President Donald Trump said Thursday he’d ordered a deadly strike on Islamic State terrorists in Nigeria, who he has accused of persecuting Christians in the country.
In a post on social media, Trump said he’d directed a “powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria,” who he said had been killing innocent Christians.
US Africa Command said it conducted the strikes in Sokoto state, which borders Niger to the north, “in coordination with Nigerian authorities.” AFRICOM’s initial assessment is that “multiple ISIS terrorists were killed in the ISIS camps,” according to a news release. A US official told CNN the strikes included Tomahawk missiles fired from a Navy vessel that struck two ISIS camps.
In a post on social media, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said there was “more to come,” without expanding further and added he was “grateful for Nigerian government support & cooperation.”
Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar told CNN Friday that he had spoken with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio prior to the strike and that Nigerian President Bola Tinubu gave the “go ahead.”
“This is not about religion. It is about Nigerians, innocent civilians, and the wider region as a whole,” Tuggar said.
Speaking of the wider terrorism threat facing Western Africa – particularly in the Sahel region, which has marked the fastest growth in violent extremist activity on the continent – Tuggar said: “When you talk about the Sahel, (the) majority are Muslims. They’re not Christians.”
“Whoever is prepared to work with us to fight terrorism, we’re ready, willing and able,” he said, later adding: “We demonstrated this yesterday.”
Trump has focused for the last several months on the plight of Christians in Nigeria, including calling on Hegseth in November to “prepare for possible action” and warning the US would enter Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” to protect the Christian population of Africa’s most populous country.
“I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday evening. “The Department of War executed numerous perfect strikes, as only the United States is capable of doing.”
“Under my leadership, our Country will not allow Radical Islamic Terrorism to prosper. May God Bless our Military, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues,” concluded the president, who is spending the Christmas holiday at his estate in Palm Beach.
Tuggar told CNN: “We’re not going to dwell or pour over forensically on what has been said – or what hasn’t been said,” stressing that Nigeria’s focus is “to fight against terrorism, to stop the terrorists from killing innocent Nigerians, be (they) Muslim, Christian, atheist, whatever religion.”
Security analysts said Lakurawa, a lesser-known group prominent in northwestern states, could have been the target of Thursday’s strikes. Lakurawa has become increasingly deadly this year, often targeting remote communities and security forces and hiding in the forests between states, the news agency Reuters reported. In January, Nigeria’s authorities declared the group a terrorist organization, and banned its activities nationwide.
Nigerian Muslims have been victims of targeted attacks by Islamist groups seeking to impose their extreme interpretation of Islamic law.
Sokoto state is home to 4 million people – the majority of whom are Muslim.
The violence in the country’s northwest is mainly driven by criminal bandit groups, analysts say, but growing links with Islamic State-affiliated jihadists have created a hybrid crime-terrorism threat.
Tuggar did not say which group had been targeted in the attack.
On Christmas Eve, Tinubu shared a “Christmas Goodwill Message” in which he wished Christians across his nation and the world a merry Christmas and prayed for peace among 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,” Tinubu said in a post on X.
The West African nation has grappled for years with deep-rooted security problems that are driven by various factors, including religiously motivated attacks. Observers say other violent conflicts arise from communal and ethnic tensions, as well as disputes between farmers and herders over limited access to natural resources.
Militants have targeted Christian and Muslim communities
The plight of Nigeria’s Christians has been an animating subject for American conservatives for years, with some of Trump’s top allies, including Sen. Ted Cruz, in recent months calling for US intervention after claiming Nigeria’s government wasn’t doing enough to prevent attacks on Christians.
In the fall, Trump accused Nigeria of religious freedom violations claiming that “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria” and designating the nation as a “Country of Particular Concern” under the International Religious Freedom Act. The label is a suggestion that his administration has found that Nigeria has engaged in or tolerated “systematic, ongoing, (and) egregious violations of religious freedom.”
Both Christians and Muslims — the two main religious groups in the country of more than 230 million people — have been victims of attacks by radical Islamists, experts and analysts say.
Oluwole Oyewale, a Dakar-based African security analyst, told CNN Friday that Trump’s “binary framing of the issue as attacks targeting Christians does not resonate with the reality on the ground.”
“In a country that is largely divided – not only politically, but in terms of religion – these are serious connotations in terms of how people view this. And it goes in a long way to actually open the fault lines of division that already exist in the country,” Oyewale said.
Trump has cast himself a peacemaker, and entered office vowing to limit US military intervention abroad. Since returning to power, however, he has also ordered strikes on Iran’s nuclear program and overseen a massive military buildup around Venezuela, with the threat of strikes on land there.
This story has been updated with additional details.
CNN’s Aleena Fayaz and Zain Asher contributed to this report.
