U.S. Builds New Firewall to Stop Spread of Militant Islamists

The front lines in the war between the West and militant Islamists have shifted to Africa, from Somalia on the continent’s eastern tip to the West African Sahel, a semidesert strip south of the Sahara.

In the Sahel, the U.S. and its allies are betting that Niger, the worst-off country in the world by a U.N. measure, offers the best hope of stopping the seemingly inexorable spread of al Qaeda and Islamic State.

In the heart of the region, the nations of Mali and Burkina Faso are losing ground, roiled by militant attacks and military coups. In contrast, the elected civilian government in neighboring Niger is making slow headway against insurgents with the help of Western forces, U.S. and Nigerien officials said. Mali’s ruling junta has hired Kremlin-linked mercenaries to provide security, while Niger has shunned Russian intervention and welcomed U.S. and French forces.

“We’ve invested a lot with the Nigeriens, and we’re seeing a payoff from that,” said Lt. Col. Chris Couch, commander of U.S. special-operations troops in West Africa. Niger, he said, is emerging as a cornerstone of regional security.

In a typical operation, U.S. Army Green Berets helped plan a recent Nigerien raid on Torodi, an al Qaeda stronghold straddling a well-used trade route between Burkina Faso and Niamey, Niger’s capital.

French military helicopters delivered members of an elite, U.S.-trained Nigerien strike force to the village in the dark of night. A U.S. spy plane circled overhead as the commandos swept through Torodi. They searched mud-brick huts for al Qaeda fighters, who use the village to rest and rearm between attacks. American Special Forces soldiers, monitoring live aerial surveillance feeds, alerted Nigerien troops that men had bolted from the far side of town and were hiding in the bush.

U.S. commandos accompanied Nigerien forces on combat missions until a 2017 Islamic State ambush killed four American soldiers from the Special Forces outpost in Ouallam. The Green Berets now supervise from a safe distance, while local commandos they train carry out the raids.

American troops use infrared surveillance to track targets and warn of developing ambushes. U.S. reconnaissance drones fly out of a Pentagon-built airfield in Agadez, Niger, an ancient crossroads for desert caravans.

Niger is proving a test ground for the U.S. strategy of deploying relatively small numbers of American troops—there are around 800 now in the country—to train local forces.

Historically, the strategy has yielded uneven results. U.S.-trained militaries in Burkina Faso, Mali and Guinea overthrew civilian governments. After U.S. troops left Afghanistan in 2020, local forces collapsed under Taliban offensives, despite U.S.-supplied weapons and two decades of training.

Human-rights advocates in Niger worry that a military-heavy approach will not only fail but will also impose untenable costs to civilians caught in the crossfire. “I don’t understand why we don’t try dialogue,” said Kaka Touda Mamane of Alternative Citizen Spaces, an activist group in Niamey.

France, the former colonial power in the region, had deployed thousands of troops to Mali until the country’s ruling junta evicted them this year. Paris now stations 1,500 troops in Niger, conducting joint missions with local soldiers. Italian, Belgian and Canadian troops mentor Nigerien special-forces units.

Germany built a military training base in the Nigerien desert. Burkina Faso, swamped by the militant wave, and neighboring Benin, which is absorbing its first attacks, are in talks to send troops to train there under Nigerien forces.

The Biden administration contends that weakly governed countries create sanctuaries for violent groups that aspire to carry out plots against the U.S. and its overseas interests. Militants insinuate themselves into communities permeated by distrust of corrupt governments and riven by local grievances.

“Most Americans had no idea who Osama bin Laden was, or how much influence he had in Afghanistan and ability to plot and plan from an area even farther away than Africa—until Sept. 11,” said Victoria Nuland, U.S. undersecretary of State, who visited Niger in October.

Hundreds of U.S. special-operations troops train Somali forces to battle al-Shabaab, al Qaeda’s largest affiliate, and American drones conduct periodic strikes against militant targets in the region. Attacks in Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria and Chad are carried out by Islamic State’s West Africa branch and Boko Haram, the group infamous for kidnapping schoolgirls.

Under pressure

“You can see that Niger is kind of an island of stability in all this turmoil in the Sahel,” said Brig. Gen. Moussa Salaou Barmou, commander of the country’s special forces.

The region is torn by the al Qaeda umbrella group Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin and Islamic State of the Greater Sahara, which fight each other for control of land as well as carry out attacks on government forces.

