(2013) Djibouti is a tiny, poor former French colony with less than one million people. The US military has had a presence in Djiboutu since 2001 as a base for US operations in the Horn of Africa. Starting witth a 2002 strike in Yemen that killed a suspected ringleader of the attack on the USS Cole, for a decade the United States flew an occasional drone from its base there called Camp Lemonnier.