Niger : US Agree To Withdraw Troops

United States Government has announced the withdrawal of 1,000 troops from Niger. The information was made public on Friday April 19, 2024 by top United States officials. The agreement throws into question the status of a $110 million U.S. air base that is only six years old. The withdrawal comes after a military coup last year that ousted the country’s democratically elected government and installed a transitional military government. “The prime minister has asked us to withdraw U.S. troops, and we have agreed to do that,” a senior State Department official told The Washington Post in an interview. The official, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive situation. “We’ve agreed to begin conversations within days about how to develop a plan” to withdraw troops, said the senior State Department official. “They’ve agreed that we do it in an orderly and responsible way. And we will need to probably dispatch folks to Niamey to sit down and hash it out. And that of course will be a Defense Department project.”
The Sahel region, including neighboring Mali and Burkina Faso, has become a global hot spot for Islamist extremism in recent years, and Niger saw such attacks spike dramatically following the coup. For U.S. officials who viewed the base as an important counterterrorism asset, say the withdrawal agreement is a significant setback. “I think it’s undeniable that it was a platform in a unique part of African geography,” the State Department official said. For years, the Pentagon has deployed a mix of mostly Air Force and Arm...