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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