On October 30, 2020, US Special Forces effectuated a hostage rescue operation to free a US citizen Philip Walton. Kidnapped in Niger, he was held hostage in Nigeria by a group of hijackers who threatened to hand him over to an extremist terrorist organisation Boko Haram. The operation was planned and carried out four days after the abduction. The present analysis intends to reconstruct a probable course of the operation, based on the available open-source information. It also contains a set of conclusions on the basis of the planning and implementation of the rescue operation.
KBN Analysis no. 1 (81) / 2021
18 January 2021
On October 30, 2020, US Special Forces effectuated a hostage rescue operation to free a US citizen Philip Walton. Kidnapped in Niger, he was held hostage in Nigeria by a group of hijackers who threatened to hand him over to an extremist terrorist organisation Boko Haram. The operation was planned and carried out four days after the abduction. The present analysis intends to reconstruct a probable course of the operation, based on the available open-source information. It also contains a set of conclusions on the basis of the planning and implementation of the rescue operation.
In the picture: The Joint Special Operations Command’s emblem. Source: Special Operations Forces Reference Manual, JSOU, Tampa FL, 2015.