Mattis Erupts Over Niger Inquiry and Army Revisits Who Is to Blame

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt
Dec. 7, 2018

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was livid last month when he summoned top military officials to a video conference at the Pentagon to press them about an investigation into a 2017 ambush in Niger that killed four Americans on a Green Beret team. His anger, Pentagon officials said, came from seeing news reports that junior officers were being reprimanded for the botched Niger mission while the officers directly above them were not.

Days later, a senior officer who had largely escaped punishment was told he would be reprimanded. Another senior officer’s actions before and around the time of the mission were also under new scrutiny.

And this week, Capt. Michael Perozeni, a more junior officer who had received much of the public blame for the mission received word from the Army: His reprimand was rescinded.

The turnaround is evidence of the troubled search for accountability in an incident that left a small team of underequipped and poorly supported American soldiers in the African scrub to be overrun by fighters loyal to the Islamic State. More than a year after the ambush — the American military’s largest loss of life in Africa since the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” debacle in Somalia — top military leaders continue to battle over how to apportion blame and who should be held accountable.

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