2e REP: Great photos of legionnaires in the Sahara of Niger

The 1st Company of the French Foreign Legion’s 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment (2e REP) has been based in Madama, a new French forward operating base located in the land of nowhere in north-eastern Niger, near the Libyan-Algerian border, deep in the heart of Sahara. In February 2015, a well-known French reporter-photographer Thomas Goisque spent some time with legionnaires there and made hundreds of great images.

As stated earlier, many legionnaires from the 2e REP joined anti-terrorist campaigns in Africa in January 2015. Having been part of Operation Barkhane since January 2015, the 2e REP legionnaires from the 1st Company placed in Madama together with an airborn cavalry platoon from the 1st Parachute Hussar Regiment (1er Régiment de Hussards Parachutistes, 1er RHP), conduct military operations alongside Nigerien troops in the region, to search and eliminate the drug and arms trafficking carried out by radical islamist groups or by rebel gangs connected to them, according to French officials. The legionnaires will have spent several months there.

Some examples of Thomas Goisque’s great images: