A military investigation has found “individual, organisational and institutional failures” leading up to an ambush of US special forces and local troops by an Isis-affiliated group in Niger last October.



The incident took place just south of the Niger-Mali border when a joint patrol was returning from an attempt to find a leader of Isis in the Greater Sahara (Isis-GS), Doundoun Cheffou, and were taken by surprise by a much bigger force of militants on motorbikes and pickup trucks. Five Nigerien and four American soldiers were killed.

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The deaths of the four Americans became a political scandal in Washington – where there was little awareness of US military operations in the region – and an unseemly row broke out between Donald Trump and the widow of one of the slain soldiers, who said the president told her that the young soldier “knew what he signed up for” during a condolence call.

Among several lapses, the report released on Thursday by US Africa Command found that the soldiers had not trained long enough together with their Nigerien counterparts or rehearsed basic procedures such as what to do if they came under fire.

The US training team misrepresented the original aim of the patrol as reconnaissance rather than a kill-or-capture mission, so the decision to approve it did not go high enough up the chain of command. A second mission to look for Cheffou was properly approved but an airborne force that was supposed to take part, turned back because of poor weather.

Ultimately the small joint patrol of 30 Nigeriens and 12 Americans, was ordered to go to an abandoned camp near the Malian border in the hope of gathering intelligence. On the way back, it stopped at a village called Tongo Tongo to take on water and talk to local leaders.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nigerien police take part in the annual US-led Flintlock exercise in Niamey, Niger last month. Photograph: Carley Petesch/AP

The patrol was ambushed as it left the village. A surveillance drone had been used to ensure that there was no threat near the Isis camp the patrol had gone to explore, but it was not sent southwards to check the road back to their base at Oallam, some 50 miles north of the capital, Niamey. Instead it was sent northwards, towards the Mali border.

Initially under the impression that they were being attacked only by a small group of fighters, the patrol did not call for help until an hour later. By then it was too late.

A mobile force of 150 or more Isis-GS militants descended on them from the east, outflanking and scattering the patrol, forcing the soldiers to retreat and ultimately abandon their vehicles and run for their lives on foot.

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A Guardian investigation after the Tongo Tongo incident revealed that the American soldiers had been stripped of their weapons and guns, and that two of the bodies had been dumped in a car with the engine running, implying that their attackers had been about to drive off with them.

The official report found that the militants abandoned their vehicles after the arrival of French warplanes, who reached the scene 47 minutes after the patrol called for help, and flew low over the scene in a show of force.

The report found that US and Nigerien soldiers fought heroically, but that the seeds of the disastrous ambush had been sown in the preceding months, before the US special forces team even arrived in Niger.

Due to “personnel turnover”, the report found, “only half the team had conducted any collective training together.

“If you don’t have the people there at the appropriate time to conduct the training, if they come late … it impacts the ability to have cohesion,” the head of US Africa Command, Marine General Thomas Waldhauser told reporters at a Pentagon briefing on the report.

When the special forces team arrived at their base at Oallam, it did not conduct basic drills with its Nigerien partner forces that would have allowed them to coordinate in combat, despite language barriers.

“If you get to a situation when you’re under enemy contact, you need to be able to operate like clockwork without having to speak … and in this particular case, the team did not conduct those basic soldier-level skills,” Gen Waldhauser said.

In early October, when the US junior officers leading the special forces team submitted a request to go on patrol, they simply copied the wording from an earlier reconnaissance mission, rather than giving an accurate description of their plan.

The misleading request, however, did not lead directly to the ambush, the investigators found. A second mission was approved on 3 October, to go after Cheffou (who though not named in the summary of the report published on Thursdayis confirmed by US officials to have been the target), and a third mission, the next day, to go to the suspected Isis camp.

Waldhauser said that even before the report was produced, his command had changed the way it carried out its counter-terrorism training missions. They will have now have the option to use more armoured vehicles with more firepower, and more surveillance drones.

“We have beefed up a lot of things posture-wise, with regards to these forces,” Waldhauser said. Overall, he stressed that there had to be greater emphasis on the fact that US trainers are in Africa to train and advise and not to go into battle.

“Tactical operations are there to be carried out by the partner force, not by US forces,” he added. “We are now far more prudent in our missions, the missions we actually accompany have to have a strategic value in terms of the enemy we are going against – do they have a strategic threat to the United States.”

Waldhauser did not say whether the doomed patrol on 4 October would have taken place at all under the new guidelines.

The Pentagon said there would be no changes to the overall scale of its mission in Niger.

At Niamey airport on Thursday, men in camouflage trousers worked at the loading ramp of a US air force cargo plane.

On the other side of immigration, gum-chewing soldiers with France’s counter-terrorism force in the Sahel, waited to pick up arriving colleagues.