Leading Role for France as Africa Battles Back

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/16/world/africa/leading-role-for-france-as-africa-battles-back.html

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NDJAMENA, Chad — Deep in the Sahara, late at night, a Reaper drone silently tracked a six-vehicle convoy crossing the desert into Niger from Libya. Minutes later, French attack planes and helicopter gunships swooped down on the convoy of Qaeda-backed fighters, turning the militant caravan into smoldering wreckage.

The raid last October by French combat aircraft and commandos killed or captured 15 Islamist fighters, and recovered nearly three tons of weapons, including Russian-designed SA-7 shoulder-fired missiles and several hundred anti-tank rockets, all bound for guerrilla operations in Mali, French officials said.

The attack also provided a view of an increasingly violent, multifront campaign that France has joined here in the Sahel, a vast area on the southern flank of the Sahara that stretches from Senegal to Chad. The battle is being waged to combat Al Qaeda’s affiliate in North Africa and other Islamist extremists in Mali, and more recently to thwart Boko Haram, a violent militancy that is spilling across from Nigeria to attack Chad, Niger and Cameroon.

Last summer, France reorganized its 3,000-member force in West Africa to carry out its counterterrorism fight more effectively in some of the harshest terrain on the planet.

The French military has concentrated its air power and mission headquarters here in Chad, its reconnaissance drones in Niger, its special operations troops in Burkina Faso, and its logistics hub in Ivory Coast. It has also deployed about 1,200 soldiers to Gao and another site in northern Mali to fight the remnants of militant organizations that French-led forces rolled back in early 2013.

“The fight against terrorist groups is our daily business,” said Gen. Jean-Pierre Palasset, the commander of the operation, called Barkhane, which means sand dune in French. General Palasset also led French troops in Afghanistan and the Ivory Coast.

The mission is expanding to support regional African forces fighting Boko Haram, France’s defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, said last week. That will likely mean more operations like the one last month in which a French team in the city of Diffa, in southeastern Niger just across from Nigeria, collected intelligence on Boko Haram.

Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Benin, along with Nigeria, have agreed to contribute 8,700 troops to a regional force to contain and, it is hoped, defeat Boko Haram after the group seized territory the size of Belgium in northeastern Nigeria and then staged cross-border attacks. African troops have since regained some towns.

“The question is not about numbers but how we provide support in terms of planning, logistics and intelligence to our African allies,” said a senior French Defense Ministry official in Paris. “It could be 100 or 200 additional officers. We need to support the Cameroonians, the Chadians. We don’t intend to be ahead of them; we need to be there to help them.”

French officials have paid close attention to fast-shifting developments in the region. The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, held meetings in Chad, Cameroon and Niger last month to discuss security threats.

In January, Mr. Le Drian visited Madama, a new forward-operating base in northern Niger, 60 miles from the Libyan border. With more than 200 troops and combat helicopters based there, the outpost is designed to stanch the flow of foreign fighters, terrorists and criminal smugglers coursing down from the mayhem in largely ungoverned southern Libya into sparsely populated and lightly defended Niger and Mali.

France, which has the United Nations Security Council presidency in March, is also pushing for a resolution by early April that would back the regional African force to fight Boko Haram, providing it with crucial financing to carry out operations.

The Obama administration, which is already fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, has been only too eager to provide financial, logistical and intelligence support to France to avoid having to put American combat forces on the ground in yet another global hot spot.

“There’s a lot of merit to partnering with the French who have sort of staked out their claim in the Sahel region of North Africa,” James R. Clapper Jr., the American director of national intelligence, told a Senate committee last month. “They have history and heritage there, access, and have committed to deploying troops in that area, boots on the ground, which we can supplement.”

Last August, President Obama authorized the Pentagon to send France $10 million to help pay for troop transport and aerial refueling.

“There’s already an unprecedented degree of coordination, with both the U.S. and France bringing complementary strengths to the table,” said Michael R. Shurkin, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst who is now at the RAND Corporation. “The more the U.S. and France work together, the greater the regional alliance’s chance of success.”

That regional cooperation began in earnest in January 2013 when French forces led a military operation that largely expelled Qaeda-linked extremists from a vast area they had controlled in northeastern Mali.

Since last August, personnel assigned to the French counterterrorism operations, working with African security forces, have killed or captured about 100 militants, French officials said. French attack planes have carried out several strikes in just the past few months in northern Mali.

Last December, French troops working with Malian authorities near Gao killed Ahmed al-Tilemsi, who had a $5 million bounty on his head after the State Department listed him as a “specially designated global terrorist.”

Mr. Tilemsi, a Mali native, was a leader of Al Mourabitoun, a group formed by extremists who split off from the Qaeda affiliate here two years ago. The extremists led an attack on the In Amenas gas plant in Algeria in 2013 and killed at least 37 foreign hostages taken during the assault.

More recently, French forces joined 800 troops from Mauritania and Mali in a show-of-force mission west of Timbuktu near the Mauritanian border.

In addition to the threat from Boko Haram, French officials have voiced increasing concern about members of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, and other extremists using southwestern Libya as a safe haven and as a logistic base mainly for fuel and ammunition.

It is an area that is also commanding increasing concern in Washington, and drawing the two countries closer. “We have absolutely overlapping interests here,” James Knight, the United States ambassador to Chad, said in an interview here. “The cooperation is seamless.”