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US military presence growing in Djibouti, other Africans sites

By KEVIN J KELLEY

The recent announcement of a planned White House meeting between US President Barack Obama and Djibouti’s leader highlights the considerable importance to the US military of the small nation bordering Somalia and Eritrea.

President Obama’s scheduled May 5 talks with President Ismail Omar Guelleh, which are likely to focus in part on the US base at Camp Lemonnier, represent a rare official acknowledgment of Djibouti’s strategic significance to the US.

Already the largest Pentagon facility in Africa, Camp Lemonnier is the site of major construction projects that could total $750 million.

The buildup reflects Washington’s growing concerns about Islamist insurgencies in East Africa. Greater resources are also being made available to the Djibouti operations as the US redeploys military assets from Afghanistan to Africa.

“Our presence here in Djibouti is enduring and I think it is growing,” US Air Force Col Kelly Passmore, a commander at Camp Lemonnier, recently told the Pentagon newspaper Stars and Stripes.

“As DOD [the Department of Defence] has capacity that is freed up from our transition out of Afghanistan, it gives us forces that are able to now focus on this region.”

Overall, the portion of Camp Lemonnier used by the US has grown from about 85 acres in 2002 to 500 acres today. The US pays the government of Djibouti $38 million a year to lease Camp Lemonnier.

The former French Foreign Legion base has been home for the past 12 years to a US military unit known as the Combined Joint Task Force/Horn of Africa. About 3,000 US personnel conduct air, sea and land surveillance operations throughout East Africa and parts of the Arabian peninsula from Camp Lemonnier.

A rapid-response force is also headquartered at the camp. The US Africa Command (Africom) also makes use of the base in Djibouti. Up to 6,000 troops are available to Africom, its commander, Army Gen David Rodriguez, said recently.

Since its inception a few years after Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington, Africom has sought to keep a low profile and to depict its mission as mainly a partnership with various African militaries.

The announcement of Africom’s establishment drew a negative response from many governments, who worried about the prospects of US militarisation of Africa.

Initial efforts by the command to locate its headquarters on the continent were terminated as it became clear that almost no African nation was willing to host a large-scale US military base.

Camp Lemonnier has come to function as an African complement to Africom headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. But Djibouti’s location makes the camp a convenient location only for operations in East Africa, so the Pentagon has quietly been establishing much smaller bases in several locations near conflict zones in other parts of the continent.

Today, the US has a military presence in more than half-a-dozen African countries in addition to Djibouti. Kenya is included in that network.

Air-support facilities have been constructed at Manda Bay in Lamu, Kenya to accommodate US cargo planes that ferry African Union troops and equipment, along with numbers of US personnel, to Somalia.

Kenyan maritime forces that play supportive roles in combating piracy and Al Shabaab insurgents are also trained in a facility at Manda Bay known as Camp Simba.

The US operates drone bases in both Ethiopia and the Seychelles as well as in Djibouti. A post making use of the same surveillance resources has also been established in Niger in West Africa.

Elsewhere in that sub-region, a US Joint Special Operations Air Detachment carries out counterinsurgency initiatives from a base in Burkina Faso’s capital city, Ouagadougou.

The United States has also sent troops during the past year to South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Mali.

In addition, President Obama recently expanded the US military presence on the ground and in the air in Central Africa.

Source: The East African

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