Some time after the defeat in the Second World War, Germany again returned to the African mainland. In the beginning, these were humanitarian missions. Long before the German unification, the Bundeswehr provided medical assistance after the earthquake in Morocco in 1960. Germany then participated in the air transport of medical equipment to Egypt, Syria and Israel in 1973-1974. Luftwaffe aircrafts, within the framework of UN mandates, airlifted military personnel to Lebanon in 1978, operated in Namibia in 1988-1989, and were used in measures to provide food assistance to the starving in Sudan in 1989.
There were also military missions. Until 1970, weapons from the arsenals of the Bundeswehr were sent to 15 African countries and were used to suppress the liberation movement in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea. Groups of German instructors worked in Africa, and training for African military personnel was organized in Hamburg. On the territory of one of the barracks in Hamburg until 1988, the Bundeswehr supported the work of the traditional union of veterans, until the last veteran of the Afrika Korps died.
Everyone remembered the Afrika Korps already in the 90's. The German contingent used in 1992 in Somalia was immediately called the new Afrika Korps in the press. After the reunification of Germany in 1991, the Bundeswehr began to participate in combat operations against Iraq in the territory of this country and in the Persian Gulf, where searches for weapons of mass destruction and minesweeping were carried out.
Humanitarian actions also continued. In 1991-1993, the medical service of the Bundeswehr was involved in providing assistance in Cambodia. In 1992-1994, the Bundeswehr, with a UN peacekeeping mandate, operated in Somalia, engulfed in civil war and famine.
By the beginning of 2006, about 7,000 Bundeswehr troops were on foreign missions in the Balkans, Afghanistan and other regions of the world. In total, from 1995 to 2006, more than 120,000 German soldiers took part in these mission.
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