“The United States, in cooperation with Nigeria, conducted air attacks against fighters in northwest Nigeria. US President Donald Trump tells Politico that the strikes he ordered on Nigerian fighters ‘decimated’ their camps. Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar says Abuja provided the US with intelligence ahead of the Christmas Day strike. A US defence official tells Reuters that the strike was carried out by about a dozen Tomahawk missiles and that another attack is not imminent. Isa Salihu, the chairman of the Tangaza local government in Sokoto State, told Nigeria’s Premium Times newspaper that one of the areas hit by the strike was a ‘primary route’ for fighters,” notes a news article.
While these strikes may have hit ISIS camps, it is not yet clear if they killed any ISIS fighters.
Nigeria may welcome the air attacks, but they won’t be a game-changer for Nigeria. Most of the killings in northwest Nigeria are by bandits, not ISIS. Bandits there kill people for financial gain, and kidnap people for money. Those bandits are a bigger threat than ISIS to the local population.
Hundreds of miles away, in central Nigeria, Muslim herders — and sometimes terrorists — kill at least 1,000 Christians every year (mostly Christian farmers). But those areas in Nigeria’s Middle Belt are far from the sites in northwest Nigeria where the U.S. conducted air attacks on ISIS camps. Northwest Nigeria is almost entirely Muslim, so any killings there are Muslims killing other Muslims.
Nigeria is a populous nation of 240 million people that is home to over 100 million Christians. So the fact that over 1,000 Christians are killed by Muslims every year does not rise to the level of genocide, however terrible it may be for the victims.
Nigeria is a large country of over 357,000 square miles, and the most dangerous parts of it are not in the northwest, where the U.S. airstrikes occurred, but rather in the northeast, where the Boko Haram terrorist insurgents killed many thousands of people, kidnapped many school children, and drove millions from their homes.
