U.S. strikes in Nigeria

Jeffrey Owens

More than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles deployed from a U.S. warship operating in the Gulf of Guinea struck two Islamic State camps in the Sokoto region of northwestern Nigeria on Christmas Day.

The attack came at the direction of President Trump, who weeks prior had called upon the Nigerian government to do more to protect Christians, who he believed were facing an “existential genocide” at the hands of violent jihadists.

To avoid the wrath of Trump, and the risk of threatened U.S. intervention upon the Nigerian government if it failed to cooperate, Nigeria assisted in the operation by opening its airspace and providing intelligence to the U.S. of known Islamic State positions.

Striking the Islamic State, commonly known as ISIS, wherever they operate is a positive move and aligns with a U.S. global strategy dating back to 2014 to defeat them. However, isolating the attacks to a small region of Nigeria, blaming the spread of jihadi violence on the Nigerian government, threatening that government with retribution if it did not “do more” and attributing the missile campaign to stopping “genocide” on Christians is a policy influenced by American Evangelicals vs the U.S. military or intelligence community. Additionally, it reveals a grade school level understanding within the Trump administration of the complex internal and geopolitical situation within West Africa.

Nigeria is located right on the southern edge of the Sahel region of Africa; a semi-arid zone separating the Saharrah desert with the rain forests of Central Africa. The Sahel is a historical region which spans the entire length of the continent from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, whose culture of nomadic livestock herders long predates the era of European colonialism and the establishment of manmade borders.

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The modern Sahel in West Africa generally is considered to consist of nations, from west to east, of Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Chad. The preeminent language is French, due to European colonialism but its culture is immensely diverse with scores of ethnicities. While its religious profile is dominated by Islam, the region also is home to hundreds of Christian communities while its rural areas retains many practitioners of indigenous African faiths.

Instability resulting from violence due to the spread of multiple jihadi networks within the Sahel led to military coups in the 2020’s which ousted the more pro-western governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Niger. These military “juntas” were heavily anti-western and not just began the process to end the teaching of French in schools but subsequently kicked out both the French and U.S. militaries from their countries. This ended a decades long western led counterterrorism operation in the Sahel.

The military juntas fared far worse than their pro-western predecessors did against the spread of militant Islam and many of the regimes naively turned to Russia to fill the void for international support created by the ouster of the French and U.S. militaries.

Russia had extremely limited experience in battling jihadism in Africa, so they could offer little in the way of real military support to the juntas. Additionally, Putin entered the arena with the disingenuous goals of creating an anti-western bloc for the purposes of securing the extraction of raw materials and eventually to establish a Russian naval base on the coast as a challenge to NATO maritime supremacy west of Africa.

Russia had little interest in the juntas creating a system of popular support and encouraged them to follow their examples set in Chechnya, Syria and Ukraine by violently crushing resistance without concern for human rights abuses or civilian casualties.

By 2025 the Sahel was among the most violent and unstable regions of the world with competing jihadi groups fighting not just each other but also the incompetent yet savage military juntas which yielded multiple refugee crises, starvation and death from violence on a massive scale.

The three primary jihadist groups threatening the Sahel are the Islamic State, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram; each of which have their own unique leadership structures and methods of operation to establish their goals.

Al Qaeda’s branch in the Sahel is JNIM whose primary base of operations is across southern Mali, where they have found considerable success and the junta is in serious risk of falling.

While Al Qaeda Central, based out of Afghanistan and Pakistan sets the organization’s overarching goals, each affiliate branch has considerable autonomy to craft its tactics to their respective region.

JNIM has infiltrated the society of Mali, intermarried within its population, invested in local businesses and welcomed into its ranks defected military personnel from the former and current regimes who swear allegiance to the organization. In Mali JNIM possesses thousands of fighters with a structured military that operates as an insurgency which in July 2024 even massacred dozens of Russian mercenaries in a complex ambush.

