U.S. forces struck Islamic State targets in northwestern Nigeria on Thursday evening, the U.S. and Nigerian governments said, acting after threats by President Donald Trump to attack the country in an effort to stop what he has said are the killings of Christians.
Trump said in a Truth Social post that the military conducted “multiple strikes” but did not elaborate. In a news release, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) said multiple people that it said were Islamic State terrorists were killed in strikes in Sokoto state, which is in the northwestern part of the country bordering Niger and has become a hot spot for a resurgence in violent extremism and the kidnapping of schoolchildren.
“MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues,” Trump posted to social media.
Nigeria is a diverse, multiethnic country of 230 million people roughly split between the mostly Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south. While violence has sometimes targeted Christians, it has also deeply affected Muslims, according to Nigerian and Western analysts.
The Pentagon said Thursday that the Nigerian government approved the strikes and worked with the United States to carry them out. Video posted online by the Pentagon as it announced the strikes appeared to show a Tomahawk cruise missile being launched from a Navy warship in the region.
On Friday morning, Nigerian Foreign Affairs Minister Yusuf Tuggar told Nigerian broadcaster Channels Television that his country provided intelligence to the U.S. for the strikes and that he had spoken with Secretary of State Marco Rubio twice in the lead up, including in one call that lasted 19 minutes.
“This is what we’ve always been hoping for — to work with the Americans, work with other countries to combat terrorism,” he said. But in several media interviews after the strikes, he pushed back on the framing of the country’s security issues as being about religion.
Referring to his discussion with Rubio, he said it was agreed that statements by the two governments “would show clearly that it is a strike against terrorism … and that it is not to do with religion, is to do with protecting Nigerians and innocent lives.”
“When you try to reduce it to just say, ‘Oh, no, it’s Muslims killing Christians in Nigeria,’ you see how you can get it completely wrong. It’s a regional conflict,” he added.
He made the same argument in an interview Friday with CNN. In that interview, when asked whether he would allow U.S. troops on the ground in the country — a reference to Trump’s threat to go “guns-a-blazing” into the country — he said it was a matter for the Nigerian military to consider.
AFRICOM said in a statement that the strikes were carried out at the direction of Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. A U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive situation, said strikes were conducted at two locations in Sokoto state, targeting Islamic State-Sahel Province, an African branch of the extremist group.
Kimiebi Imomotimi Ebienfa, a spokesperson for the Nigerian Foreign Ministry confirmed the U.S. strikes Thursday evening, saying in a statement that “precision hits on terrorist targets in Nigeria by air strikes” had been carried out in response to the “persistent threat of terrorism and violent extremism.” The strikes were a security and intelligence collaboration between the two countries, he said.
In a social media post before Trump announced the strikes, Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu said he would “pray for peace in our land, especially between individuals of differing religious beliefs.”
“I stand committed to doing everything within my power to enshrine religious freedom in Nigeria and to protect Christians, Muslims, and all Nigerians from violence,” he wrote, tagging Trump alongside other accounts.
Daniel Bwala, an adviser to Tinubu, has previously said that Nigeria’s government welcomes security help from the U.S.
However, he has disputed that the government is “allowing” the killing of Christians specifically, as Trump and other Republican lawmakers have stated.
Trump threatened an attack in Nigeria early last month, writing on his Truth Social site: “If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”
In a message to The Washington Post on Thursday, Bwala said the government “considers the repeated emphasis on Christian killings as needless because firstly terrorists don’t target any particular religion and, secondly, the rhetoric along that line will only feed into the desire of the terrorists to further create a broader crisis.”
He declined to specify the exact targets of the strikes for security reasons.
For months, Trump and Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Reps. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida and Riley Moore of West Virginia, have raised alarms about the killings of Christians in Nigeria amid larger ethnic and religious bloodshed.
Most violence in Nigeria has taken place in the northeast, where the extremist group Boko Haram has regularly attacked churches and kidnapped children for more than a decade as part of its campaign to build an Islamist state through violence.
Trump’s post threatening military action last month followed a meeting in Washington between top advisers and representatives of religious groups and after he watched a Fox News segment on the topic on board Air Force One, The Post reported. The push to make the issue an administration priority was long in the making, according to three people with knowledge of the situation, but the president’s threat of military action was entirely unexpected, they said.
In late October, before his initial threat, Trump designated Nigeria a “country of particular concern” under the International Religious Freedom Act, a move that can be a precursor to U.S. sanctions. The designation was also applied to Nigeria during Trump’s first term and removed under the Biden administration.
The Council on Foreign Relations reported earlier this year that the Sahel, a region that spans multiple countries across Central Africa including Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Chad and Sudan, has seen a significant uptick in the growth of violent extremist organizations as a result of decreased international counterterrorism support.
U.S. forces lost access to key counterterrorism bases in Niger and Chad in 2024. In their place, a surge of proxy military groups such as the Russian-backed Wagner Group have filled in.
Aneliese Bernard, a former State Department adviser who now runs a private consulting firm working in West Africa, said the part of northwest Nigeria where the strikes took place is primarily affected by violence from bandits, who work with the Islamic State-Sahel Province and al-Qaeda affiliate Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM).
Bernard, who has worked extensively in neighboring Benin, said evidence to support a specific Islamic State cell in that area is “dubious at best.”
“This feels incredibly reactionary, and it doesn’t feel like it will do anything,” she said of the strikes. “There is very little evidence that targeted airstrikes reduce armed group activity.”
The Trump administration has been looking at ways to reduce the U.S. role in Africaoverall as it shifts to a strategy that will focus more military assets and attention to the Western Hemisphere. The administration is also looking at potentially consolidating AFRICOM into a theater command that would also include U.S. European Command and U.S. Central Command, which could further reduce the attention and resources the region would receive.
That proposal drew concern from some lawmakers, including Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, who cautioned against the U.S. pulling back given Africa’s young and quickly growing population and economic importance.
Jintak Han and Dan Lamothe contributed to this report.
correctionA previous version of this article gave the incorrect state for Sen. Chris Coons. He represents Delaware.
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