What Trump should know before going 'guns-a-blazing' into Nigeria

In one weekend, U.S. President Donald Trump not only damaged previously cordial relations with an important African ally, he also pledged U.S. military action in one of the world’s most complex conflict landscapes.

On October 31, Trump designated Nigeria, Africa’s largest country by population and one of its economic powerhouses, a “Country of Particular Concern” for the ”existential threat” purportedly faced by Christians in the West African country who he alleged are undergoing “mass slaughter” at the hands of “Radical Islamists.”

The following day, he warned that should the Nigerian government continue to allow the killings of Christians, the U.S would immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria and “may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing.’”

Although this is not the first time Trump has picked on the oil-rich country of some 230 million people, nevertheless the threat of military action is new and stands as an unprecedented escalation.

Washington considers Nigeria one of its most important partners in Africa. Until February, when Trump froze foreign aid, Nigeria was ranked third among recipients of U.S humanitarian aid in Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite this, significant cooperation has continued between both countries especially in the arena of counter-terrorism.

Since 2017, Nigeria has received U.S security assistance estimated, as of January, at approximately $650 million, including $500 million in Foreign Military Sales. In August, the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency approved a $346 million arms sale to aid Nigeria’s fight against Islamist terrorists and trafficking in the Gulf of Guinea.

Rattled by Trump’s threats, Nigeria’s president Bola Ahmed Tinubu disputed Trump’s characterization of the situation in his country while assuring Washington of his commitment to protecting the lives of all Nigerians regardless of faith. Yet for many Nigerians who have watched for years the Nigerian state’s helplessness as insecurity escalates, many are welcoming Trump’s threat to intervene militarily if it can succeed where the government has failed in ending the violence.

In reality, Trump’s criticism of Nigeria did not arise in a vacuum. It is the direct result of years of the failure of successive Nigerian governments to protect citizens in the face of endless mass killings of both Christians and Muslims. Of course, when killings persist for years — with little or no consequence for perpetrators, the difference between doing nothing and quiet approval soon blurs.

Yet Trump’s suggestion of a religious-driven conflict is a one-dimensional view of the catastrophic situation on the ground.

While religion is always in the background of Nigeria’s multiple conflict theaters, it is not always the driving force. On several occasions, religion is only a cover for other primarily economic, environmental, and political factors. According to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a U.S.-based think tank, the nearly 53,000 civilians killed in Nigeria since 2009 as a result of political violence are people of all faiths. While Nigeria recorded about 389 cases of violence targeting Christians between 2020 and 2025 resulting in at least 318 deaths, there were 197 attacks targeting Muslims within the same period leading to at least 418 deaths.

The conflict landscape is complex, cutting across vast geopolitical expanses and overlapping causes. The country itself is almost evenly divided between a Christian-dominated south and a Muslim-dominated north while at its center lies the Middle Belt, home to over 200 ethnic groups where adherents of both religions, and mostly Muslim pastoralists and mostly sedentary Christian farmers, have long lived side by side.

In the northeastern part of the country where Boko Haram and the regional Islamic State affiliate (ISWAP) have been waging a bloody insurgency to establish an Islamic caliphate, Muslims are the primary victims of violence. Since 2009, the violence has led to more than 40,000 civilian deaths while forcing more than two million to flee their homes.

Boko Haram considers anyone, whether Christians or Muslims, who does not accept their version of Islam as infidels. Meanwhile, the most iconic violent incidents that made Nigeria’s jihadists shoot into global headlines more than a decade ago have predominantly been Christian victims. This includes Boko Haram’s kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok village in 2014 and, four years later, 110 schoolgirls taken by ISWAP in Dapchi Yobe state. While 104 of the girls were soon released after negotiation (5 were killed during the kidnapping), Leah Sharibu, a young Christian girl, is still being held years after for refusing to convert to Islam.

Focus on these stories can create a misleading impression that Christians are the main victims of violence in Nigeria. Indeed, Trump’s own Senior Advisor for Arab and African affairs, Massad Boulos, observed just last month that Boko Haram and ISWAP "are killing more Muslims than Christians."

This is not just an argument over numbers. When the raison d'etre for a military action is based on inaccurate assumptions, not only are the chances of success limited, it also raises the risk of the U.S. getting bogged down in another “forever war.” When Trump was asked this week if he was considering a ground invasion of Nigeria or air strikes, he said: “Could be, I mean, a lot of things – I envisage a lot of things.”

The U.S. could target Islamist jihadists in the northeast. But any military action outside of Nigeria’s Middle Belt would not protect Nigerian Christians — at least not in the way Trump is promoting it. The Middle Belt is where the Nigerian Christian population has suffered disproportionately in a manner that suggests a systematic targeting. Here for over two decades, sedentary farmers and Fulani pastoralists have been locked in an internecine conflict. Other perpetrators of violence include armed bandit gangs who raid villages, rustle cattle and kidnap victims for ransom.

According to new findings by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa, out of the approximately 36,056 civilians killed across Nigeria between 2019 and 2024, the Fulani militias, considered the world’s deadliest terrorist group, and who operate within the Middle Belt and southern parts of the country “were responsible for a staggering 47% of all civilian killings —more than five times the combined death toll of Boko Haram and ISWAP.”

The breakdown of the data shows an alarming disproportionality. Nearly 3 “Christians were killed for every Muslim during this period, with proportional losses to Christian communities reaching exceptional levels. In states where attacks occur, Christians were murdered at a rate 5.2 times higher than Muslims relative to their population size,” the report said.

Yet religion is not the main driving force for this horrific violence. Rather, it is the acute competition for diminishing land and water resources alongside other factors, although the fact that pastoralists are often Muslim Fulanis and sedentary farmers are often Christians sometimes causes observers to consider religion the primary motive.

Whether by air strikes or ground forces, American military intervention in Nigeria’s complex terrain carries many risks, particularly extensive civilian harm, the consequence of which is that the situation gets worse than it already is.