WASHINGTON — A Fox News report prompted President Donald Trump to call out Nigeria over the killing of Christians and then threaten military action, setting off a scramble in the White House over the weekend, according to multiple U.S. officials.
It’s still unclear what — if anything — the administration will do to counter Islamic militants in Nigeria, but precision drone strikes are among the preliminary options being considered, two U.S. officials said.
A White House spokesperson declined Monday to offer any details on the plans under consideration.
“At President Trump’s direction, the administration is planning options for possible action to stop the killing of Christians in Nigeria," the spokeswoman, Anna Kelly, said in a statement. "Any announcements will come from the President directly."
Trump's first social media post on Nigeria came Friday night after he watched a Fox News report on violence in the West African nation, two administration officials said. The president asked his staff for more information about the situation and, shortly after, declared in a Truth Social post that he was designating Nigeria a "country of particular concern" over its failure to, in his words, stop the "mass slaughter" of Christians.
Trump then went further in a Saturday post, directing the Defense Department to prepare for possible military action.
“If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities,” Trump wrote.
It’s not the first time the president’s rapid fire social media posts have moved faster than policy deliberations, with officials rushing to draft diplomatic and military options and allied governments taken by surprise.
Experts and scholars who follow events in Nigeria say Trump’s portrayal of the security situation in the country as a “Christian genocide” is misleading and oversimplified, as Nigerians of all faiths have suffered at the hands of Islamist extremists and other groups.
Trump's posts even contradicted one of his own senior State Department advisers, Massad Boulous, who said last month that Muslims have died in larger numbers than Christians.
“People of all religions and of all tribes are dying, and it is very unfortunate, and we even know that Boko Haram and ISIS are killing more Muslims than more Christians," Boulos said while meeting with the Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in Rome, according to state media outlet, Voice of Nigeria. "So people are suffering from all sorts of backgrounds. This is not specifically targeted at one group or the other."
Speaking to reporters Monday, Trump hinted that he was open to sending troops on the ground in Nigeria, but that seemed like a far less likely option as he has generally been loath to deploy troops to conflicts overseas, according to the two U.S. officials.
A senior Trump administration official said the White House is in regular contact with the Nigerian government.
“We hope that the Nigerian government will be a partner in the process of addressing this issue, and work with the United States to take swift and immediate action to address the violence that is affecting Christians, as well as countless other innocent civilians across Nigeria,” the official said.
Nigeria’s government was taken aback by Trump’s statements, but officials cited the two countries’ friendly relations and called for a cooperative approach between the two governments to tackle the threat posed by Islamist groups.
Daniel Bwala, an adviser to Nigeria’s president, told the BBC that any military action against the Islamist groups should be carried out jointly. Nigeria would welcome U.S. help in tackling the militants but added that it was a “sovereign” country.
Insurgent groups such as Boko Haram and the Islamic State terrorist group’s branch in West Africa sometimes use anti-Christian language, but their attacks are indiscriminate, targeting civilians, officials and local leaders regardless of religion, according to Miriam Adah, an analyst with the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED), a U.S.-based nonprofit that tracks conflicts and crises.
“In Nigeria, the violence is widespread and complex. It involves insurgents, bandits, ethnic clashes and land disputes — not a single campaign to eliminate Christians,” Adah said. “Both Christians and Muslims are victims.”
The bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has pointed to violence against both Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, saying there are systematic religious freedom violations in the country. “Violence affects large numbers of Christians and Muslims in several states across Nigeria,” the commission said in a report last year.
It also described the Nigerian government's response to attacks on civilians by “nonstate actors” as slow or ineffective.
Islamist groups like Boko Haram are not the only actors behind violence in Nigeria, experts say.
Apart from Boko Haram and an ISIS branch in northern Nigeria, there is a separatist movement in the southeast, ethnic militant groups in the oil-producing Niger Delta, kidnapping gangs in the northwest and clashes between Muslim herders and Christian farmers in the Middle Belt fueled by climate change.
Trump’s comments may have had more to do with domestic American politics than addressing a security threat in Nigeria, experts said.
Some Republican lawmakers, aligned with elements of Nigeria’s Christian diaspora population in the United States, have long focused on the plight of Christians in Nigeria. And Trump may have been trying to deliver a message to his Christian supporters in the United States, experts said.
“Republicans on the Hill in particular, for years, have been trying to frame Nigeria as ‘a Christian genocide,’ and they have strong allies in the Nigerian diaspora in the United States,” said Darren Kerr, dean of the School of Peace Studies at the University of California at San Diego.
Nigeria’s population of 230 million is split almost evenly between Muslims and Christians, and the sectarian divide has triggered political violence in the past. Trump’s comments threaten to potentially “light a match” in an already fragile landscape, Kerr said.
“To bring the weight of the United States solely on the Christian side and to frame things in a Muslim-Christian dimension is probably extremely unhelpful to both Christians and Muslims in Nigeria,” Kerr said.
The United States does, however, have grounds to question how the Nigerian government is using the weapons and other assistance that Washington has delivered over the years, Kerr said.
“Had the president been more measured in his comments to say ‘Nigeria, we give it all this money, what’s happened?' That, I think, is a legitimate criticism on the part of the United States to say to the government, ‘Look, what are you guys doing? Where’s the strategy? Where’s the success, where’s the progress that we’re expecting?’”
