AGADIR, Morocco — The head of the U.S. military in Africa vigorously defended the country’s counterterrorism strategy on the continent and vowed to press forward with it despite a wave of criticism and a drift among African nations toward seeking security help from Russia instead.
In an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday at Africa Lion, a war games exercise in Morocco, Gen. Michael Langley blamed a tide of Russian disinformation for anti-U.S. sentiment in volatile regions. He said the military needed to reassert how its longstanding strategy can foster stability throughout the Sahel, the semiarid region south of the Sahara Desert.
The 6,000 members of the U.S. military stationed in Africa are confronting new setbacks as governments in Chad and Niger — two key regional allies — embrace Russian forces and paramilitaries and push for them leave posts previously identified as critical to monitoring security challenges.
“There was negative sentiment across the last couple of years against one of our most valued allies — France — as you looked at all social media and looked all across media writ large,” Langley said. “A lot of that negative sentiment was fueled by the misinformation and disinformation of the Russian Federation.”
“We need to get our narrative out there,” he added.
More than 11,000 deaths last year in the Sahel were linked to militant Islamist violence, continuing a trajectory that has…
