The United States says that it has carried out an air strike against ISIL (ISIS) fighters in northwest Nigeria that residents say caused buildings to shake and the sky to glow red.
“Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria,” President Donald Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform on Thursday evening.
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Trump, who has previously threatened greater US intervention in Nigeria over dubious claims that a “genocide” of Christians is taking place there, said ISIL fighters had been “viciously” killing and targeting Christians at levels unseen for “centuries”.
“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 said.
The US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM), which is responsible for operations in Africa, said in a post on X that the air strike was carried out “at the request of Nigerian authorities” and had killed “multiple ISIS terrorists”.
Residents of Jabo have said that the strikes caused alarm and that their village has never experienced an attack by ISIL.
“As it approached our area, the heat became intense,” Abubakar Sani, who lives just a few houses from the scene of the explosion, told the news service Associated Press.
“Our rooms began to shake, and then fire broke out,” he said. “The Nigerian government should take appropriate measures to protect us as citizens. We have never experienced anything like this before.”
Another resident, 40-year-old farmer Sanusi Madabo, said that the attacks made the night sky glow red and appear “almost like daytime”.
“Grateful for Nigerian government support and cooperation,” US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote on social media, warning also of “more to come”, without providing details.
In a statement, AFRICOM said the strike occurred in “Soboto state,” an apparent reference to Nigeria’s Sokoto State.
Nigerian Foreign Minister Yussuf Tuggar confirmed on Friday that the strike had been carried out in coordination with the country’s authorities, but said it was not aimed at targeting members of any particular religious community.
“Nigeria is a multi-religious country, and we’re working with partners like the US to fight terrorism and protect lives and property,” Tuggar told Nigeria’s Channels Television.
The US military action comes weeks after Trump said he had ordered the Pentagon to begin planning for potential military action in Nigeria following claims of Christian persecution in the country.
Nigeria’s government had dismissed Trump’s assertions, saying armed groups target both Muslim and Christian communities in the country, and US claims that Christians face persecution do not represent a complex security situation and ignore efforts by Nigerian authorities to safeguard religious freedom.
Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement shortly after Trump announced the US strike, confirming early on Friday that Nigerian authorities were “engaged in structured security cooperation with international partners, including the United States of America, in addressing the persistent threat of terrorism and violent extremism”.
“This has led to precision hits on terrorist targets in Nigeria by air strikes in the North West,” the ministry said.
Al Jazeera’s Ahmed Idris, reporting from Lagos in Nigeria, said pictures are circulating on social media of missile fragments following a strike outside a village in Sokoto State that did not cause casualties.
“To look at the issue of alleged Christian genocide in Nigeria, Sokoto State is probably the last place many Nigerians would think it’s happening,” Idris said, explaining that the vast majority of the state’s population is Muslim and there had been few if any attacks on Christians in the region that he could recall.
US airstrikes around the world have often resulted in civilian casualties, sometimes targeting communities with no connection to the armed groups they are meant to hit based on faulty or incomplete intelligence.
Major General Samaila Uba, the Nigerian military’s director of defence information, said Nigeria’s armed forces, “in conjunction with” the US, had carried out the strike based on “credible intelligence and careful operational planning”.
The “precision strike operations against identified foreign ISIS-linked elements operating in parts of North West Nigeria” had received approval from federal government authorities, Uba said in a statement on Friday.
“The operation underscores the resolve of the Federal Government of Nigeria, working with strategic partners, to confront transnational terrorism and prevent foreign fighters from establishing or expanding footholds within Nigeria’s borders,” he said.
Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi said the threat of US military action in Nigeria had been “percolating for some time”. Donald Trump had also accused Nigeria of not doing enough to protect its Christian community in his first term as president.
“But in the last two months or so, with congressional pressure and the State Department, they declared Nigeria a particular country of concern when it came to the rights of Christians, and we had heard that the US had begun overflight surveillance of Nigeria from an airbase in Accra, in Ghana, over the last several weeks. And now we have this,” Rattansi said.
“On Christmas Day, the Trump administration acts. This will go down very well with Trump’s Christian evangelical base, I am sure,” he said.
Trump issued his attack statement on Christmas Day while he was at his Palm Beach, Florida, Mar-a-Lago Club, where he has been spending the holiday.
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