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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........

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