The US troop withdrawal from Niger, as demanded by the West African country\u2019s military regime, will be completed in early August, a US general said Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe withdrawal is going well,\u201d General Kenneth Ekman, US commander for Africa, told reporters in Abidjan.
\n\u201cIt is ahead of schedule and this is because of the excellent coordination that we have had with our Nigerien military counterparts,\u201d said Ekman, who heads up the US Africa Command Africom.
\n\u201cI expect that we will be complete with the withdrawal by early August, well ahead of the 15 September mutually agreed deadline.\u201d
\nThe United States pulled out of a base in the Niger capital Niamey in early July, but another 200 US soldiers remain at the Agadez drone base in the north of the country.
\nUS troops were part of an international effort to suppress jihadists forces that regularly strike across the region.
\nBut the Niger military leaders who seized power in a coup a year ago in March told US and French forces to quit the country.
\n\u201cThe consequences for regional security are very concerning,\u201d Ekman said.
\n\u201cI\u2019ve been here speaking to your military and government leaders — we share the same concerns about the violent extremist threat that is growing and increasingly threatening the countries around the Sahel.\u201d
\nHe said the United States would continue to work with Ivory Coast security forces, but he denied media reports that the US military was looking to build a base in Odienne, in the north of the country.
\nUS forces recently took part in the \u201cFlintlock\u201d military exercises in Ivory Coast that involved hundreds of soldiers from Western and African countries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The US troop withdrawal from Niger, as demanded by the West African country\u2019s military regime, will be completed in early August, a US general said Wednesday. \u201cThe withdrawal is going well,\u201d General Kenneth Ekman, US commander for Africa, told reporters in Abidjan. \u201cIt is ahead of schedule and this is because of the excellent coordination …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":28764,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international","category-news-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28763"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28765,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28763\/revisions\/28765"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}