Pentagon officials in 2013 moved drone operations out of a joint civilian-military installation in Djibouti after encountering resistance from local air traffic controllers who denounced the US “killing Muslims,” a Washington Post report revealed on Thursday.
Civilian air traffic controllers even attempted to ban the top-secret unmanned aircraft from taking off or landing at Camp Lemonnier—an increasingly important US military facility built within Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport—but those orders “lasted no longer than a week,” The Post also noted.
Craig Whitlock, the veteran national security reporter who broke the story noted, however, that the ad hoc injunctions “disrupted US military operations.”
“The Djiboutians’ greatest fears were these drones,” one former Federal Aviation Administration offical told Whitlock. “They hated these drones with a passion.”
The revelations, while unsurprising, paint a picture of the difficulty American officials can encounter when seeking to conduct often unpopular and heavy-handed counterterrorism operations around the world. In Sept. 2013, Whitlock and Post colleague Greg Miller had reported that at least six accidents involving drones were what caused US military brass to move UAV operations out of Lemmonier, at the request of its hosts. “Rattled by the rash of drone crashes, the Djiboutian government asked the Pentagon to move its unmanned aircraft away from the city to a rarely used airstrip in the desert, Chabelley Airfield,” the pair wrote, basing the claim off information released by the military through a public record request. Whitlock’s report Thursday, however—based, in part, on information only released by the Pentagon after the threat of Freedom of Information Act litigation–makes it clear that political considerations, particularly those colored by distaste for President Obama’s targeted killings program, were more to blame.
“Tensions over the drones became so severe that the U.S. military agreed to move the robotic aircraft in 2013 from Camp Lemonnier to a remote desert airstrip in another part of the country,” Whitlock noted.
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, US drone strikes and other covert operations conducted in the Global War on Terror era have killed as many as 256 Yemeni and 52 Somali civilians. Lemonnier is used to conduct counterterrorist operations in both countries.
Thursday’s report also found that prior drone crashes may have been caused, in part, by the Djiboutians’ anger toward the White House’s kill list, although The Post also discovered, through documents it obtained, that American officials had accused Djiboutian civilian air traffic controllers of sleeping and chewing khat on the job, and of engaging in uncooperative behavior and other unsafe labor practices.
The investigation did note, however, that, in particular, “Air Force drone crews fumed to investigators that the controllers were difficult to deal with.”
According to The Post, US and Djibouti last year agreed to extend the lease on Lemonnier for two decades. It is currently the only permanent American base in Africa, and home to roughly 4,000 US military personnel.
Lemonnier also played host to more than 15,000 takeoffs and landings by American military aircraft in 2014—a sum equal to more than half of the entire traffic last year at Djibouti’s only international airport.
