Unrest as Militants Overran Airfield, Killing 3 Americans in Kenya

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Eric Schmitt, Charlie Savage and Helene Cooper

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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Burkina Faso Lawmaker Killed by Militants

By Simon Gongo
Assisted by Katarina Hoije

Attack comes as Burkina Faso grapples with Islamist insurgents
Militant attacks in the Sahel region doubled last year
A Burkinabe Parliament member, who was also one of the last authorities in a region ravaged by militants, was killed in a suicide bomb attack in the northern Djibo region on Sunday, security and government officials said.

The lawmaker, Oumarou Dicko, who had gone to officiate the launch of a Red Cross program to tackle youth employment, was traveling back to the capital Ouagadougou when his car hit a roadside bomb that killed the driver before gunmen opened fire and killed the lawmaker, a civil servant and Dicko’s cousin.

The assault comes as Burkina Faso grapples with an Islamist insurgency that has displaced more than half a million people, according to the U.N. Over 200,000 people have been displaced in the last four months, most of them from the West African nation’s northern regions.

The Sahel, a semi-arid region on the southern fringe of the Sahara, stands out as a region where violent extremism is on the rise in contrast to progress made fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The spike in violence has lead to increasing discontent with how President Roch Marc Christian Kabore’s government is tackling the situation. Senior opposition politicians have called for Kabore step down.

On Saturday 20,000 people gathered at a stadium in Ouagadougou to show support for the country’s security forces, according to the organizers.



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