2e REP: Combat jump over the Salvador Pass of northern Niger

In early April, legionnaires from the 1st Company of the French Foreign Legion’s 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment (2e REP) jumped over the Salvador Pass of northern Niger, on the Niger’s border with Libya and Algeria, in the deep Sahara.

The Salvador Pass is an important crossroads for the drug and arms trafficking carried out, according to French officials, by radical Islamist groups and local rebel/criminal gangs, in the land of nowhere in the heart of the Sahara, near the Niger’s border with Libya and Algeria. As stated earlier, the legionnaires from 1st Company of 2e REP have been based in Madama, a new French forward operating base located in north-eastern Niger, near the Salvador Pass, as part of Operation Barkhane. The legionnaires from 2e REP have been conducted operations there to search and eliminate the trafficking gangs. They will have spent several months there.

The military operation the legionnaires conducted a night combat jump within, lasted one week, from April 7 till April 13. About 50 men from the 1st Parachute Hussar Regiment (1er Régiment de Hussards Parachutistes, 1er RHP), the French airborne cavalry unit, together with 30 Nigerien troops took part in the operation too. However, they did not jump over.

For the 2e REP, it has already been the second combat jump accomplished in Africa since the 2e REP jumped over Timbuktu (Mali) in 2013.

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