The U.S. Military Is Getting Kicked Out of Niger

A delegation of U.S. officials arrived in the Nigerien capital of Niamey on Thursday to discuss the withdrawal of some 1,000 troops from the country, bringing an end to the largest U.S. military presence in a region that has come to be regarded as the global epicenter of Islamist violence. 

The withdrawal at the request of the country’s ruling military junta, which seized power in a coup last July, comes despite significant diplomatic efforts by Biden administration officials to maintain the two U.S. bases in the country and to nudge Niger back toward civilian rule during a series of contentious meetings in Washington and Niamey. 

The drawdown follows the withdrawal of French troops from the country late last year, as a rash of military coups across the Sahel have upended Western counterterrorism efforts and opened the door for the deployment of Russian mercenaries.

Dozens of Russian military instructors arrived in Niger this month, echoing a pattern seen earlier in Mali and Burkina Faso, where operatives from the Wagner mercenary group entered both countries shortly after a French withdrawal. 

On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the small contingent of U.S. Special Forces in neighboring Chad would also be withdrawn after officials in that country called the future of the U.S. presence into question. A U.S. defense official said the repositioning of forces was a temporary move until after the Chadian presidential election, scheduled for early next month. 

The U.S. withdrawal from Niger has been seen as part of a broader trend playing out across the region, where military regimes have ousted Western troops while welcoming in Russian forces that analysts fear will fuel spiraling insecurity in the region. 

“My concern is that if the Russians come in … they continue to make the terrorism problem worse, not better, and then when they’re done extracting what they want to extract, they’re going to pack up and go home, and this place is going to look like a nightmare,” said Colin P. Clarke, the director of research at the Soufan Group, a global intelligence and security consultancy. 

Although Biden administration officials have repeatedly said they do not want to make African leaders choose among competing powers, the move underscores how the plurality of players vying for influence in Africa, where both Russia and China are seeking to make inroads, complicates U.S. security assistance efforts. 

Among the equipment unloaded by Russian troops arriving in Niger was an anti-aircraft battery, according to reports in Russian and Nigerien state media. As local militant groups pose no threat from the skies, the move was widely regarded as a shot across the bow at U.S. drone operations in the country. 

At the same time, former U.S. government officials, regional analysts, and counterterrorism experts said the loss of the two U.S. bases in Niger was likely to have a limited impact on regional counterterrorism efforts.

“There’s a practical impact, and there’s a symbolic impact,” said Cameron Hudson, a senior fellow in the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who previously held various positions in the U.S. government working on Africa. 

The role of U.S. troops in Niger has waned in recent years, following an ambush in 2017 that killed four U.S. Special Forces troops and four Nigerien soldiers and led to a reevaluation of U.S. combat operations on the continent. 

In the wake of the attack, the U.S. role was confined to conducting surveillance overflights using manned aircraft and drones and gathering signals intelligence.

All counterterrorism operations were then suspended in the wake of last year’s coup, with intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance flights resuming in September for the sole purpose of force protection, according to the U.S. Defense Department. 

“I think the bigger impact here is on Washington’s reputation—it’s on its relationships, on the optics of being displaced by Russia,” Hudson said. “That, much more than any kind of practical impact, is really what is costing Washington.”

U.S. officials have not yet announced a timeline for the Niger drawdown. At a briefing on Monday, Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder declined to comment as to whether the Defense Department would look to redeploy troops elsewhere in the region, but he noted that the United States would continue working with regional partners to “explore options to address the terrorist threat.”

In January, the Wall Street Journal reported that Washington was seeking to use airfields in the coastal states of Benin, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast for regional surveillance flights in light of the coup in Niger. 

A small contingent of U.S. forces was first dispatched to Niger in 2013 to establish a drone base there to keep tabs on extremist groups affiliated with al Qaeda. 

Over the past decade, Islamist militia groups including Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), which is associated with al Qaeda, and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) have grown steadily, fueled by weak governance, inequality, and a patchwork of local grievances. 

