The Daily - Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2018

Episode Date: February 20, 2018

In October, four American soldiers were ambushed by militants in a remote desert in Niger. What were they doing in Africa, and who were they fighting? It was all part of a shadowy war going back to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Guests: Alan Blinder, a national reporter for The New York Times; Rukmini Callimachi, who covers terrorism and the Islamic State for The Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Last October, four U.S. soldiers were ambushed in a remote desert in Niger. And the question became, what was the military doing in Africa? And who was it fighting? Five months later, the story from Niger. It's Tuesday, February 20th. Sit down. Sorry, my job's over. No, no.

So earlier this month, I drove from my base in Atlanta a few hours south to South Georgia. Alan Blinder is a national reporter for The Times. When I got into town, I went for a drive with Ginger Russell and her mom. All right, so here's the city limits to the City of Lions. Okay. And this is actually now turns into Old Normantown Road. Okay. And see, they have a bow. Uh-huh.

That's what we were talking about. And as we get closer to Tombs County, Georgia, I started seeing these red, white, and blue bows. These ribbons that you'd see tied to street signs, you'd see on the side of the road. We notice which ones are faded and which ones, I do, I'm like, I wonder, you know, what ribbon they have, because their ribbon just is still vibrant. As we get closer to where Ginger and a lot of her relatives live.

This is my mama's sister's house. I ain't healing, so she has her bow up. And her flag on the front door. These are just people that have been neighbors for a long time. They have their flag up. This is my cousin Sandy's house. She has her ribbons. They're on mailbox after mailbox after mailbox.

This is my cousin Katie. She has her little flag. This is my grandma's house, and nobody lives there, but they made sure that she got a bow on her mailbox, too. These ribbons went up after Ginger's nephew, Dustin Wright, was killed in Niger. That's the way we like to look at it. It's a work in progress.

When it gets done, it gets done. It's a nice day today to work on it. It would be really nice. Dustin Wright was a product of South Georgia. He was born and raised in small towns like Santa Claus, Georgia, places like Lyons, Georgia. Hey, you can't blow a monster. I visited his grandmother at her house, who everyone knows as Elaine, but he called her

Granny. That picture on the corner, that's Dustin. He got a little chubby whenever he was in his... Dustin was a big guy. I mean, he was kind of a chubby kid. And I would fix rice and gravy, or else rice and tomatoes. You like that? There's a picture of him in front of an American flag in his Army uniform.

And everyone I talked to who knew him well said they thought he was having to try really hard to be serious. If you'd have saw him as a kid and then saw him, you'd have never figured that kid would have turned into a Green Beret. He just didn't look like the guy who was going to be a Green Beret? No, absolutely not. He looked just goofy. How much did you and Dustin talk about your military career? A lot. A lot? Common topics? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were involved. They were with me.

His dad was in the military, so was his mom. And the family can trace its lineage in the U.S. military back to the War of 1812. So he joined the military in 2012, very much following in his family's footsteps. But really from the word go, he was telling his friends and family that he wanted to be among the Army's best. family that he wanted to be among the Army's best. So he goes to training in Georgia. He does the Army's infantry school, and he also does the Army airborne school. And eventually in 2014, the Army designated him as a Green Beret. We'll test today But only three When the green were red Dustin and I met June 9th this summer.

So Dustin's home from one of his deployments, and he and some of his buddies decide to take a trip to the Carolina Country Music Fest in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I'm a girl from Philly, but I'm country as hell. So I got my cowboy boots on. He meets a woman named Jenna. The concert was like on the beach. The last set was playing and it was Darius Rucker.

And the song that was playing was If I Told You. And I saw him from across the crowd with his hat on and his sweaty shirt. And I like with a lot of liquid encouragement, him from across the crowd with his hat on and his sweaty shirt. And I like with a lot of liquid encouragement, I, I said, Hey, he's like, hi. He's like, um, want to dance? I'm like, yes, I do. So we, we danced. And, um, by the third chorus we're kissing in the middle of the crowd of thousands of people and it was just this like magical moment. What if I told you about my little nothing town, the two-room house where I came from,

the man that I got my name from, I don't even know where he is now. She's a school teacher in Philadelphia. He's a soldier assigned to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. But they're talking all the time. They're visiting each other. He told his grandmother before he left that he had met the woman he wanted to marry. And then August happened. The deployment was coming. Throughout their relationship, they know he's a Special Forces soldier,

and another deployment is getting closer and closer. He didn't say much about what he was doing. They got a land deal, and I'm just there to do the paperwork. He sent his family pictures of these beautiful landscapes, and he told them it was the military's version of a vacation. That's what he told me that day, sitting there on the couch, and he was leaving that afternoon. It was just paperwork.

