WASHINGTON – A Fox News report led President Donald Trump to denounce Nigeria for killing Christians and then threaten military action, sparking a riot at the White House over the weekend, according to several US officials.
It’s still unclear what, if anything, the administration will do to counter Islamic militants in Nigeria, but precision drone strikes are among preliminary options being considered, two U.S. officials said.
A White House spokesman declined Monday to offer details about the plans under consideration.
“At the direction of President Trump, the administration is planning options for possible actions to stop the killing of Christians in Nigeria,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement. “Any announcement will come directly from the president.”
Trump’s first social media post about Nigeria came on Friday night after watching a Fox News report on violence in the West African nation, two administration officials said. The president asked his staff for more information on the situation and, shortly thereafter, declared in a Truth Social post that he was designating Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” for its inability to, in his words, stop the “mass killing” of Christians.
Trump then went further in a Saturday post, ordering the Defense Department to prepare for possible military action.
“If the Nigerian government continues to allow the slaughter of Christians, the United States will immediately suspend all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go to that now-disgraced country, ‘with guns,’ to completely eliminate the Islamic terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities,” Trump wrote.
It is not the first time that the president’s rapid social media posts have moved faster than political deliberations, with officials rushing to draft diplomatic and military options and allied governments caught off guard.
Experts and academics following developments in Nigeria say Trump’s description 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 top State Department advisers, Massad Boulous, who said last month that Muslims have died in greater numbers than Christians.
“People of all religions and all tribes are dying, and it is very unfortunate, and we even know that Boko Haram and ISIS are killing more Muslims than Christians,” Boulos said during a meeting with Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in Rome, according to state media Voice of Nigeria. “So there are people suffering from all kinds of backgrounds. This is not specifically aimed at one group or another.”
Speaking to reporters on Monday, Trump hinted that he was open to sending troops on the ground in Nigeria, but it seemed a much less likely option since he has generally been reluctant to deploy troops to conflicts abroad, 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 many other innocent civilians throughout Nigeria,” the official said.
The Nigerian government was taken aback by Trump’s remarks, but officials cited friendly relations between the two countries. and called for a cooperative approach between the two governments to address the threat posed by Islamist groups.
Daniel Bwala, an adviser to the Nigerian president, told the BBC that any military action against Islamist groups should be carried out jointly. Nigeria would welcome US help in fighting the militants, but added that it was a “sovereign” country.
Insurgent groups such as Boko Haram and the Islamic State branch in West Africa sometimes use anti-Christian language, but their attacks are indiscriminate and target civilians, officials and local leaders regardless of their religion, according to Miriam Adah, an analyst with the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project, a US-based nonprofit that tracks conflicts and crises.
“In Nigeria, 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 US Commission on International Religious Freedom has pointed to violence against Christians and Muslims in Nigeria, saying there are systematic violations of religious freedom in the country. “Violence affects large numbers of Christians and Muslims in several states in Nigeria,” the commission said in a report last year.
He also described the Nigerian government’s response to attacks on Nigerian civilians by “non-state actors” as slow or ineffective.
Experts say Islamist groups like Boko Haram are not the only actors behind violence in Nigeria.
In addition to Boko Haram and a branch of the Islamic State 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 herdsmen 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 diaspora Christian population in the United States, have long focused on the plight of Christians in Nigeria. And Trump may have been trying to convey a message to his Christian supporters in the United States, experts said.
“Republicans on Capitol 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, San Diego.
Nigeria’s population of 230 million is divided almost evenly between Muslims and Christians, and the sectarian divide has sparked political violence in the past. Trump’s comments threaten to “light a match” on an already fragile landscape, Kerr said.
“Putting America’s weight solely on the Christian side and framing things in a Muslim-Christian dimension is probably extremely unhelpful for both Christians and Muslims in Nigeria,” Kerr said.
However, the United States has reason to question how the Nigerian government is using the weapons and other aid that Washington has provided over the years, Kerr said.
“If the President had been more measured in his comments by saying ‘Nigeria, we gave you all this money, what happened? That, I think, is a legitimate criticism on the part of the United States to say to the government: ‘Look, what are you doing? Where is the strategy? Where is the success, where is the progress that we hope for?'”
