We look at the U.S. military presence in Africa and what happened during the ambush of U.S. Special Forces by militants in Niger, in which five Nigerien soldiers were killed along with four U.S. Green Berets. The incident is now the subject of a military and FBI investigation. At least 800 U.S. servicemembers are currently stationed in the country to support a French-led mission to defeat militants in West Africa. Meanwhile, Somalia continues to recover from a massive bombing in Mogadishu that killed at least 358 people. We speak with Horace Campbell, who is currently spending a year in West Africa as the Kwame Nkrumah chair at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. Campbell is a peace and justice scholar and professor of African American studies and political science at Syracuse University. We are also joined by Mark Fancher, an attorney and frequent contributor to Black Agenda Report, where his new article is headlined “U.S. Troop Deaths in Niger: AFRICOM’s Chickens Come Home to Roost.”

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