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| Along the Volta, African Commandos Train to Battle Terrorists by Land and Sea | Along the Volta, African Commandos Train to Battle Terrorists by Land and Sea |
| (about 11 hours later) | |
| SOGAKOPE, Ghana — Troops clad in black jumped out of motorboats near a riverside resort and made their way along a wood-slat fence to their objective: a building where terrorists had seized a high-level government official. | SOGAKOPE, Ghana — Troops clad in black jumped out of motorboats near a riverside resort and made their way along a wood-slat 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 one-story structure with the freed hostage, who was wearing a bloodstained white robe. An ambulance drove up, and the man was strapped to a gurney and taken away. | Shots rang out and the troops returned fire. They soon emerged from the one-story structure with the freed hostage, who was wearing a bloodstained white robe. 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 on this day, the shots that were fired were blanks, the hostage was pretend and the rescuers, 31 soldiers and sailors, soon 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 scene along the Volta River in Ghana ended in success for the military forces. But on this day, the shots that were fired were blanks, the hostage was pretend and the rescuers, 31 soldiers and sailors, soon 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 — at a location about a dozen miles 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,” Gen. Michael E. Langley, the commander of U.S. Africa Command, said in a meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, after Flintlock had ended. “We’ve had a number of countries that come together to focus on illicit activity across the gulf, and the drug trade is one of them, smuggling is another and transiting citizens as well across that region.” |