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Nigeria on Friday signalled that more strikes against terrorist groups were expected after a Christmas Day strike by US forces against militants in the north of the country.
The West African country faces multiple interlinked security crises in its north, where terrorists have been waging an insurgency in the northeast since 2009, and armed “bandit” gangs raid villages and stage kidnappings in the northwest.
The US strikes come after Abuja and Washington were locked in a diplomatic dispute over what Trump characterised as the mass killing of Christians amid Nigeria’s myriad armed conflicts.
Washington’s framing of the violence as amounting to Christian “persecution” is rejected by the Nigerian government and independent analysts, but has nonetheless resulted in increased security coordination.
“It’s Nigeria that provided the intelligence,” the country’s foreign minister, Yusuf Tuggar, told Channels TV, saying he was on the phone with US State Secretary Marco Rubio ahead of the bombardment.
Asked if there would be more strikes, Tuggar said: “It is an ongoing thing, and we are working with the US. We are working with other countries as well.”
The Department of Defence’s US Africa Command, using an acronym for the Islamic State group, said “multiple ISIS terrorists” were killed in an attack in the northwestern state of Sokoto. US defence officials later posted a video that appeared to show the nighttime launch of a missile from the deck of a US-flagged battleship.
Which of Nigeria’s myriad armed groups were targeted remains unclear. Researchers have recently linked some members from an armed group known as Lakurawa, the leading terrorist group located in Sokoto State, to Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP), which is active mainly in neighbouring Niger and Mali.
Other analysts have disputed those links, though research on Lakurawa is complicated as the term has been used to describe various armed fighters in the northwest. Those described as Lakurawa also reportedly have links to an al-Qaeda-affiliated group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), a rival group to ISSP.
