War in the Sahel

The US MSM just notice it, because they want to use it to remove Trump from office (and any story they can twist will do).

But this story is not new.



AustinBay has a long report on Niger.

West African nations are willing to fight the terrorists, but need help. Given France's military assets in the region and American commitments in Syria and Iraq, the Obama Administration concluded that a small, focused military effort providing training assistance and logistics and intelligence support was an appropriate response.
General Dunford's press conference tells me that he thinks that conclusion was correct. It also says the Trump Administration agreed with the Obama Administration's goals in the region. However, that isn't a point domestic hysterics want to hear.

Italics mine.

That's because the "domestic hysterics" don't care about Africans killed by terrorists, because they want to remove Trump, and any story will do.

As for ignorance of the war there: This is because they don't bother to read the BBC or AlJ where they could find good summaries about what is going on.

BBC notes 4000 French and 12 thousand UN troops are involved. (plus locals).

the US was sent there to help Nigeria and nearby countries to fight the BokuHarem:

  Full report of that conflict here.
2 million refugees, 2000 teachers killed and schools destroyed, 5 million of locals in that area facing starvation, and the "good guys" are corrupt.

notice that part about France's military assets? They have been working with the Sahel governments for quite awhile: ALJ reports on that HERE. 

think tribal civil wars.

part of the backstory is the tribal civil war in Libya.

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WHO Removes Mugabe

NYTimes article says the WHO and the UN said "Whoops" and removed their appointment of Mr Mugabe.

Twenty-eight health organizations, including the NCD Alliance — which works with the W.H.O. and other global groups to battle noncommunicable diseases — released a statement expressing “shock” at the appointment.
 Obert Gutu, a spokesman for Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, Movement for Democratic Change, said, “It is an insult.”
 He added: “Mugabe trashed our health delivery system. He and his family go outside of the country for treatment in Singapore after he allowed our public hospitals to collapse.”
 Under Mr. Mugabe’s authoritarian rule, critics say, the country’s health care system, like many of its public services, has suffered badly, with hospitals frequently lacking essential supplies and nurses and doctors regularly left without pay.

yup. The UN is honoring Mugabe.

From the BBC.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has appointed President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe as a "goodwill ambassador" to help tackle non-communicable diseases.

the BBC then adds this in case you thought the appointment made sense:

Imogen Foulkes, BBC News, GenevaThe appointment of 93-year-old Robert Mugabe will cause astonishment among many WHO member states and donors.
A goodwill ambassador may be a largely symbolic role, but the symbolism of giving it to a man whose leadership of Zimbabwe has, critics say, coincided with a collapse of its health service, and major human rights abuses, will be very unpopular. 

Mugabe, after "winning" an election, decided to tear down a lot of middle class areas to punish them for voting against him. He called it "operation take out the trash" and insisted it was slum clearance, but it was not.

UKGuardian article on this from 2005:

The UN's 98-page report concluded that 2.4 million people had been affected, of whom 700,000 had lost their homes or livelihoods or both, in a humanitarian crisis of "immense proportions"....

The language was harsh by UN standards. It said the clearances were a "disastrous venture". It added that the operation, "while purporting to target illegal dwellings and structures and to clamp down on alleged illicit activities, was carried out in an indiscriminate and unjustified manner, with indifference to human suffering, and, in repeated cases, with disregard to several provisions on national and international legal frameworks".

one of the buildings town down was an HIV clinic near Harare, run by Sister Patricia, the public health nurse who worked with me.

Another building torn down was a convent in QueQue, again that housed some of the African sisters who I worked with.

file AFP

And I won't even go into the threats and massacres by his "green bombers"  in the past, or that he has decided to reorganize the group for the 2018 election.

Of course, all sins forgiven because he is an open communist.

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Niger (take two)

The Green Berets killed in Niger were fighting the Boko Harum, but the press headlines are the Trumpieboy are that he insulted someone when he called the families.

Because everything must be politicized, you know, to foment Trump hatred.

But why were they there in the first place? Because President Obama sent them there in 2014...

Backstory from before their deaths from Reuters in 2015 HERE.

A Reuters reporter was the first to visit the detachment, which is among about 1,000 U.S. Special Operations Forces deployed across Africa. In Chad, Nigeria, Niger and elsewhere, they are executing Obama’s relatively low-risk strategy of countering Islamic extremists by finding local partners willing to fight rather than deploying combat troops by the thousands. The new approach, which Obama announced in May 2014, is far from being a silver bullet for the United States in its global battle against Islamic militancy. \

the backstory is not just the Boko Harum but the ongoing war in the Sahel, which gets little or no press coverage, partly because most of the special forces types there are French.

StrategyPage discussed this little covered war HERE. and has this note about the ambush:

October 4, 2017: In the northeast, just across the border in Niger four American Special Forces soldiers were killed when the training exercise (a large patrol) they were supervising was ambushed. Four of the Niger troops were killed as well and even more American and Niger troops were wounded...

The attackers were believed to be Islamic terrorists from Mali. In less than an hour French helicopters were in the area to evacuate the wounded and in the next 24 hours French troops and more aircraft from Mali moved to the Niger border to search for the attackers.

Italics mine, because another story had a father of another of the troops wondering why they had no air cover.

The press picked this up and started saying this was "Trump's Benghazi", i.e. implying that he refused to send help for those who were ambushed. Uh, in Benghazi the help was told to stand down for political reasons. Here, the French air support arrived within an hour.

And SP has the backstory:

 The area where the attack took place had never experienced an Islamic terrorist activity before but the border is long and the Islamic terrorists have been known to move around the area without attracting attention because the locals tend to avoid groups of men with guns.

Apparently Islamic terror groups had established a new smuggling route that ran through this areas. The U.S. has 800 troops in Niger, mainly to train Niger troops but some also maintain a number of Reaper UAVs used for surveillance. The smuggling operations often appear (especially from the air) like commercial or aid group traffic.

read the whole thing.

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AlJ notes that the SJW are not protesting the many killed in a truck bomb in Somalia. Why Not? Racism?

Well, no: because they were killed by Islamic terrorists, and the left loves Islamic terrorists, and most SJW are leftists. Pointing this out is a big no-no.

This is the same reason the SJW ignore the deaths in Yemen: They can't blame the US or the west for what is essentially a fight between the Saudis and the Iranians.

But the failure to notice the many killed or fleeing the war in the Congo is indeed racist. UKGuardian story from January 2017.

Congo’s Catholic church said in a recent report that more than 3,300 people had been killed in Kasai since October. The church blamed government forces, their proxies and the insurgents. More than a million people may have been displaced and were threatened with malnutrition and disease – historically the two biggest killers of civilians during conflicts in the country – it added.

more recent report about nearby Burundi at Crux. (which reports Catholic news).

Later stories are about the murder of wildlife activists, because of course SJW care more about wildlife than black children.

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The US is helping Niger ?

In Niger, not Nigeria.

I was under the impression that France was doing a lot of the training in this area.

But not my area of expertise.

The Congo war starts again

Sigh. A long discussion on StrategyPage, 

local warlords behind the violence.

the good news: UN peacekeepers are trying to keep things from going into another full time civil war.

The bad news: They are corrupt.

UN peacekeepers have been in Congo for 18 years and have cost the UN about a billion dollars a year. It is the largest peacekeeping operation the UN has and this year the Congo force had to deal with an eight percent budget cut with more to come. One reason is the growing corruption and other criminal activity among the more hat 20,000 UN personnel in Congo. Corruption and other criminal activity is not unusual in the UN, especially in situations where the UN has been in an area for a long time and had opportunities to develop more relationships with local criminals (often government officials).