In a strategy to undermine the legitimacy of the junta, JNIM has enforced a month’s long siege since September of the Malian capital of Bamako and have cut the city off from fuel and nearly all highway imports coming from the Ivory Coast and Senegal. To project power into neighboring Niger to the east of Mali, JNIM has developed an army in Niger’s south, similar to its force structure in Mali, and nearly has its capital city of Niamey surrounded from the north.

Meanwhile the Islamic State is primarily operating on two separate fronts of southern Niger. Although the Islamic State lost its “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq to a sustained global campaign to eliminate it, it now operates multiple fronts under the General Directorate of Provinces spread across Africa and the Middle East.

The ISSP (Islamic State Sahel Province) is based in the southwest in the tri-border region of Niger, Nigeria and Burkina Faso while the larger ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province) is active in southeast Niger in the Lake Chad region at the intersection of Niger, Nigeria and Chad. In typical fashion, the Islamic State in every front in which it operates, utilizes brutal tactics, has zero flexibility in command, demands complete submission to its Caliph and leaves in its wake murder, torture and devastation.

The Islamic State struggles to build even a fraction of the insurgent force that Al Qaeda musters due to its intractable policies. Al Qaeda is far more of a global menace with many tens of thousands of fighters across a theatre of operations. The Islamic State, although dangerous and capable of radicalizing individuals around the world, struggles to transition from a local threat into a regional one. 

 
Nigeria, to the south of Niger, has a secular government with a vastly diverse; multi-ethnic and multi-religious population which elected a Muslim president with a devoutly Christan wife. The nation of roughly 237 million is relatively evenly split between Muslims in the north and Christians in the south.

Jihadism has threatened northern Nigeria for nearly two decades, but that violence has increased considerably with the establishment of two Islamic State provinces along its border with Niger. The primary victims of Jihadi violence are Muslims, since Nigeria’s Islamic population is mostly in the north, and the Nigerian security forces, which in the northeast, have been overrun in more than a dozen locations by ISWAP just since March.

In the northwest, ISSP has pushed south into the Sokoto region of Nigeria, where they have massacred civilians and security forces alike, of all ethnicities and religions. Although many Christian civilians in various Christian communities have been brutally murdered, the ISSP lodgment is hundreds of miles from the primary concentration of Nigerian Christians in the south of the nation. Classifying the ISSP’s actions as a “genocide” against Christians is simply inaccurate, as their violence has been targeted against anyone who does not submit to the Caliph.

The U.S. attacking the Islamic State in northwest Nigeria, while justified and consistent with the global effort to eliminate ISIS; a handful of isolated missile strikes does very little to change the situation unless it is backed by a larger strategic vision. Bombing the ISSP is doing the anti-western junta’s job for them, and it makes Russia’s mission in the Sahel a little easier. With JNIM nearly having the Niger capital of Niamey surrounded from the north, a city which lies just 500 miles from the Nigerian border; the U.S. bombing their rival jihadi group (ISSP) indirectly aids and abets Al Qaeda.

The long-established number one recruitment tool for terrorist groups is poverty. The Trump administration’s cancelation of hundreds of millions of dollars of humanitarian aid to Africa, which improves the lives of millions across years, while launching the same hundreds of millions of dollars of advanced military hardware in a single hour against Islamic State targets, in the long run, is a policy which works against itself.

Nigeria is an ally nation in a rough neighborhood, whose security forces have been doing the fighting and dying across nearly two decades to hold the line against the southward advancement of jihadi violence. Risking alienating this ally by publicly accosting them for not doing enough and throwing around accusations of a Christian “genocide” while every religion, most notably fellow Muslims are suffering, undermines, not enhances the U.S.-Nigerian relationship.

While striking the Islamic State wherever it operates is a noble undertaking, isolated missile strikes alone can have a minimal effect and even risk making the situation worse by emboldening adversaries and alienating allies. A long-term investment into the Nigerian security forces coupled with increased intelligence sharing and counterinsurgency military training can yield a much greater benefit to the U.S. for the security of what remains of western allies in Africa vs a missile strike.

Jeffrey Owens is the Author of the Victory in Europe: A People’s History of the Second World War. He is from Grove City, Ohio, United States. Jeffrey is the correspondent of Mahabahu.

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