While much of our attention is focused on ISIS and the Middle East , a closer face at the news wheel during the past two Clarence Shepard Day Jr. reveals the extent to which the U.S. military has expand its mien in Africa , where it is providing support for French counter - terrorism operations against militant Islamist groups .
As the Washington Post ’s interior surety blogobserves , we ’ve seen a muckle of U.S. military reports emerging from Africa this week :
First , word came Monday afternoon that a CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter carrying 17 Marines and eight sailors had go down in the Gulf of Aden , off the coast of Djibouti and Somalia … .[They ] were returning to the USS Mesa Verde , an amphibious ship , from training in Djibouti .
Monday night , the Pentagon followed that by acknowledging a counter - terrorism mission in Somalia . U.S. officials told The Washington Post that the mission direct Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr , wide know as Godane , who had taken control of the warring grouping al - Shabab .
This morning in The Washington Post , Craig Whitlock also reports that the U.S. military has opened another dawdler base in Niger , in the urban center of Agadez , at the bound of territory under the influence of militants … .U.S. flock also are said to lock from a French foundation in Chad near Nigerien territory where the Islamist group Boko Haram have abducted hundreds of man , fair sex and shaver in waves over the last year .
The rationale for the strike , grant to the Defense Department ’s General Counsel Stephen Preston , is that “ the U.S. has used power against certain al - Shabab activist in Somalia not because it has deemed al - Shabab an ‘ colligate force , ’ but instead because those ‘ circumscribed number of targets ’ have ‘ been driven to be part of al - Qaeda ’ itself . ”
If , in the future , the U.S. were to begin targeting members of militant mathematical group who have no unmediated necktie to al - Qaeda , then as NYU law prof Ryan Goodmannotes :
a major new front in the post-9/11 US war ground has open — and the administration has not informed the American public . There is no reading that we are there ( yet )
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