DJIBOUTI: At a base in Djibouti, a hot and rugged outpost on the African coast of the Red Sea, French special forces soldiers are training to hunt down guerrillas in Afghanistan.
"Djibouti resembles Afghanistan, and therefore gives us an exceptional opportunity for training and battle-hardening," said Colonel Bertrand de Turkheim, speaking during a recent visit by French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie.
The small country, strategically located at the southern entrance to the Red Sea, is a former French colony and home to France's biggest remaining overseas base. During her visit, Alliot-Marie confirmed that France's contingent of special forces in Afghanistan, operating from a base at Spin Boldak near the southwestern city of Kandahar, would be continuing to hunt for Al Qaeda activists, and notably for the group's leader, Osama bin Laden.
The minister also said that French forces had received some information on Osama bin Laden's possible whereabouts. "A certain amount of information has allowed us to locate him approximately," she said. "The mission continues."
About 200 French special forces soldiers have been working in the Spin Boldak region, on the border with Pakistan, since August 2003 to uncover networks of Al Qaeda activists and supporters of the ousted Taliban regime. Their efforts are distinct from the multinational assistance force under Nato command, which is deployed mainly in the capital Kabul.
In early June the chief of staff of the French armed forces, General Henri Bentegeat, said during a visit to Kabul that Osama bin Laden had on several occasions been almost within reach of the coalition forces in Afghanistan.
The French forces engaged in the hunt regularly pass through Djibouti for four-month spells of training in desert conditions, in temperatures that can reach as high as 55 degrees Celsius.
Carrying packs weighing 45 kilograms, the soldiers work on survival in the desert, attacking buildings, parachuting into hostile environments and carrying out hostage rescue operations.
"We move around a great deal within Djibouti to develop our feeling for terrains that resemble the ones we will be deployed to," said the group's commander, who in line with special forces' regulations could neither give his name nor show his face.
The officer was at pains to stress that his forces were not gun-happy Rambo-type characters or physical fitness freaks. "We tend to reject the image of high-level sportsmen," he said. "Our aim is to look for people who are psychologically very stable and mature, with great endurance."
Members of the special forces, brought together under the French armed forces' Special Operations Command (COS), are somewhat older than the average soldier. They work not only in Afghanistan but also in the former French west African colony of Ivory Coast, and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they intervened last year alongside a Swedish contingent.
Their longstanding training programme in Djibouti was stepped up after the attacks of September 11 in the United States in 2001, said Colonel de Turkheim. Djibouti is currently home to some 2,850 French troops in all.
Since the "war on terror" declared by the United States after the 2001 attacks, it also hosts a US base, and is the main staging post for a multinational effort to protect sea-lanes in the strategic Horn of African region. That mission, named "Task Force 150," is currently under French command. -AFP
