Air Force propping up peacekeepers in Darfur - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

Air Force propping up peacekeepers in Darfur

Operating from Rwanda’s grassy hills, the U.S. Air Force is quietly changing its role in relieving genocide in Darfur.

For years, the Air Force has assisted the African Union’s long-standing efforts to stem bloody tribal conflicts in Sudan’s Darfur region. Now, amid fresh calls for holy war in Sudan from Osama bin Laden, and ongoing bloodletting in Darfur, the Air Force is propping up a hybrid United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force.

In mid-October, the Air Force transported Rwandan battalions and associated cargo — 200 troops in and 200 out each day — for four days. Over the past four years, airmen with the 786th Expeditionary Squadron out of Ramstein Air Base, Germany, have completed six similar missions. This go-round, they’re being assisted by two C-17 Globemaster jets and a small crew from South Carolina’s Charleston Air Force Base.

As the United Nations prepares to bolster the African Union’s 7,000-troop force, aiming for a combined force of 26,000 peacekeeping troops, the Air Force will remain in Rwanda for another week to transport more soldiers and supplies. Before the airmen leave, roughly 2,200 Rwandan troops — with their tons of baggage, medicine, food and vehicles — will have been airlifted to a dusty landing strip on the outskirts of Darfur’s fighting fields.

“We are building up the capability for the transition,” said Rwandan Lt. Col. Ndore Rurinda, African Union operations officer.

In an interview from Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, where the 50-airman squadron operates out of a civilian airport, mission commander Lt. Col. Kevin Therrien described the 786th as light, lean and lethal.

“We come out here with just enough people to do the mission and no more,” he said. “Our guys do long, hard days. We have one shift: Work as long as you can to get the mission done.”

As they readied for airlifts carrying the new United Nations-African Union force, several armored personnel carriers were still wet from repainting.

“They just painted white with the giant black U.N. letters on the side,” Therrien said.

Though the Defense Department’s newly created Africa Command is not overseeing this mission, this exercise is a bellwether for the type of small, humanitarian-focused missions the command was designed for. Air Force Capt. Erin Dorrance, also on the ground in Rwanda, described it as “very similar to the missions Africa Command will be doing in the near future,” adding that she often updates the new command on the mission’s progress.

In Kigali — the setting for the 2004 film “Hotel Rwanda” — the high altitude keeps heat at bay for airmen at work. From the squadron’s operational location, they can see a rolling hillside, dormant volcanoes in the distance and, below, Kigali’s streets lined with ramshackle homes roofed with sheet metal.

Airlifted Rwandan soldiers, wearing lime green berets and carrying wooden-stocked AK47s, perform a ceremonial dance before boarding or exiting the C-17. The good-luck celebration is backed by a marching band toting snare drums, trombones, flutes and more. The Rwandan Defense Force’s only four-star general, comparable in stature to a chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, dances with the battalions as they return, Therrien said.

Rwanda — tiny in size but densely populated — is an African Union nation still recovering from its own internal ethnic genocide in 1994, which left between 500,000 and 1 million dead. In the Sudan’s Darfur region, fewer than 800 miles to the north, conflicts between the Sudanese military and rebel groups have claimed more than 400,000 lives and displaced more than 2 million, according to the United Nations.

The airlift’s Darfur drop-off point, near the region’s El-Fasher area, is a flat, bleak expanse of dirt spotted with sagebrush. Therrien was cagey about describing the danger to airmen there, explaining that he was “constantly reassessing our threat and measuring the risks versus rewards.” The C-17s do not deposit troops close to combat zones and the Rwandans must be transported by other vehicles to their end location.

U.N. spokesman Nick Birnback described the airlifts as extremely helpful.

“There are two things that don’t exist within traditional military structures in the developing world: enabling capacities and specialized units. We’re always short of heavy airlift,” he said.

Still, the African Union, which is providing the bulk of the hybrid force’s manpower, is calling on the United Nations to provide more airpower. Gen. Henry Anyidoho, a commander with the United Nations-African Union forces, has said his troops still need more attack helicopters, utility helicopters and heavy-lift transport units.

Though not fully active until early 2008, the peacekeepers are entering Darfur as negotiations between Sudanese leaders and rebel factions remain rocky. In late October, rebel leaders in Darfur stated they will not attend peace talks with the Sudanese government. And on the eve of the U.S. squadron’s airlift of Rwandan members of the hybrid force, al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden called for a jihad, or holy war, against the new wave of troops backed by the west.

He also called for attacks on the Sudanese government, which harbored bin Laden in the 1990s but has angered the terrorist-in-hiding by allowing the United Nations inside its borders and not strictly adhering to Islamic law.

“It is the duty of the people of Islam in the Sudan and its environs, especially the Arabian Peninsula, to perform jihad against the crusader invaders and wage armed rebellion to remove those who let them in,” said bin Laden, according to a widely circulated translation of an al-Qaida tape released in late October.