Combined, the groups tallied 141 attacks in Niger in the first nine months of the year, up from seven in 2017, according to data collected by the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project and analyzed by the Pentagon-funded Africa Center for Strategic Studies.

By comparison, the data show 732 attacks by militants in Mali and 1,181 in Burkina Faso over the first nine months of the year.

Soldiers in Mali and Burkina Faso have carried out repeated coups over the past two years, triggering U.S. laws that prohibit weapons and training for militaries that have overthrown civilian governments. Mali’s junta alienated its former backers in the West further by hiring the Russian mercenary firm Wagner Group to provide security.

“The choices that the Malian junta has made make it impossible for us to support their military—because they’re in bed with Wagner,” Ms. Nuland said.

Militants with a foothold in Mali and Burkina Faso are edging south into Ivory Coast, Benin and Togo along the Gulf of Guinea coast. Ghana, one of the region’s most stable countries, is bracing for militant incursions.

Niger seems an unlikely bulwark. It’s three times the size of California, sparsely populated, landlocked and surrounded by volatile neighbors, from Libya to Nigeria. The country ranks last in a global United Nations index measuring income, life expectancy, education and other indicators of well-being.

U.S. diplomats put great stock in Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum, who has rejected Russian intervention in Africa and aligned himself with the West. “Niger remains a robust and stable state,” Mr. Bazoum said at the U.N. in September. He emphasizes the need for improving the education available to young Nigeriens who might otherwise be attracted by radical ideologies.

U.S. commanders are counting on the battlefield prowess of the 52-year-old Gen. Barmou and his special-forces battalions. At age 12, he followed a friend to military school in Ivory Coast and, against the wishes of his civil-servant father, joined Niger’s army. He rose quickly through the ranks and won prestigious spots in military programs in the U.S., including parachute training.

In 2004, Gen. Barmou took command of Niger’s first special-forces company, trained and equipped by the U.S. The general, a fluent English speaker, set up a special-operations command in 2006 and invited elite troops from the U.S., France, Belgium, Germany and Italy to train the new battalions.

With a bench of well-heeled allies, the Nigeriens are fending off Boko Haram in the east and have made headway against al Qaeda and Islamic State in the west.

“I don’t know that I’d call them winning,” said Rear Adm. Jamie Sands, commander of U.S. special-operations forces in Africa. “I‘d certainly say they’re holding.”

‘Total surprise’

Al Qaeda fighters use western Niger as a place to resupply and recuperate, according to the U.S. military. Green Berets advise Nigerien troops to focus on disrupting militant operations, such as bomb factories, logistics teams, and fuel and weapons smugglers.

To prepare for the Torodi raid, U.S. and Nigerien troops built a sand-table model of the village, with boxes marking specific buildings, and yarn and tape marking roads and riverbeds. The Americans suggested the best approaches, and the Nigeriens conducted rehearsals.

On the night of the mission, French helicopters carried some 60 soldiers from the Expeditionary Forces of Niger, its U.S-trained strike force, to the edge of Torodi. Villagers were asleep.

“We get the drop on them,” said the American company commander, who monitored an aerial surveillance feed and communicated via radio with the Nigerien commander. “It’s a total surprise.”

The video was clear enough that the Green Berets could distinguish the people wearing civilian robes and head wraps from the soldiers in fatigues and helmets, the armed from the unarmed. Militants often bury rifles or conceal rocket-propelled grenade launchers outside of villages and pretend to be unarmed when the army arrives.

The Nigerien commandos rounded up dozens of men spotted by the Green Berets fleeing into the bush. The soldiers looked through their cellphone contacts and call histories. They loaded suspects onto the helicopters and turned them over to civilian law-enforcement agents. A U.S. military official said the Nigerien authorities later confirmed that several of those arrested belonged to al Qaeda.

In eastern Niger, 412 Boko Haram fighters have accepted government amnesty in exchange for job training and small-business starter kits, such as sewing machines.

Human-rights advocates say the Nigerien government relies too much on the military, and not enough on addressing the underlying problems that make the region vulnerable to militant recruiters—poverty and unemployment, among them. They say the longer the fighting goes on, the more civilians get hurt.

“It might take 10 years or 20 years of fighting, and in the end you’ll have to negotiate anyway,” said Mr. Mamane, the Nigerien activist.

In October, at least eight people died in a government airstrike on an informal gold mining site in Tamou, on the Burkina Faso border. The Nigerien military said the dead were militants who had killed two policemen at a checkpoint. Others said they were civilian workers trying to scratch out a living.