On Christmas Day 2025, while Americans were unwrapping gifts, the skies over Sokoto State, Nigeria, glowed red. A barrage of US precision-guided munitions slammed into the forest encampments of the “Lakurawa” militant group, a strike authorized directly by President Donald Trump. In a post on Truth Social, the President framed the operation with characteristic bluntness as a punitive blow against terrorists who had been targeting innocent Christians. While the protection of the faithful played well with domestic constituencies, the Tomahawks that destroyed the Lakurawa command nodes were doing something far more critical than fighting a culture war. They were clearing the southern gateway of a new, vital geopolitical architecture known as the Atlantic Security Corridor. This strike signals the death knell of the old, failed containment strategy led by France and Algeria, and the violent birth of a new doctrine anchored by the United States and the Kingdom of Morocco.

To understand the shift, one must look past the bandit label often applied to the targets. The Lakurawa are not mere cattle rustlers. They are the Southern Brigade of ISIS-Sahel, a group that exploited the vacuum left by the 2023 coup in Niger to turn the forests of northwestern Nigeria into a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)