A U.S. drone base operating since 2011 in Southern Ethiopia has been deemed no longer necessary and shut down, an embassy official said, according to the Associated Press.
The base, located in Arba Minch, 450 kilometers (280 miles) south of Addis Ababa,was used to attack Islamic extremists in Somalia, according to a security expert in Addis Ababa asked not want to be identified for fear of Ethiopian government retaliation, AP reported.
Ethiopia and the U.S. are staunch allies in East Africa, fighting Islamic extremists despite Ethiopia’s history of human rights issues, AP reported.
Embassy spokesman David Kennedy told the AP by email, “U.S. military personnel are no longer in Arba Minch. In our ongoing bilateral discussions on defense cooperation, we reached a mutual decision that our presence in Arba Minch is not required at this time.”
When the drone base was set up in 2011, the U.S. said the drones were being for surveillance only, not for air strikes, BBC reported.
They were part of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts in East Africa aimed at groups with links to al-Qaeda such as Somalia-based al-Shabab.
U.S. military personnel and contractors became increasingly visible in 2011 in Arba Minch, a city of about 70,000 people, WashingtonPost reported in October, 2011. Arba Minch means “40 springs” in Amharic, a semitic language spoken in Ethiopia.
In a recent email, the embassy official said, “it is important to know that our presence at Arba Minch was never meant to be permanent,” BBC reported.
Ethiopian media reported about the base when it was set up in 2011 but the U.S. has never publicly confirmed its existence, according to AP.
The U.S. Air Force invested millions of dollars to upgrade an airfield in Arba Minch, building a small annex to house a fleet of drones that could be equipped with Hellfire missiles and satellite-guided bombs, WashingtonPost reported in October, 2011. The U.S. started flying Reaper missions earlier in 2011 over neighboring Somalia, where the U.S. and its allies in the region targeted al-Shabab.
Standard models of the Reaper have a range of about 1,150 miles, according to the Air Force. The MQ-9 Reaper is known as a “hunter killer.”
The Barack Obama administration has tried to avoid deploying troops to Somalia since the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” debacle in which 18 Americans were killed when two U.S. military helicopters were shot down in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, Washington Post reported in 2011.
The rebels were pushed out of Mogadishu in 2011 with the help of African Union troops, AP reported. But al-Shabab still carries out attacks in Somalia and the countries contributing A.U. troops, including Kenya, Djibouti and Uganda.
Ethiopia has troops in Somalia supporting the government there in its fight against al-Shabab, BBC reported.
Civilian travelers who went through the Arba Minch airport in 2011 described a U.S. military compound erected on the tarmac next to the terminal, WashingtonPost reported.
The compound was about half an acre and surrounded by high fences, security screens and lights on extended poles. U.S. military personnel and contractors were served American-style food at a cafe in the passenger terminal.
The Ethiopian Foreign Ministry denied the presence of U.S. drones in the country in 2011, WashingtonPost reported. “We don’t entertain foreign military bases in Ethiopia,” a spokesman for the Ethiopian embassy in Washington said at the time.
