At around 10 p.m. on Christmas night, residents of the predominantly Muslim village of Jabo in Sokoto State, northwestern Nigeria, noticed an object in the sky resembling a small aircraft. “Shortly afterwards we heard a powerful explosion and saw a huge fireball,” one local resident told journalists. “Everyone was terrified. People ran out of their homes with their families and scattered in panic in different directions.”
Similar incidents were reported in at least two other settlements in Sokoto State, which borders neighbouring Niger. The strikes were described by U.S. President Donald Trump as a “powerful and lethal attack against ISIS terrorist scum in northwestern Nigeria”.
In a preliminary assessment, the U.S. military said the strikes on extremist “camps” had killed “several” ISIS militants. Residents of Jabo, however, expressed confusion, saying the bombs had fallen on empty fields and caused no casualties, and that the village itself had long remained relatively insulated from violence. According to them, the last militant attack there took place two years ago. Footage aired on Nigerian television showed charred fragments of metal scattered across farmland. “Thank God no one was killed,” one local resident told Arise News.
Major General Samaila Uba, the Nigerian defence ministry’s director of information, effectively confirmed Abuja’s close involvement in the operation. According to him, Nigeria’s armed forces, “together with” the United States, carried out the strike on the basis of “credible intelligence and meticulous operational planning”.
Uba also said that “precision strikes against identified foreign elements linked to ISIS” had been authorised by federal authorities. The operation, he added, demonstrates Nigeria’s determination, alongside its strategic partners, “to confront transnational terrorism and prevent the entrenchment or expansion of foreign militants’ presence on the country’s territory”.
At the same time, a number of Nigerian analysts questioned the defence ministry’s official account, pointing to the odd choice of Sokoto State as a target, given that its population is almost entirely Muslim. In their view, far more severe violence has affected other regions—including Niger and Kebbi states in the northwest, as well as Borno in the northeast, where the Boko Haram insurgency has historically been most active.
Nigeria has for at least a decade been grappling with overlapping security crises, including banditry, kidnappings, clashes between herders and farmers, and Islamist extremism. According to Acled, a non-profit organisation that tracks global conflict, nearly 9,500 people were killed in political violence across the country last year. The victims included both Muslims and Christians.
Trump said the U.S. actions were a response to terrorist activity directed against Christians—a theme that has long occupied a prominent place on his administration’s agenda.
The strikes came a day after a bomb attack on a mosque in Maiduguri, in northeastern Nigeria, in which at least five people were reported killed and dozens injured. In November, gunmen abducted at least 200 children from a Catholic school in Niger State.
Mustapha Gembu, a security analyst, described the choice of Sokoto State as “highly questionable”. He said the region suffers far more from banditry than from terrorists targeting Christians, who are almost non-existent in the state. Sokoto, he stressed, is not among the country’s “terrorist hotspots” but rather “a predominantly Muslim enclave and the historical seat of the Sokoto Caliphate—the spiritual centre of Islam in Nigeria”.
After Trump in November threatened to deploy U.S. forces “guns blazing” in response to attacks on “our cherished Christians”, the Nigerian government came under intense pressure from Washington to step up its response to the violence. President Bola Tinubu dispatched senior security officials to Washington to discuss the situation and replaced his defence minister with a former general.
However, despite public claims of coordination made on Friday, Gembu said he doubted that the Nigerian armed forces had been closely involved in planning the strikes.
Opposition politician Umar Ado also said he was not convinced of Nigeria’s active involvement. “Targeting Sokoto State in the absence of any previously documented ISIS presence raises the question of whether Nigeria’s military authorities exercised real control over the operation or were merely observers,” he said.
According to Ado, Tinubu must provide the country with “a full and detailed explanation of the legal basis, authorisation procedures, and strategic logic behind the reported U.S. strikes on Sokoto”.
Other branches of the Nigerian government were slower than the defence ministry to issue statements asserting full responsibility for coordinating the operation.
One senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he was still trying to establish the facts, including the precise moment when Abuja was informed of the timing and location of the strikes.
He noted that in recent weeks Nigeria had taken part in joint intelligence-gathering operations with the United States, but acknowledged that Sokoto was not the most obvious choice of target.
The foreign ministry also adopted a more restrained tone, saying only that it “continues to work closely with partners through existing diplomatic and security channels to degrade terrorist networks”. It stopped short, however, of explicitly stating that it had prior knowledge of when and where the strikes would take place.
Until now, the Trump administration’s military focus in Africa has been largely concentrated on Somalia, where more than 100 strikes have been carried out against suspected Islamist militants since February. In May, Admiral James Kilby of the U.S. Navy said Washington had conducted “the largest air strike in world history—125,000 pounds from a single aircraft carrier—against Somalia”.
After the strikes on Nigeria, the United States released video footage that it said showed a missile launch from a naval vessel.
Gembu said witnesses in Jabo reported the use of both drones and missiles, and that the strikes may have involved a combination of the two. Contrary to U.S. claims that “several ISIS terrorists were killed in ISIS camps”, he said no information on fatalities had emerged. In Tangaza, where a separate strike occurred unrelated to Jabo, one of the hit areas of scrubland was “still smouldering”, he added.