“The Sahel in particular is really a microcosm of some of the problems we’re likely to see in other parts of the world,” said Clarke, who noted that climate change is also fueling tensions in the region. 

Political violence and attacks on civilians have surged in recent years, with more than 11,600 people killed last year in Islamist violence, according to research by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a congressionally funded research institute within the Defense Department.

In both Burkina Faso and Mali, JNIM and ISGS control large swaths of territory. Their association with transnational terrorist groups may have added an “ideological fig leaf” to what they’re doing, said Joseph Siegle, the director of research at the Africa Center, but he said the association is largely rhetorical. 

“These are largely autonomous, almost entirely autonomous, violent extremist groups that emerged on their own and are going to persist on their own,” he said. 

U.S. officials and experts believe that despite their concentration in the Sahel, groups such as JNIM and ISGS pose little immediate threat to the United States. 

“There are few if any indications from the public domain or other research that Sahelian militant groups have the intention or capacity of attacking the U.S. homeland,” said Andrew Lebovich, a research fellow with the Clingendael Institute in the Netherlands. “While they have attacked Western targets and kidnapped Westerners in the region, they have so far shown no interest in moving these attacks beyond the region.”

U.S. President Joe Biden took office vowing to refocus the United States away from the so-called forever wars, a proliferation of open-ended counterterrorism operations established across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa after 9/11.

A former senior Biden administration official who requested anonymity to discuss policy deliberations said that while the circumstances of the U.S. withdrawal from Niger were “suboptimal,” the U.S. bases there are a “relic of a past approach to counterterrorism.”

In the wake of the coup in Niger, which followed military takeovers of governments in Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali, U.S. officials invested significant diplomatic efforts to coax the country back toward civilian rule and to preserve the U.S. military presence in the country. 

“Balancing the pressure on military governments for democratic transitions and making sure that the United States keeps its military partnerships with them, that’s the dance the U.S. has to do,” former Malian Foreign Minister Kamissa Camara said. “It’s not an easy task.”

But critics have accused the administration of putting the region on the back burner and fumbling in times of crisis. 

“We have to acknowledge that the recent coups in the Sahel and West Africa have had rather broad popular support from the citizens of the countries affected, for whom security is at present a higher priority than the trappings of formal democracy,” said J. Peter Pham, who served as U.S. special envoy for the Sahel region during the Trump administration. “Lectures on elections are not only going to fall on deaf ears, but [they are] likely to prove counterproductive to U.S. interests.”

Tensions in the U.S.-Niger relationship came to a head in the wake of a visit by Molly Phee, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for African affairs, and Gen. Michael Langley, the head of U.S. Africa Command, in March for talks on returning to civilian rule. U.S. officials also raised concerns about intelligence indicating that the country was in talks with Iran about giving it access to Niger’s vast uranium reserves, according to the Journal. 

Shortly after the visit, a spokesperson for the military junta, Col. Amadou Abdramane, announced that the country was ceasing its military cooperation with the United States and condemned U.S. officials for failing to follow diplomatic protocol during the visit.

“Niger regrets the intention of the American delegation to deny the sovereign Nigerien people the right to choose their partners and types of partnerships capable of truly helping them fight against terrorism,” Abdramane said in a televised statement. “Also, the government of Niger forcefully denounces the condescending attitude accompanied by the threat of retaliation from the head of the American delegation toward the Nigerien government and people.”

The former senior Biden administration official pushed back against claims that Washington had been too forceful in urging Niger’s military leaders to return to democratic rule.

“We wanted to continue to work with the Nigerien government to help them bring stability and security to the people of Niger,” the official said. “I think we were being pretty flexible, but after several months and no signs of progress toward a return to democratic rule—not even a notional transition timeline—it raised questions whether our interests aligned.”

FP staff writer Robbie Gramer contributed to this report.