Sites are added to aid governments in Africa, Southeast Asia as diplomacy faces potential cuts
DAKAR, Senegal—The State Department is opening new, military-style training facilities around the world, expanding plans to prop up local forces battling terrorism as the Trump administration seeks cutbacks in conventional diplomacy and development programs.
Three new State Department training centers—in Africa and Southeast Asia—are joining two centers in the Middle East that train and equip forces responding to terrorist attacks in their home countries.
While the U.S. Defense Department conducts training programs for foreign military forces around the world, including Africa, the State Department works with local law-enforcement agencies and counterterrorism authorities in a fast-growing and steadily spreading war against jihadist groups in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.
The State Department’s Antiterrorism Assistance, or ATA, program runs the centers and is carrying out the expansion, details of which haven't been previously reported.
Officials opened the newest training center in 2018 in Senegal, in West Africa, as a first step toward broadening the program’s role in training and equipping forces around the world.
New centers also are scheduled to open later this year in Kenya and the Philippines, to serve as regional hubs in East Africa and Southeast Asia, respectively.
The new centers join a pilot Antiterrorism Assistance program in Jordan, where officials began training Iraqi police soon after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The State Department now operates two facilities there, hosting antiterrorism forces from more than 20 countries. More than 10,000 law-enforcement officials have trained in Jordan during the past decade.
The plans reflect a realignment of priorities at the State Department under the Trump administration. As a critical but little-publicized area of U.S. diplomatic efforts, the Antiterrorism Assistance program has expanded steadily in the past decade and is ramping up at a time when Mr. Trump has proposed cutting the budget for the State Department and its development arm, the U.S. Agency for International Development, by nearly 25% for fiscal year 2020.
The administration’s budget proposal has drawn criticism in part because of the proposed cuts, and it is considered unlikely to pass in Congress.
Roberto Bernardo, ATA’s acting director, said in an interview there are no plans to reduce funding for the training program, adding it actually might expand further.
“There’s certainly an appetite for it,” he said.
Antiterrorism Assistance program officials say the Senegal center will train elite units from across the continent’s vast Sahel region. This semiarid belt south of the Sahara has become a staging ground for surging numbers of violent jihadist groups.
The Africa Center for Strategic Studies has reported a fivefold surge in Sahel violence during the past three years, with more than 1,100 civilians killed in 2018.
The State Department’s West African facility is located on a Senegalese military base in Thies, some 45 miles east of Dakar, the country’s capital. Senegal shares a 250-mile border with Mali and wants to help with peacekeeping operations and stop cross-border attacks that could cause violence to spread to the peaceful coast.
Al Qaeda-allied militias in northern Mali are fighting United Nations peacekeepers, with violence spreading into Burkina Faso, which is also experiencing an aggressive insurgency.
“The security of Mali is part of the security of Senegal,” said Maj. Aloise Ndene, a Senegalese commander at the base, referring to yearlong rotations in Mali.
The U.S. continues to see Islamist-inspired terrorism as the main threat to its interests overseas.
In Kenya, the State Department’s new facility will be used to train elite forces from across East Africa, including Somalia, the source of a violent insurgency led by al-Shabaab, a Somali group linked to al Qaeda. The violence has spread into Kenya, which supports U.S. military operations against the group.
Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for a January attack on a hotel complex in Nairobi, killing at least 21 people. Many of the elite Kenyan security forces called to stop the suicide bombers and gunmen at the Dusit D2 Hotel had been trained and equipped under the Antiterrorism Assistance program.
Two of the al-Shabaab attackers were killed by members of a unit trained under the Antiterrorism Assistance office’s Special Program for Embassy Augmentation Response, or Spear, according to U.S. officials.
Mr. Bernardo said the ATA program had increased support to Kenyan counterterrorism units after a 2013 attack at Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall. Their presence at the Dusit D2 Hotel in January “mitigated that attack, and reduced the number of casualties,” he said.
In the Philippines, the State Department will use its new facility to train elite counterterrorism units from across Southeast Asia, including Malaysia and Indonesia, which also have seen a rise in jihadist-inspired violence.
The rough terrain of the southern Philippine island of Mindanao and nearby islands have provided shelter and recruits for armed separatists and factions of extremists. Jihadists took over the city of Marawi in May 2017, only to be ousted five months later by Philippine forces, with the backing of several hundred U.S. troops.
The State Department’s ATA program was created in the wake of the Marine Corps barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. service personnel in 1983.
The program’s baseline funding has grown fivefold in recent years, from $38 million in 2001 to an administration request for $182 million for 2020. The program also is supported by other streams of funding, including the Overseas Contingency Operation, that make its overall cost difficult to assess.
The ATA program has drawn criticism from the Government Accountability Office for a lack of transparency and oversight over the years. The program, which relies in part on outside contractors for the training effort, came under intense scrutiny in 2016, when the Justice Department filed a lawsuit under the False Claims Act against the State Department’s main contractor.
The lawsuit alleges that DynCorp International, which provided the training at the Jordan site under a contract, allowed subcontractors to inflate charges and add a markup to costs for hotels, guards and other expenses between 2004 and 2008.
A spokesman for DynCorp said the company doesn’t comment on active litigation. State Department officials didn’t respond to a request for comment.
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