And then he leaves for Africa, a country called Niger, which is in West Africa. He said he was going to Niger to train the African army skills to help them be successful and to bring more good into this world. He said, I'm a teacher just like you. I'm there to teach them ways so they can be successful. Did you know how much danger he was in? We didn't think he was in any danger at all.

And, you know, you're talking to people who didn't even know how to pronounce Niger. You know, we had to look it up on the map to see exactly where it all happened. They know he wasn't deployed to one of the combat zones they've seen on TV somewhere like Iraq or Afghanistan. And the risk of his work just weren't all that clear to folks. It was a normal day for us. He woke me up. I got to school. Lunchtime, he texted me. And at 3.30, October 3rd, he told me that they were changing plans and they were going to not return to that base that night. Okay. Told him I loved him.

Love you too, darling. I'll talk to you as soon as I get back to base. He said I'm losing reception soon. I'll try to call you later if I can. But part of the job. You can do it, my man. So, it was about midnight

when two soldiers arrived at Dustin's grandmother's house. And he opened the door and I, this leg, I could see his leg and I sort of looked up and his uniform came into play and he began to say these words to me.

He was so sorry. My grandson had been killed that afternoon and I said, no, no, no God, no. How could Dustin, how could this happen to Dustin? How could Dustin be killed? How could this be? The town is shocked when Dustin Wright is killed. And when his body was brought back from Africa, people lined the streets of this small town.

They had to have his funeral at High School Football Stadium because it was the only place where they could fit the crowd that wanted to come. That's when members of his family started to wonder. What was going on in Africa? He didn't make it out to be anything. They had a land deal going on. He was over there assisting. That was it. That was it.

I'm telling you, Dustin didn't brag. He didn't say more than he needed to say. And it wasn't that he was intentionally keeping things from us, but it was not his place to tell, so he didn't. And I guess that's why it comes as such a shock. Some members of his family still want a simple explanation of why American forces need to be in Niger in the first place. I'll have a list of questions when they get here.

Are we protecting the United States by being over there? Why are we even over there? What is he doing in Africa? Because you don't think of your military in Africa. What was he doing? Just what he did protect us. Where was he? Because I got serious questions.

Who was he fighting? Why was he fighting? When we come back, what happened in Niger? We'll be right back. I'm walking inside a military prison in northwestern Niger. There's a woman who is beating, I think, millet in a bowl. That's the sound that you're about to hear. Rukmini Kalamaki covers ISIS for The Times. A couple of days ago, I got back from Niger, where I went to ask the question, what happened

to these four American soldiers who were killed in an ambush in a forgotten and remote corner of Africa, in a war that I think very few people understand? What the Pentagon has told the American people about what has happened has shifted numerous times. They began by saying one version of events that then changed, it changed again. So I wanted to get on the ground and I wanted to speak to the people who had actually witnessed it. Direct eyewitnesses to what happened. Do you think that he's willing to speak to me? direct eyewitnesses to what happened.

Do you think that he's willing to speak to me? Yeah. The most difficult thing was to try to speak to actual members of the terror group that carried it out. So you think that this guy Hassan, if I get permission to speak to him, he's going to help? Yes, yes. He knows a lot about the group? He knows everything.

Everything. And I was able to speak to two in a prison in Kolo, Niger. He's a well-known terrorist in the area. Okay. And what did you find in Niger? Can you start me at the morning of the ambush? So the morning of the ambush is October 4th. I'm actually going to start one day earlier, October 3rd.

And it was at around 6 a.m. on October 3rd that a mixed patrol of American and Nigerian troops left the gates of their base. The Americans included Green Berets as well as other troops. And they set off on what they had planned to be a low-risk routine patrol, a classic hearts and minds exercise. And what does a routine patrol look like? What the Nigerian troops told me who were accompanying the Americans is they were told it's an aller-retour. In French, that means go out and come back. So they set off at 6 o'clock in the morning.

