EUCOM-based troops training Mali, Mauritania militaries for border patrols

Military leaders have dispatched teams of Europe-based special forces troops to train the Mali and Mauritanian militaries to better police the Saharan badlands along their borders with Algeria.

The training is part of a new State Department program, known as the Pan Sahel Initiative, designed to help buttress border patrols in a region of Africa that military officials describe as an emerging front line in the war on terror.

A group of Marines is poised to begin similar training in Chad and Niger along Libya’s southern border later this summer.

“We are paying greater attention to Africa, both northern Africa and sub-Saharan Africa,” Marine Gen. James Jones, the head of U.S. European Command, told congressional leaders March 3.

As U.S.-led military efforts in Central Asia and the Middle East put the squeeze on terrorist groups there, Jones said, “we are seeing indications of [the terrorists’] willingness to move to Africa to start to develop their footholds and to export their particular brand of terrorism and instability.”

The goal of the Pan Sahel Initiative, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters last week, “is to help Chad, Niger, Mali and Mauritania control their borders, interdict smuggling and to deny their use of territories to terrorists and other international criminals.”

Upcoming training in Chad, he said, comes in the wake of military operations by the Chadian military against an al-Qaida-linked organization called the Salafist Group for Call and Combat operating in the region.

Officials have earmarked some $7 million in aid and military equipment for the program, including new four-wheel drive vehicles, according to EUCOM spokeswoman Lt. Col. MJ Jadick, who is in Mali.

“One of the lessons we’ve learned is you can’t wait for the problem to become large and then address it,” Jones’ deputy, Gen. Charles Wald, told reporters in Washington on March 8. “You have to get ahead of this problem. And North Africa is no different.”

Wald said about 200 special forces troops were forming the vanguard of that effort with the training in Mali and Mauritania.

A training task force of about two dozen Marines will soon follow in Niger and Chad, according to Maj. Tim Keefe, a Marine spokesman in Europe. The training will be modeled closely after the 2-year-old Georgia Train and Equip Program, which has trained some 3,000 troops in the former Soviet satellite, he said.

“We’re going to a kind of basic training with individual infantry skills, but also go up to company- level tactics,” Keefe said. “They should have a very strong capability once they’ve completed the training.”

Still, Wald said the training along the southern rim of the Sahara is only the beginning. Using the old military adage of “crawl, walk, run,” Wald said the training effort is currently “in the crawl phase. We’ll walk eventually, and then we’re going to run.”

The training in Mali began in November.

“Initially, it was about a four-week training mission to train the trainers of a brand-new company in basic rifle marksmanship,” said a 33-year-old special forces “A-team” detachment commander with the Germany-based 1st Battalion, 10th special forces Group, who led the effort in Timbuktu.

Speaking by telephone, the captain — who is not being identified under interviewing ground rules from the public affairs office — said the mission has now shifted to training the entire company. That’s included everything from basic individual infantry skills to squad-level, and now, to platoon-level training.

“At this point, we’ve shown them all the basic skills they need,” said the officer, explaining this phase of the training is scheduled to wrap up with “multiplatoon” exercises by the end of March.

How the training continues remains to be seen, a EUCOM spokesman said.

“At this stage, there is no specific training currently planned beyond what the Marines are looking at,” said Lt. Col. Bill Bigelow. However, “we do plan to remain engaged through the Pan Sahel Initiative and throughout North Africa,” he said.

Indeed, while denying recent reports the U.S. military was planning to establish a permanent base in Algeria, Wald did say EUCOM wanted to set up an outpost there that would allow refueling rights and open up greater training possibilities.

Meanwhile, North African military chiefs are planning to meet at the EUCOM headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, for the first time on Monday.