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Excerpt from www.nysun.com
As of now there are about a thousand American soldiers deployed in Niger as part of the fight against jihadist forces in the region, but by the middle of September they will likely all be gone. The ruling junta has given Washington four months to vacate everyone from Niger Air Base 201, a $100 million drone air base that is near the remote town Agadez. It is owned by Niger but financed, and was built, by America.
The announcement came on May 19 at the capital, Niamey, after days of talks between the junta and a delegation from the Department of State. The approximately 1,000 soldiers deployed as part of the anti-jihadist fight have until September 15 at the latest to leave the base, which is used for intelligence and anti-terrorism operations in the Sahel and the Sahara.
Since a July 2023 coup d’état against the elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, things have gone south for relations between Niger and both the former colonial power, France, and America. While the split between Niamey and Washington is on the surface amicable, there is no getting around the idea that Secretary Blinken’s team at Foggy Bottom could have done better. There are uncomfortable echoes of President Biden’s hasty withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in August 2021 as well as of President Obama’s decision to shutter the American Embassy in Yemen in 2015.
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