Libyan war escalates amid lack of U.S strategy for secret missions in Africa by SeanDNaylor, nickturse
For several years, from a handful of outposts in Libya, U.S. special operators have been conducting counterterrorism missions with names like Obsidian Lotus and Odyssey Resolve. These are just two of dozens of named operations that, largely unknown to the American public, have been launched from a string of bases across the northern half of Africa, according to information obtained by Yahoo News via the Freedom of Information Act.
Nowhere is that policy vacuum more evident, critics said, than in Libya, where Gen. Khalifa Haftar’s militia this past week fought on the edge of Tripoli, prompting the U.S. military on April 7 to announce it was evacuating the small force it had maintained in the Libyan capital. Bolduc acknowledged policymakers’ concerns that by allying closely with Haftar the United States would be helping enable his potential seizure of power in Libya but said that the priority should have been defeating the Islamic State and al-Qaida. “We should have been a whole heck of a lot more aggressive in supporting Haftar than we were.”
In May 2015 the Islamic State captured the coastal city of Sirte, about 273 miles east of Tripoli. A year later, the Government of National Accord launched an offensive to retake the city, which the United States supported with an extensive campaign of almost 500 airstrikes as part of Operation Odyssey Lightning.
Obsidian Lotus was a so-called “1208 program,” named after the budgetary authority that governed such low-profile counterterrorism efforts. Since renamed “127e operations,” these turn local fighters into a surrogate force for the United States, which trains it, equips it and directs its missions unilaterally.
By the end of 2016, those Islamic State fighters who had survived the aerial pummeling of Sirte had withdrawn from the city. The air campaign, which had been managed by Joint Special Operations Command, which controls Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 and is sometimes referred to in the U.S. military simply as “Task Force,” had been a resounding success, according to Bolduc.
However, in his written answers to advance questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Trump administration’s nominee to be the next head of Africa Command, Army Gen. Stephen Townsend, sounded a more optimistic tone. “U.S. efforts to degrade and contain violent extremism in Libya have been largely successful to date,” he wrote.
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