They spend all day. They stop in villages. They meet with local community leaders. In the late afternoon, they begin heading home. And they're basically a couple dozen miles away from the gates of their compound when the convoy stops. And they're told that their mission has changed. And what is the new mission? The order that they've gotten is that American intelligence agencies have honed in on a signal

from an electronic device belonging to a suspected terrorist named Dundun Shafu. They've identified what they think is his camp, where he's hiding out in the far north of the terrain where they're searching. And they want them to go and back up another American special forces counterterrorism raid as they go in to raid that camp. And this is where things start to fall apart. They go into the camp and they find nobody, but they do find traces of the terror group. They find ammunition. They find the tire tracks of motorcycles that had sped off. So they had somehow been alerted and had left the campsite before the Americans got there. Now, the irony in all of this is that was supposed to be the high-risk thing,

the raid on this campsite. And they got there and they were fine. Nothing happened. They spent some time there. And as the sun was rising, they were heading home. And that's the real tragedy here, because what happens next happens on an unplanned stop in a village they were not supposed to stop in. But they've been out now for more than 24 hours. In the desert. In the desert. They're out of water. The first village on their way back is a place called Tongotongo.

And they stop at a well to fill up their water bottles. At this point, the village chief has learned that they are there, and he walks out to meet them. He tells them that there are several sick children in the village, and could they help them. So as part of their Hearts and Minds campaign, they do carry supplies that are specifically meant to be distributed to villagers. So they take out the medicine that they have,

and they start distributing it to the people there. But something's not quite right. It's at this point in time that several members of the unit tell us that they start noticing that the looks on the faces of villagers are not welcoming, even menacing. They notice groups of young men gathering. They notice several people on motorcycles who speed off as if they're going to pass a message to somebody. And most of all, they notice that the village chief keeps on trying to delay them. Every time they get ready to leave, he seems to have some other question or some other reason for them to stay. They finally decide to leave. They get on to the backs of their trucks and not even 200 yards past the village, they begin taking heavy and deadly fire.

This is the ambush. This is the ambush. The Pentagon told us repeatedly that they did not leave these soldiers behind. The New York Times acquired the body camera footage of one of the four dead Americans, and that footage tells a very different story. In the footage, you see three of the four Americans who die on this day. And what you see is that they are outgunned and overrun by this terrorist group and that nobody comes to their aid. You specifically see a black SUV, which is where Staff Sergeant Brian Black, Staff Sergeant Jeremiah Johnson, and Staff Sergeant Dustin Wright find themselves. One of them is at the wheel. Two of them have emerged from the car and

they're trying to use the chassis of the car for cover. They're shooting over the hood. They're trying to hide behind the wheel well. Brian Black is the first to go down. His colleagues rush to help him. They pull him back by the strap of his flak jacket and try to bring him back behind the wheel of the car. They're then taking positions, trying to keep firing at the enemy, but the enemy is right upon them. And the surviving two just start running. And they're running and running. You're seeing it through the viewfinder of the soldier who's behind the first.

They're running past shrubs, they're running past trees, they're running past little huts. The next soldier, Jeremiah Johnson, is hit. And you see him fall and roll. You see his colleague, Staff Sergeant Dustin Wright, stop running and take a position next to basically a desert shrub and try to hold off the attackers. One U.S. soldier with virtually no protection. With no protection. And he's behind this bush that is so wispy that you literally see the branches ricocheting from the force of his weapon. literally see the branches ricocheting from the force of his weapon. And he holds them off for at least a minute and a half, possibly longer,

but he's just one person. And they descend on the soldier who was down. They open fire on him, and then they turn their fire on Sergeant Wright. Okay, so now we know what happened to Sergeant Wright and these three other soldiers. But I think a lot of people, including Sergeant Wright's family, don't really understand what these soldiers were doing

in Africa. What were they doing there? Niger is now one of the battlefronts in the war on terror, very much so in the war on the Islamic State. Africa is where I actually started investigating terror. This is where I began on this beat in 2012 when I was covering Mali and where this particular group that goes on to attack the four soldiers began as an affiliate of Al-Qaeda. And so I want to explain to you the context of terror in this region. Since around 2012, I've been following one particular guy who became a leader of Al-Qaeda in this region. He then breaks off and creates his own group. And he begins to actively recruit from a group of people who are traditional herders and nomads,

and who have one specific grievance. They are herders in an area where the government does not exist, and they are being routinely attacked by armed bandits who are taking their cows and their camels and who are killing their men. That made them extremely vulnerable to recruitment because this al-Qaeda group comes in, offers to arm them, and offers them protection, and at the same time turns them into jihadists. armed them and offers them protection and at the same time turns them into jihadists. So it doesn't very much seem like a terror group, just seems like a local government doing what these people most need, which is protecting their livelihoods. Exactly. And you have to imagine that in this part of the world,

if you're a herder, your animals, it's like your 401k, you know, so somebody comes in and takes your camel, that's like somebody liquidating your bank account, right? There is no other wealth. They don't have bank accounts. They don't have cash on them. And so this was an ongoing issue in this area. And this one-time al-Qaeda group moves in. And by 2015, they pledge allegiance to the Islamic State.

