An internally displaced person’s camp, the Rann IDP camp, in Nigeria was a target of a 2017 airstrike in which the US played a then-unacknowledged role, according to a report published by The Intercept. The strike resulted in the death of over 160 people.

Prior to the air strike, a surveillance plane circled above the Rann IDP camp. The camp used to house around 43,000 people and was supervised by the Nigerian military. The air strike hit the area where most people drew water from a borehole. After that, the jet targeted the tents where people sheltered during their displacement.

The airstrike killed nine humanitarian aid workers and left over 120 civilians injured. The Nigerian air force conveyed feelings of regret for carrying out the airstrike which was referred to as an instance of “US-Nigerian operations” according to a previously secret US military document obtained exclusively by The Intercept.

The number of victims

To this day, the number of individuals that were killed in the blast remains unknown. A list of 127 victims' names - with children making up the majority of the list - was sent to Agnès Callamard, who at the time was a United Nations special rapporteur on the extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions in Nigeria.

While a local government official said there were 236 dead, witnesses who participated in the funeral claim 167 people were buried in the Rann cemetery. Following the incident, several ball bearings were reported to have been discovered by witnesses. 

According to Callamard's assessment, photographs of the deceased and injured "showed both massive and smaller wounds, consistent with firing of ball bearings-based ammunitions." 

According to Callamard, the claims that these munitions were deployed are "extremely serious" and "should have been independently investigated." Various experts argued that the US must come clean about such instances, across the world, given that the US has a history of secrecy when it comes to such attacks.

Post-incident chronology

According to the abovementioned secretive document, the US launched an investigation into the airstrike following a mention of US contributions, which did indeed happen though secretly, by the Nigerian armed forces. However, the document also alleges that an investigation by the US Africa Command was secretly commissioned to Brig. Gen. Frank J. Stokes. This investigation was not previously reported nor were its reports published, said The Intercept, but it served to avoid questions of wrongdoing or recommendation for disciplinary action.

The attack, conducted on January 17, 2017, was aimed, according to The Intercept report, against Boko Haram, a terrorist group located near Rann, Nigeria, near the Cameroonian and Chadian borders. The Nigerian and US troops declared, originally, that they had no knowledge of the presence of a civilian camp in the region. However, a Nigerian human rights activist probed the matter. Callamard noted the absurdity of the strike, highlighting that the tents were visible from the air, according to satellite imagery.

“The military presence in Rann, its role in establishing the camp and their facilitation of the humanitarian distribution on the day, raises many questions,” Callamard wrote in a 2021 report adding that “No independent investigation was carried out.”

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The Intercept questioned AFRICOM on the findings of Stokes' inquiry and the level of American involvement in the strike, but AFRICOM did not respond.

About the “black programs”

Strokes, then-deputy director of AFRICOM’s directorate for strategy engagement and programs, had to be “sensitive” in preparing the formerly secretive report, as stated in The Intercept. The reason behind this is the existence of “special access programs” also known as SAPs or “black programs.” Access to information from these programs is highly restricted to a need-to-know basis, with entire programs being unacknowledged and publicly denied at times while their funding is hidden within the federal budget, as stated in The Intercept.

AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan claimed that AFRICOM “was not involved” in the airstrike on the Rann IDP camp. She pointed out that the CIA or Special Operations forces might carry out covert operations throughout the African continent while operating inside their own command structures. Drone attacks, for instance, are overseen by AFRICOM, but a Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC task force typically conducts them.

These US surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations have frequently been used close to Nigeria. In 2017, The Intercept exposed the existence of a drone base and a torture facility operated by American contractors in Salak, Cameroon, which is located along the northern border of Nigeria and Chad.

The disinformation

When asked by The Intercept, Cahalan insisted that AFRICOM had no “additional information” on the Rann airstrike as mentioned above. However, this statement is worth being questioned given that then-AFRICOM commander Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, had commissioned a secret investigation. The then-secretive document read that the investigation gathered “accounts from witnesses” as well as investigated documents and collected “information which will support any subsequent reviews of the strike … and shape the manner in which any future coalition or partner nation operations are conducted.”

The redacted document, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, read it incredibly difficult to define the extent of US involvement, however, it was clear that information was collected and that intelligence was provided by the US to the Nigerian military.

Other instances of “collateral damage”

A 2015 attack on an ISIS bomb plant in Hawija, Iraq, which sparked secondary explosions and killed at least 85 people, was the result of US targeting analyses performed for another allied force, as The Intercept revealed in a report earlier this year. The commander of targets for US Central Command stated that the Dutch airstrike had been carried out "by the book" including the pre-strike "collateral damage estimate," or CDE. He stressed that "CDE Methodology does not account for secondary explosions," and that "This was a perfectly accurate CDE call."

In line with a long list of assaults, from Somalia to Libya and from Syria to Yemen, that the Pentagon has neglected to examine or reinvestigate despite reports of civilian casualties, no Americans were held accountable for the civilian deaths in the Hawija strike. Rep. Sara Jacobs, a Democrat from California, questioned the Defense Department earlier this year about whether it intended to review claims of civilian casualties in situations where significant information had emerged.

Defense Secretary Austin Lloyd replied by saying that “At this point, we don’t have an intent to re-litigate cases.”

US weapon sales and CDEs

Based on The Intercept report, former US President Donald Trump spoke with Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari less than a month after the bombing and five days before Stokes was scheduled to submit his findings. According to a White House readout of the discussion, Trump “expressed support for the sale of aircraft from the United States to support Nigeria’s fight against Boko Haram.”

Later that year, as part of the largest US foreign military sale in sub-Saharan Africa, the US agreed to sell Nigeria 12 Super Tucano jets, together with thousands of bombs and rockets, for $593 million.

“These new aircrafts will improve Nigeria’s ability to target terrorists and protect civilians,” Trump said during a 2018 White House meeting with Buhari.

“The strike on the IDP camp happened in January 2017, and already by August of the same year, the U.S. government had approved the sale of more aircraft … to the Nigerian government,” Lauren Woods, director of the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy, told The Intercept, adding that “The timeline is striking.”

It is worth noting, as per the abovementioned examples, that neither the weapons sales nor the killing of civilians were Trump-era anomalies. This spring, the United States gave its approval to a potential $1 billion sale to Nigeria of 12 attack helicopters along with associated training and equipment.

Another failed US anti-terror strategy

Nigerian security forces have been battling Boko Haram since 2009, which is an affiliate of the IS, additionally to battling other numerous militarized "bandit" organizations. However, despite the 20-year security cooperation in which the US has provided weapons and training to Nigerian troops, the anti-terror strategy has failed as these terror groups continued to thrive.

The Intercept report showed that according to a study released earlier this year by the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies at Brown University, the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy, and InterAction, the Nigerian military has frequently engaged in serious human rights violations. When addressing Nigerian violations it is crucial that the Rann IDP camp incident be remembered as US-guided black programs in the African continent continue to work in the shadow of the Nigerian armed forces.