The Far-Fetched Mission to Reclaim Islands That Host a Key U.S. Military Base
The Chagossian men say they are returning to block Britain’s handover to Mauritius of the islands that host the Diego Garcia base
Feb. 18, 2026
The Wall Street Journal
LONDON—The band of adventurers call it “Operation Certain Death.”
Earlier this week, a sailboat pulled up to an uninhabited island in the middle of the Indian Ocean on a secret mission: To re-establish a human colony more than half a century after its last inhabitants were forcibly removed. And, along the way, influence a geopolitical tug of war involving a huge U.S.-U.K. military base.
The Chagos Islands, home to the strategically vital Diego Garcia military base, currently belong to the U.K. However, the British government is in the process of giving it away to the African island of Mauritius, which has close ties to China, in a bid to erase a colonial stain. It plans to pay Mauritius billions of pounds to then lease the base back for 99 years.
President Trump weighed in on the matter on Wednesday, saying Britain shouldn’t hand over the islands, and said the airfield there could be used to launch U.S. jets against Iran. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY DIEGO GARCIA,” he wrote on Truth Social.
This handover of the last vestige of Britain’s African empire has caused outrage among some Brits, resulting in an unlikely alliance and a far-fetched expedition to reinhabit one of the most remote places on earth and keep it under British control.
The boat, carrying several former British military officers and four Chagossian men, set sail from Sri Lanka and took nearly two weeks to arrive, anchoring Monday morning about 150 yards offshore from the Île du Coin, a half-square-mile island. The colonizers, four Chagossians aged 31 to 72, clambered aboard a dinghy and came ashore, waving British and American flags.
The operation, led by a former British army captain, a Shackletonian character named Adam Holloway, aims to convince Trump and the British public that the Chagos should be kept for King and Country and the handful of Chagossians who want to return to the islands they once inhabited.
The Chagossians were forcibly removed by the British and Americans in the late 1960s and early 1970s to make way for the joint U.S. military base. The Chagossians, who say their dogs were gassed as part of the campaign, were then dumped in Mauritius and the Seychelles. They were offered British citizenship in the early 1990s. Some moved to the U.K.
Holloway argues that giving the Chagos to Mauritius would undermine British security. “To hand over the Chagos to a country that is friendly with China would be an extremely stupid thing to do,” says Holloway. “Then there’s the small matter of the Chagossian people, who have never been consulted on any of this.”
By putting some Chagossians back on the islands, Holloway says he hopes it changes the facts on the ground. “I challenge the Brits or Mauritius to come and remove these people again.”
Mauritius Attorney General Gavin Glover this week dismissed the landing as a publicity stunt. The island nation has long denied it is in China’s pocket.
The men are equipped with three tents they bought on Amazon, a water-purification system and a bag full of medicines they acquired more or less legally in Thailand. They also have a Starlink terminal to talk to the outside world. They will have to contend with swarms of mosquitoes, coconut crabs (a type of giant hermit crab that can reach a yard in diameter and has been known to eat birds), and the fact that no one is actually allowed to live there. The expedition used AI to ask what they would need to set up a settlement in a jungle.
“We plan on living here,” said Misley Mandarin, a 48-year-old bus-driving instructor in London. He came with his father, Michel, who was born on the island and was forced to leave at age 14 when his family was kicked out and sent to Mauritius, where many Chagossians say they faced discrimination. “My father was so happy to return here, he cried when we arrived.”
Sitting on a boat floating off the shore, Holloway is more circumspect. “I have no f—ing idea how we are going to fund this.”
On Wednesday, the U.K. issued the group an eviction order along with the threat of three years in jail.
The U.K. government says it has to hand over the Chagos to avoid falling foul of international law, after a nonbinding advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice in 2019 found that Britain forced Mauritius, as a condition of its independence in 1968, to split off the archipelago from its jurisdiction.
The U.K. government argues that the handover is necessary to ensure the long-term security of Diego Garcia.
Trump has blown hot and cold on the agreement. In January he called it “an act of great stupidity.” Then earlier this month he backtracked and said it was the best deal the British government could make under the circumstances. Now, he has changed his mind again.
Trump’s comment came just a day after the U.S. State Department said that it continues to support the deal proposed by the U.K.
The group of Chagossians and Holloway hope their encampment will scuttle the agreement once and for all before the British Parliament rubber stamps it.
Financing the operation is a handful of conservative Brits who are upset that their government isn’t only giving away a strategic crown jewel but then paying around £120 million (or around $162 million) a year to Mauritius to rent it back.
Nigel Farage, the populist leader of Reform UK party, which is leading the polls, is among those who helped plot the operation, says Holloway, a former member of Britain’s Parliament for the Conservative Party who recently defected to Reform.
Muddying the water is the Chagos Islands’ complicated history. After being controlled by the French, who brought in slaves from Madagascar and elsewhere to work coconut plantations, it was taken over by the British after the Napoleonic wars. When Britain abolished slavery, many of the local inhabitants stayed on, numbering in the low thousands across several islands.
During Britain’s age of empire the Chagos were administered from Mauritius, also a British colony, which is around 1,300 miles away. Three years before Mauritius’s independence in 1968, the U.K. split off the archipelago to create a new entity called the British Indian Ocean Territory, in a deal that Mauritians now claim was forced upon them.
To clear the way for the Diego Garcia base, Britain claimed a group of 2,000 Chagossians living on the archipelago were transient workers rather than natives and then forcibly kicked them out.
In recent years, the Mauritian government successfully petitioned international bodies to pressure the U.K. government to give them the Chagos. After the 2019 advisory court ruling, several international bodies recognized the islands as belonging to Mauritius. These include the Congress of the Universal Postal Union, which barred BIOT stamps from being recognized worldwide, and the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission. The British government said it feared that other bodies would join in, potentially blocking radio frequencies from being used and barring commercial flights heading over the island.
For now, the future of the newfound colony is uncertain. None of the four men who plan to stay are experts in survival. Mandarin, who said his family lived on this island for six generations, doesn’t seem concerned about what the group will eat when they run out of the few supplies they brought, including bags of rice and lentils.
“There are so many fish here you wouldn’t believe it. We’re having lobster for dinner tomorrow,” he said. One reason fish could be abundant is that the Chagos is a protected marine reserve. It is illegal to stay or fish. You can’t even hunt the massive coconut crabs because they are a protected species.
In the coming days, the sailboat plans to leave the four men behind. “I don’t know where it goes from here,” says Holloway. “I’ve just been relentlessly focused on getting them here.”
Corrections & Amplifications
The name of the British Indian Ocean Territory was incorrectly given as the British Indian Overseas Territory in an earlier version of this article. (Corrected on Feb. 19)
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Appeared in the February 20, 2026, print edition as 'What Is Next for ‘Operation Certain Death’'.