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More U.S. Troops Are Headed to Nigeria

The Trump administration is sending more troops to a region where U.S. military presence has coincided with increased violence.

The Trump administration is increasing the U.S. military’s presence in Nigeria, where decades of American military assistance has coincided with increased violence and instability.

About 100 U.S. military personnel have already arrived in the West African country. The deployment, which is expected to more than double in the near future, follows a Christmas Day U.S. air strike and billions of U.S. tax dollars spent on fruitless military and intelligence support.

“At the request of Nigeria and as part of our longstanding relationship and defense partnership, U.S. military forces are arriving in Nigeria to provide training, advising, and technical capabilities in support of Nigerian-led counterterror operations,” a U.S. Africa Command spokesperson told The Intercept.

What AFRICOM doesn’t want to address is the billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars already spent on military training, arms and equipment in a rapidly deteriorating security situation. It’s part of a larger pattern of spiking terrorist violence in areas of Africa that have seen the longest and most concerted U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

Between 2000 and 2022, the U.S. provided, facilitated, or approved more than $2 billion in security assistance to Nigeria, according to a report by Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies. In that same period, Nigerian airstrikes killed thousands of citizens. A 2017 attack on a displaced persons camp in Rann, Nigeria, killed more than 160 civilians, including children. A subsequent Intercept investigation revealed that the attack was referred to as an instance of “U.S.–Nigerian operations” in a formerly secret U.S. military document.

War on Christmas: Trump Announces Wave of Airstrikes Targeting ISIS Militants in Nigeria

Nigeria has been beset by violence from militants, terrorists, so-called criminal bandits, and its own security forces for decades. Africa’s most populous country recorded no fewer than 169,000 violent deaths between 2006 and 2021, with the highest percentages attributed to crime and insurgency, according to a 2025 Lancet study. Recently, these two nominally separate threats have merged. “The emergence of violent extremist groups in northwest Nigeria implies the long-feared convergence of militant Islamist groups with organized criminal networks — infusing financial incentives with ideological zeal and terrorist violence,” according to a December report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. “Nigeria has simultaneously been staving off this convergence in the northeast, where Boko Haram and the Islamic State of West Africa have been active for the past 15 years.”

This convergence of crime and terrorism has supercharged lethal violence in significant pockets of the country. “Nigeria experienced an 18-percent increase in fatalities tied to militant Islamist groups over the past year,” according to another Africa Center analysis. “Borno State in Nigeria’s North East Zone remains the epicenter of this violence and Nigeria accounts for 74 percent of all fatalities in the region.”

Asked to explain why insecurity and instability have increased in Nigeria during its “longstanding relationship and defense partnership” with the United States, AFRICOM’s director of public affairs, Col. Rebecca Heyse, referred The Intercept to the Department of War and the State Department. Neither provided answers prior to publication.

Nigeria’s population of 230 million is roughly split between Christians and Muslims. People of both faiths have been targeted by extremists, but most of Boko Haram’s victims are Muslims, and violent deaths in northern Nigeria are generally caused by Muslim-on-Muslim violence. But in a Truth Social post last November, President Donald Trump threatened to go into Nigeria with “guns-a-blazing” to protect “our CHERISHED Christians.” The U.S. then conducted missile strikes in Nigeria on Christmas Day, targeting what Trump called “Terrorist Scum” that were killing Christians. He later explained that he delayed the strike until the holiday to “give a Christmas present.”

AFRICOM claimed to have struck targets in “Soboto state,” an apparent reference to Sokoto state, on December 25. Another 2025 Africa Center report noted that “militant Islamist cells” have moved into Sokoto state in recent years. AFRICOM did not respond to questions about how it could be sure who it attacked when it was unclear about where it attacked.

While Trump called the Christmas attacks “perfect strikes,” at least four of the 16 Tomahawk missiles failed to explode, according to a Washington Post analysis. There is no evidence militants were killed in the attacks, according to a Nigerian security analyst with ties to that country’s military who spoke on the condition of anonymity with The Intercept to offer an unvarnished opinion.

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Trump’s Christmas Day attack is another in a long string of failed and futile U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Africa documented by The Intercept over the last decade, including blowback from U.S. operations and failed secret wars, civilians killed in drone strikes, coups by U.S. trained officers, increases in the reach of terror groups, surging fatalities from militant violence, human rights abuses by allies, massacres of civilians by partner forces, and a catalogue of other fiascos.

Last year, there were 22,307 fatalities from militant Islamist violence in Africa. This represents an almost 97,000 percent increase since the early 2000s, with the areas of greatest U.S. involvement — Somalia and the West African Sahel — suffering the worst outcomes.

IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.

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We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.

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I’M BEN MUESSIG, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.

We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.

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