The Hamilton Spectator

Training Africans to Fight Terrorists

By JOHN ISMAY Kenny Holston contributed reporting.

SOGAKOPE, Ghana — Troops clad in black jumped out of motorboats and made their way along a fence to their objective: a building where terrorists had seized a high-level government official.

Shots rang out and the troops returned fire. They soon emerged from the structure with the freed hostage. An ambulance drove up, and the man was strapped to a gurney and taken away.

The scene along the Volta River in Ghana ended in success for the military forces. But the shots were blanks, and the hostage was pretend. The rescuers, 31 soldiers and sailors, lined up for applause from a U.S. Navy admiral and a coterie of commandos from more than a dozen nations as the largest annual special operations exercise in Africa came to an end.

The two-week U.S.-led event, called Flintlock and held in Ghana and Ivory Coast this year, had focused exclusively on land-based operations since it began in 2005. But the waterborne mission included this time — about 20 kilometers upriver from the coast — reflects rising concern about security in the Gulf of Guinea, where pirates and other armed groups have exploited the inability of many West African nations to protect international waters, U.S. and Ghanaian officials said.

“The Gulf of Guinea is like the Wild, Wild West of illicit activity, especially the drug trade,” General Michael E. Langley, the commander of U.S. Africa Command, said in a meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee recently, after Flintlock had ended.

The United States and its allies in the region say Flintlock and similar events will help build a bulwark against terrorist groups that have swept south from Mali in recent years, spread across the Sahel and now threaten the coastal states of West Africa.

In Burkina Faso, which borders Ghana to the north, the military seized power from the democratically elected president in January 2022, and the leader of that coup was deposed by other military factions in October. In the 18 months prior, there were coups in Guinea and Mali, and to the east in Chad and Sudan.

Ghanaian Army officers in Accra, the capital, attributed the rise in terrorist activity to the 2011 overthrow of Muammar el-Qaddafi and the disintegration of the Libyan state, which allowed arms to reach Mali and fall to Islamists. Those groups have flourished across Sahel states like Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal.

Some African governments have turned to Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group for help in dealing with terrorists. That has opened those countries up to exploitation by Russia, which has sought mining rights in return, Ghanaian and U.S. officials said. But those countries may have entertained Russian support out of desperation, said Colonel William Nortey, the director of operations for the Ghanaian Army.

“We should be thinking about how to engage them back into the democratic process rather than just washing our hands,” he said.

Small units of military special operation troops teamed with civilian law enforcement officers may be the future of counterterrorism in this part of Africa. Previous efforts, U.S. and Ghanaian officials said, used battalions of roughly 500 to 800 soldiers, but such large and static groups of government troops had proved vulnerable to terrorist groups. And the U.S. military mission in the western coastal part of the continent does not involve any “kinetic” actions like commando raids, airstrikes or artillery fire, according to Rear Admiral Milton J. Sands III, the commander of U.S. special operations forces in Africa.

Finding enough troops who can make it through the arduous training typical of special military units is a common challenge for African nations.

“The fallout rate is so high, so we’re still molding them, and we hope by 2025 to get to some level — we’re still training,” said Colonel Richard Mensah, the leader of Ghana’s special forces.

Flintlock, which involved 700 soldiers from 10 countries in 2005, had 1,300 from 29 nations this year. Groups were paired with NATO mentors in yearslong relationships. The Ghanaian naval forces were matched with commandos from the Netherlands; Nigerians were mentored by British forces; and Ivorians worked with Italians.

The exercise spread troops across five sites — four in Ghana and a forested area at a camp in Ivory Coast. In the finale, the hostage rescue force — a group of small teams from different African countries — moved somewhat hesitatingly at times as it approached its objective and one soldier fired blindly over a fence toward where the hostage was held. But with more training, the troops are expected to form elite strike forces.

NATO help for a region plagued by violent upheaval.

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2023-04-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-04-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://thespec.pressreader.com/article/282059101264749

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