West African troops entered The Gambia Sunday to secure President Adama Barrow’s arrival from neighbouring Senegal, as controversy erupted over the assurances offered to Yahya Jammeh to guarantee his exit, reports AFP.
The troops were involved in a fierce shootout with pro-Jammeh elements and mercenaries.
Former President Yahya Jammeh flew out of The Gambia on Saturday, ending 22 years at the helm of the tiny west African nation, and landed in Equatorial Guinea a few hours later where he is expected to settle with his family.
It was gathered that the West African troops entered The Gambia to “control strategic points to ensure the safety of the population and facilitate… Barrow’s assumption of his role.”
An AFP journalist in the Gambian border town of Farafenni saw a convoy crossing the frontier on Sunday morning, which would leave them several hours to reach Banjul.
Senegalese forces had briefly crossed into the former British colony on Thursday but pulled out shortly afterwards, with Sunday’s troop movement the first by soldiers from the joint force.
Marcel Alain de Souza, a top official with the Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS), which organised the deployment, said pro-Jammeh elements and mercenaries remained on the ground and had open fired as troops crossed the border.
“They were neutralised,” he said in a statement seen by AFP, without elaborating.
De Souza said the country “could not be left open” for long, however, and that Barrow must be in place “as soon as possible”.
“A country must have a government, but the security conditions required the troops we have sent to secure Banjul and other towns,” he said.
Jammeh took power in a 1994 coup from the country’s only other president since independence from Britain, Dawda Jawara, making this The Gambia’s first democratic transition of power.
“We are going to wait for Barrow at the airport all the way to State House. Before we were scared to come out,” said security guard Babacar Jallow, describing Jammeh as “a killer.”
With Jammeh gone, all eyes will be on the Barrow administration as they make their first steps as a government of reform and development.
“The will of the people has come to be — at last,” said Isatou Touray, a key official in the government-in-waiting.
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