The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has warned of new strikes against Islamic State targets in north-western Nigeria, hours after the US military took action against militant camps in what Donald Trump has characterised as efforts to stop the killing of Christians.
Hegseth wrote on X: “The president was clear last month: the killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria (and elsewhere) must end. The [Pentagon] is always ready, so ISIS found out tonight – on Christmas. More to come.
“Grateful for Nigerian government support & cooperation. Merry Christmas!”
Nigeria’s foreign minister, Yusuf Tuggar, said on Friday that the US strikes, which came after Trump had accused Nigeria’s government of failing to stop Christians being killed in the country, were “part of joint ongoing operations”.
Nigeria is officially secular and its population is almost evenly split between Muslims (53%) and Christians (45%). Violence against Christians has drawn attention from the religious right in the US, which has framed it as persecution. Nigeria’s government has pointed out that armed groups target Christians and Muslims.
Nigeria provided the intelligence for the airstrikes in Sokoto state, Tuggar told the country’s Channels Television on Friday. He said he had spoken to his US counterpart, Marco Rubio, for 19 minutes, then called the Nigerian president, Bola Tinubu, to get his go-ahead, before speaking to Rubio again for another five minutes.
“We have been working closely with the Americans,” Tuggar said. “This is what we’ve always been hoping for, to work with the Americans, to work with other countries, to combat terrorism, to stop the death of innocent Nigerians … It’s a collaborative effort.”
The US military’s Africa Command (Africom) said the strikes in Sokoto state had been carried out in coordination with Nigerian authorities. An earlier Africom statement posted on X and then removed said they had been conducted at the request of Nigerian authorities.
Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Thursday: “Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even 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. The Department of War executed numerous perfect strikes, as only the United States is capable of doing.”
Neither the US nor the Nigerian authorities have said if anyone was killed in the airstrikes. Asked if there would be more, Tuggar said: “You can call it a new phase of an old conflict. For us it is something that is ongoing.”
US planes conducted surveillance missions over the region earlier this month. It is believed they were using an airport in neighbouring Ghana as a base.
Forests in Sokoto, which is bordered by Niger to the north, have been used as bases by gangs of armed bandits and members of Islamic State – Sahel Province (ISSP) , known locally as Lakurawa. Some analysts say the IS branch started when a group of herders joined together to fight bandits in the absence of state support. The state is mostly Muslim.
Clashes between Muslim herders and predominantly Christian farming communities in parts of Nigeria have been aggravated by ethnicity and religion, but their roots lie in competition for land and water.
Priests and pastors have increasingly been kidnapped for ransom but some experts say this may be a trend driven by criminal incentives rather than religious discrimination.
Tuggar said the operation was about “protecting Nigerians and innocent lives”, not one religion or another. “The president emphasised yesterday, before he gave it the go-ahead, that it must be made clear that … it is a joint operation,” he said. “It is not targeting any religion, nor is it simply in the name of one religion or another.”
A day before the Sokoto strikes, a Christmas Eve suicide bombing at a mosque in north-east Nigeria killed at least five people and left more than 30 seriously injured. The Nigerian army attributed the attack to the jihadist group Boko Haram, which has waged an insurgency in the region for almost two decades, mostly separate to the violence in the north-west.
There have been almost 6,000 incidents of violence in Nigeria in 2025, about half of them attacks targeting civilians, according to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (Acled), a non-profit conflict monitor. The state of Katsina, another Muslim-majority state two states to the east of Sokoto, had the highest number of incidents at 706. Sokoto had the fourth highest, 353.
Trump positioned himself as the “candidate of peace” in the 2024 US presidential election, campaigning on a promise of extricating Washington from decades of “endless wars”.
However, the first year of his second term in the White House has been notable for a number of military interventions overseas, with strikes on countries including Yemen, Iran and Syria, as well as a huge military buildup in the Caribbean targeting Venezuela.
Source: theguardian.com