So these herders who wanted to protect their animals, they are now pledging loyalty to the Islamic State. To ISIS, exactly. So we're in Africa fighting the Islamic. These groups are morphing and growing and taking territory. And our presence there is attempting to blunt that. And how we're doing that is by training, advising and assisting local troops to fight the terror threat themselves. And I know that this might be hard for listeners, especially in America to understand, but having lived in this area for seven years, I have seen over and over again that when these jihadist groups go in, local troops basically

just rip off their uniforms and run. This has been the trend. Out of fear. So the mission is train, assist, advise. We're trying to build up these local forces so that they can do it themselves, so that we can, in a way, disengage and no longer be the forward element in these fights. And it's a worthwhile goal, but it's a really long road. It's very hard to get these troops up to the level to do what they need to do. So has this U.S. mission in Africa, has it remained focused on containment or has it started to morph? It's morphed. I mean, I think that what Tongo Tongo shows is you have a patrol that's going out there essentially training the Nigerians who are with them and doing this very low risk, you know, interaction with local villagers.

And suddenly they're given an order to go and raid a suspected terror camp. And it's the Americans who are in the lead there. It's not the Nigerians, right? That's no longer just containing the threat. That's taking a much more proactive role, going out into the field and carrying out an offensive mission to try to stop the threat. Here's the thing that is puzzling about the Tonga Tonga attack. So you have four American soldiers who are killed, which is obviously horrible. But that would have been a blip on the radar in the days when we were in Fallujah, right? In the days when we were actively fighting in Afghanistan. There are incidents in those two wars where dozens of American troops died the same day in helicopter crashes that were taken down by enemy fire. For some reason, there is much less appetite and much less willingness to expend American blood

on the continent than in the Middle East. And I think that has to do with the perception of Africa in the minds of people, where Africa is associated as a place of humanitarian catastrophes, of these endless, what I think people assume are ethnic wars, and where I think people think it's not our business to be there. But what I know from having covered these areas is that these terror groups, specifically Al-Qaeda and now ISIS, their fire is aimed at us from Africa. They are not there to kill local people. They are there to kill symbols of Western governments and specifically America, which is seen as their enemy number one. Rukini, what you're describing is a profound tension here in our priorities.

It seems like the United States, of course, wants to keep its soldiers safe in a place like Niger and wants to monitor and regulate and show the kind of restraint required to do that. But is it more dangerous if the United States is not in a place like Niger and not being as active and offensive as required? Does a vigilant war on terrorism require the U.S. to be there and to conduct itself in whatever ways are required to eliminate the threat. This is a part of the world that is incredibly volatile, that has enormous, ungoverned, lawless spaces, the very kind of spaces that these groups thrive on. thrive on. I saw half of the country of Mali in 2012, in a matter of days, I'm not exaggerating, in a matter of days, be overrun by Al-Qaeda as a result of local troops not being able to hold their ground, right? So I think there is an argument to be made for our presence in Africa.

But if we're going to be there, I think that measures need to be taken to avoid the tragedy that happened on October 4th. The troops that were there were sent in without close air support. They were not properly armored. And they went into what turned out to be a very dangerous situation. That was evident if you just looked at the statistics of how many attacks had happened there. And yet they weren't prepared. You just looked at the statistics of how many attacks had happened there, and yet they weren't prepared. And in my interviews with the Nigerian soldiers who survived this ambush, what they told me is that they thought the Americans had this under control.

They think of the Americans as all-powerful. They thought that they were going into an area, and the fact that they didn't have the right weapons, okay, the Americans would take care of them. And the profound sense that they were left with is one of abandonment, not just of themselves, but also of the four American soldiers who died in Tonga Tonga that day. They were left in the hands of the enemy. Thank you, Rukmini. Thank you, Michael. Here's what else you need to know today. We call bullshit! We call bullshit! On Monday, as students protested in front of the White House, demanding stricter gun control, the Trump administration said it was open to supporting a bipartisan Senate bill

that would improve the federal background check system for gun buyers. The bill, introduced by four Republicans and four Democrats, does not make it harder to buy a gun, but instead offers incentives to government workers to keep the system up to date with the kind of criminal and mental health records that would prevent a gun sale. Millions of those records are missing from the background check system, according to the National Rifle Association,

which supports the bill. Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you! Shame on you! That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.