Nearly three weeks after
the deadly ambush on U.S. Special Ops forces in Niger, ABC News has learned chilling new details about
the mission gone wrong from a survivor of the attack and a senior U.S.
intelligence official.
Their accounts, provided in
separate interviews, raise questions about why a second, potentially more
dangerous mission was tacked on late in the day even after a second team that
was supposed to join them was unable to do so.
What was started as a
reconnaissance mission to meet with local leaders turned into a kill-or-capture
mission aimed at a high-value target, according to both sources.
That target – codenamed Naylor
Road – has ties to both al
Qaeda and ISIS, according to the intelligence official.
According to multiple
intelligence sources, this target is one of the U.S.’s “top three objectives in
Niger,” one that the U.S. has been “actively pursuing.”
But that change in plan meant
that the team was out for over 24 hours and put them at greater risk.
“They should have been up and
back in a day. Because they were up there so f------ long on a mission that
morphed, they were spotted, surveilled and ultimately hit,” the official said.
Despite being massively
outnumbered, the American and Nigerien troops held their own -- including Sgt.
La David Johnson, who was killed in the ambush, the sources told ABC News.
“He was the best kid you could
ask for,” the survivor said of Johnson, who fought back the militants with
machine gun fire from the back of a pickup truck, before grabbing a sniper
rifle and continuing to shoot.
“The guy is a true war hero,”
the survivor added. “I really want his wife and kids to know that.”
The team of 12 Americans set out
with 30 Nigerien soldiers in the early morning on Oct. 3, according to the
sources and confirmed by Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, who on Monday offered the first official timeline of events for the
ambush in Niger.
They rode in six to eight
vehicles, three of them American. They were headed from Niamey, Niger’s
capital, to a village 85 kilometers to the north, called Tiloa.
Their pre-mission threat
assessment never considered the possibility of 50 to 60 enemy combatants
attacking them, according to the official. That matches what Dunford told
reporters on Monday.
He also added that the leaders on the ground assessed that
contact with the enemy was unlikely.
On their way back, the team
received a call from the base back in Niamey, asking them to turn around and
kill or capture a high-value target who is a known al Qaeda and ISIS operative,
according to two senior officials.
There was “high confidence” that
the target was in the area, the sources told ABC News. A second U.S. Special
Forces team was directed to meet up with their patrol, but when they could not,
the original 12-member team and their Nigerien partners were told to proceed
anyway.
The team arrived at the target
location in the early morning hours of Oct. 4, but found nothing. They burned
the remnants of the abandoned campsite and headed back south as the sun came
up, stopping back through a nearby village called Tongo Tongo around 8:30 AM.
There, the Nigerien force
requested they stop to eat, while U.S. soldiers met with a village elder, who
was “obviously and deliberately trying to stall them,” according to the
official.
“He was definitely stalling as
long as he could to keep us there,” the survivor said, saying he had an
entourage, showed the unit a child with an illness, and even grabbed a goat he
wanted to prepare for them.
But the unit suspected something was definitely
wrong when they saw two motorcycle riders watch them and race out of the
village.
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