President Donald Trump said Thursday he had ordered a “lethal” strike against Islamic State terrorists in Nigeria, blaming them for killing Christians in the region.
Trump wrote in a post on social media that he “directed the strong, rapid and decisive withdrawal of all @_AfricanUnionand US AMISOM forces from Somalia by no later than December 31, 2020.”In another statement shared on social media platform Twitter earlier today, Trump said he’d ordered “a vicious & violent strike targeting ‘J-GS’, ISIS Terrorist cells, and sanctuaries” in an undisclosed part of northwest Nigeria after they had been killing innocent Christians.
The United States Africa Command said it had carried out the strikes in Sokoto state, which lies to the north of Niger, “in coordination with Nigerian authorities.” AFRICOM’s “initial assessment is that the precision airstrikes killed multiple ISIS terrorists and destroyed multiple structures,” including ISIS camps, according to a news release. One US official told CNN the strikes involved Tomahawk missiles fired from a Navy ship that hit two ISIS camps.
AFRICOM said in an earlier statement, which it posted on X Thursday but subsequently deleted, that it had carried out the attack at Nigerian authorities’ request.
The Nigerian media will NOT report this.
However less than an hour ago,
Donald Trump has just confirmed that the USA Department of War has launched multiple airstrikes on ISIS terrorists in the NorthWest Nigeria who engage in kidnap, mass murder and terrorism.I expect that by… pic.twitter.com/4Y1RV9XNjz
— OurFaveOnlineDoc 🇬🇧 🇳🇬 (@OurFavOnlineDoc) December 25, 2025
CNN has contacted AFRICOM and the White House for more information. In a separate post on social media, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said there was “more to come,” without elaborating and added that he was “grateful for Nigerian govt support & cooperation.”
The Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar later told CNN that he had spoken to the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio before the strike and that the Nigerian President Bola Tinubu had given the “go ahead.”
“This is not about religion. This is about Nigerians, innocent civilians and the region at large.” Tuggar said.
“They are Muslim and they are killing Muslims every single day,” Tuggar said of the wider terrorism threat obliterating Western Africa – specifically in the Sahel region, which has witnessed the greatest surge in violent extremist activity across Africa since 2013. They’re not Christians.”
“Whoever is willing to cooperate with us, we will continue,” he said, and added later: “We proved it yesterday.”
Trump has spent the last few months shining a spotlight on Christians in Nigeria, including calling into Hegseth’s show in November to tell him to “get ready for possible action,” and threatening that the US will enter Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” to save the Christian population of Africa’s most populous country.
“I have told these Terrible people that if you keep slaughtering, you will pay the ultimate price and tonight you did,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday night. “The Department of War performed a perfect strike, so more will not come,” it read, adding that nothing else had happened that couldn’t be done “only by the U.S.”
“Under my Administration, many billions of dollars is the United States have been spent in the fight against Radical Islamic Terrorism. May God Bless our Military, and MAY GOD BLESS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!” the president, who is spending the Christmas holiday at his estate in Palm Beach, concluded.
“We’re not going to spend our time consulting over (the) interpretation of what has been said or what has not been said,” Tuggar told CNN, adding that Nigeria’s priority is “to fight against terrorism, to stop terrorists from killing Nigerians who are innocent – Muslim and Christian and atheists etc.
Security analysts said Thursday that Lakurawa, a lesser known group with reach into northwestern states whom it believed was the target of the strikes. Lakurawa has been deadlier this year, frequently attacking remote communities and security forces and taking refuge in forests straddling states, the news agency Reuters reported. Nigeria’s authorities banned the group nationwide in January and declared it a terrorist organization.
Nigeria’s Muslims have also become targets of Islamist insurgents, who want to impose their strict interpretation of Islamic law.
It was not clear which group the attack had been intended to target Tuggar said.
Tinubu posted some “Christmas Goodwill Message” on his Facebook page wishing the Christians in Nigeria and around the world a merry Christmas and praying for peace between persons of different religious beliefs.
“I vow to do everything within my power to promulgate and establish religious freedom not only in Nigeria but throughout Africa and other regions facing similar persecution,” Tinubu said in a post on X.
The West African country has struggled for years with deeply entrenched security challenges that are fueled by factors including religiously motivated attacks. Other violent flare-ups are driven by communal and ethnic tensions, and disputes between farmers and herders over scarce natural resources, observers say.
The plight of Christians in Nigeria has been an animating issue for American conservatives for years, and some Europeans have also weighed in with concern.The fight by Nigerians followers of Christ “The resurgence by the Boko Haram jihadist rebels which has led to several attacks on a predominantly Christian village or town by members of the Islamic terrorist organisation,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz said last month when calling for US intervention after claiming Nigeria’s government wasn’t doing enough to stop its own atrocities against Christians.
In the fall, Trump said Nigeria was engaged in religious persecution and that “Christian communities are being decimated by incessant attacks.” He designated Nigeria a country of Particular Concern under the International Religious Freedom Act. It’s a recommendation that his administration has concluded Nigeria has committed or tolerated “systematic, ongoing, (and) egregious violations of religious freedom.”
Both Christians and Muslims — the two largest religious communities in a country of more than 230 million people, have suffered attacks at the hands of radical Islamists, experts and analysts say.
Trump’s “binary framing of the issue as attacks on Christians does not at all tally with what’s actually happening on ground,” Oluwole Oyewale, a Dakar-based African security analyst, told CNN Friday.
“In a country that is fairly polarised and not just politically but religiously, these are very serious connotations in the eyes of how people perceive this. And it goes a long way to even rupture the fault lines of division that have emerged in the country,” Oyewale said.
Trump has positioned himself as a peacemaker, and took office promising to curtail US military involvement overseas. But since returning to power, he has also ordered strikes on Iran’s nuclear program and presided over a large military emplacement around Venezuela, with the prospect of land strikes there.
