Who’s ‘Winning’ In Africa?

Authored by Brian Cloughley via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
On October 4 in Niger in central Africa four American special forces soldiers were killed in an ambush by ‘fifty fighters, thought to be associated with ISIS [Islamic State], a US official said.’ In the course of the attack, one US soldier was left behind when the others withdrew, and was subsequently found dead. Nigerien soldiers were also killed, and it is interesting to examine how US media outlets recorded this aspect of what was obviously a disaster for US Africa Command, AFRICOM, the organisation headquartered, bizarrely, in Germany, that has 46 military bases (that we know of) in that continent. (Niger, incidentally, is twice the size of Texas.)
ABC News reported that ‘a soldier from Niger also died from the attack’ while CBS thought that ‘four Nigerien soldiers died,’ and Stars and Stripes went with ‘several.’ CNN’s tally was five but the New York Times didn’t mention Nigerien soldiers at all. Fox News, surprisingly, said that four were killed, as did the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, which even expanded to record that there had been eight Nigerien soldiers wounded.
It isn’t to be expected that the US media would ever concern themselves with deep research into how many foreign soldiers are killed in any of the countries in which the US is involved in armed conflict, but the sloppy reporting is a good indicator of the shrug factor.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Oct 20, 2017.