What Are US Forces Doing Abroad? We Don’t Necessarily Know.

Murder, sexual assualt, and other crimes plague our military operations abroad, where thousands of commandos operate with little visibility.

Last October, a group of eight Apache attack and CH-47 Chinook helicopters carrying US commandos roared out of an airfield in Iraq. They raced through Turkish airspace and across the Syrian border, coming in low as they approached a village just north of Idlib Province where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, his bodyguards, and some of his children were spending the night. The helicopters opened up with their machine guns, while military jets circled above and 50 to 70 members of the US Army’s elite Delta Force stormed into a compound just outside the village of Barisha. When it was all over, Baghdadi’s home was rubble, an unknown number of people living in the area, including civilians, had been killed, and he and two of his children were dead—victims of a suicide vest worn by the ISIS chief.

That commando raid in Syria was the highest profile US Special Operations mission of 2019, but it was just one of countless efforts conducted by America’s most elite troops. They also fought and died in Afghanistan and Iraq while carrying out missions, conducting training exercises, or advising and assisting local forces from Bulgaria to Romania, Burkina Faso to Somalia, Chile to Guatemala, the Philippines to South Korea.

Last year, members of the Special Operations forces—Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and Marine Raiders among them—operated in 141 countries, according to figures provided to TomDispatch by US Special Operations Command (SOCOM). In other words, they deployed to roughly 72 percent of the nations on this planet. While down from a 2017 high of 149 countries, this still represents a 135 percent rise from the late 2000s when America’s commandos were reportedly operating in only 60 nations.