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| In recent months, missions against the Shabab along the Kenya-Somalia border have dwindled, and military officials have sought to end the American Special Operations presence at Manda Bay, Kenya.Credit...Farah Abdi Warsameh/Associated Press |
The brazen Shabab assault at Manda Bay, Kenya, a sleepy
seaside base near the Somali border, on Jan. 5 left three Americans dead,
raising complex questions about the military’s mission in Africa.
Armed with rifles and explosives, about a dozen Shabab
fighters destroyed an American surveillance plane as it was taking off and
ignited an hourslong gunfight earlier this month on a sprawling military base
in Kenya that houses United States troops. By the time the Shabab were done,
portions of the airfield were burning and three Americans were dead.
Surprised by the attack, American commandos took around
an hour to respond. Many of the local Kenyan forces, assigned to defend the
base, hid in the grass while other American troops and support staff were
corralled into tents, with little protection, to wait out the battle. It would
require hours to evacuate one of the wounded to a military hospital in
Djibouti, roughly 1,500 miles away.
The brazen
assault at Manda Bay, a sleepy seaside base near the Somali border, on Jan.
5, was largely overshadowed by the crisis with Iran after the killing of that
country’s most important general two days earlier, and is only now drawing
closer scrutiny from Congress and Pentagon officials.
But the storming of an airfield used by the American
military so alarmed the Pentagon that it immediately sent about 100 troops from
the 101st Airborne Division to establish security at the base. Army Green
Berets from Germany also were shuttled to Djibouti, the Pentagon’s major hub in
Africa, in case the entire base was in danger of being taken by the Shabab, an
East African terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda.
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