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Africa Horn

U.S. drone base in Ethiopia operational

2011-11-05

A few days old but worth noting given the new dustup between Kenya and al-Shaabab.

The Air Force has been secretly flying Reaper drones on counterterrorism missions from a remote civilian airport in southern Ethiopia as part of a rapidly expanding U.S.-led proxy war against an al-Qaeda affiliate in East Africa, U.S. military officials said.

The Air Force has invested millions of dollars to upgrade an airfield in Arba Minch, Ethiopia, where it has built a small annex to house a fleet of drones that can be equipped with Hellfire missiles and satellite-guided bombs. The Reapers began flying missions earlier this year over neighboring Somalia, where the United States and its allies in the region have been targeting al-Shabab, a militant Islamist group connected to al-Qaeda.

On Friday, the Pentagon said the drones are unarmed and have been used only for surveillance and collecting intelligence, though it would not rule out the possibility that they would be used to launch lethal strikes in the future.

Mindful of the 1993 "Black Hawk Down" debacle in which two U.S. military helicopters were shot down in the Somali capital of Mogadishu and 18 Americans killed, the Obama administration has sought to avoid deploying troops to the country. As a result, the United States has relied on lethal drone attacks, a burgeoning CIA presence in Mogadishu and small-scale missions carried out by U.S. Special Forces. In addition, the United States has increased its funding for and training of African peacekeeping forces in Somalia that fight al-Shabab.

This is a good strategy: let the Africans work to suppress terrorism on their own continent, and provide them with intel and tools to do it.

The Washington Post reported last month that the Obama administration is building a constellation of secret drone bases in the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, including one site in Ethiopia. The location of the Ethiopian base and the fact that it became operational this year, however, have not been previously disclosed. Some bases in the region also have been used to carry out operations against the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen.

Thanks, WaPo, for disclosing that.

The Air Force confirmed Thursday that drone operations are underway at the Arba Minch airport. The Arba Minch airport expansion is still in progress but the Air Force deployed the Reapers there earlier this year.

Last month, the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry denied the presence of U.S. drones in the country. On Thursday, a spokesman for the Ethiopian embassy in Washington repeated that assertion. "That's the government's position," said Tesfaye Yilma, the head of public diplomacy for the embassy. "We don't entertain foreign military bases in Ethiopia."

It's not really a base, you see, just an operations center...

But U.S. military personnel and contractors have become increasingly visible in recent months in Arba Minch, a city of about 70,000 people in southern Ethiopia. Travelers who have passed through the Arba Minch airport on the occasional civilian flights that land there said the U.S. military has erected a small compound on the tarmac, next to the terminal.

Arba Minch is located about 300 miles south of Addis Ababa and about 600 miles east of the Somali border. Standard models of the Reaper have a range of about 1,150 miles, according to the Air Force.

The U.S. military deploys drones on attack and surveillance missions over Somalia from a number of bases in the region.

The Air Force operates a small fleet of Reapers from the Seychelles, a tropical archipelago in the Indian Ocean, about 800 miles from the Somali coast. The U.S. military also operates drones -- both armed versions and models used strictly for surveillance -- from Djibouti, a tiny African nation that abuts northwest Somalia at the junction of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. About 3,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the only permanent U.S. base on the African continent.

Posted by:Steve White

#2 I shouldn't think it was for Ethiopia as such, Bill Bourbon6367. But they are convenient and they agreed to play host, probably without asking too much in return.

Posted by: trailing wife 2011-11-05 19:48

#1 Kinda shocking to see Hussein O doing something for a Christian majority country. You would think that the son of a muslim spouse and child abandoner would think less of those savages.

Posted by: Bill Bourbon6367 2011-11-05 19:44

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