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The U.S. Strike in Nigeria: A Roundup of Critical Reporting and Analysis, by Alex Thurston – 15 January 2026

Militarily ineffective and politically harmful

The December 25 U.S. airstrikes on/in Nigeria, ordered by President Donald Trump, are being subjected to considerable critical scrutiny by journalists and analysts. Here are some of the most important pieces that have come out in the last few weeks, all of them drawing on reporting and interviews from the ground:

  • David Pilling and Steff Chávez for the Financial Times (December 26): “Why Bomb Sokoto? Trump’s Strikes Baffle Nigerians.” One key passage: “Despite the public claims… of co-ordination, [security analyst Mustapha] Gembu said he doubted whether the Nigerian armed forces had been closely involved in the planning of the strikes.”
  • Kingsley Madueke and Lucia Bird Ruiz-Benitez de Lugo at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (January 9): “Legitimizing Lakurawa: The Implications of the US Air Strikes in Nigeria.” One important section: “Beyond the legitimacy risks, the execution of the US operation in December raises serious questions about the long-term effects of air strikes against mobile insurgent groups. The intelligence used to plan the attacks appears to have been outdated. Lakurawa’s members frequently operate using motorcycles and can therefore respond rapidly to perceived threats. This makes it far more likely that they will be displaced rather than disrupted in the long term. There has been a pattern of geographic dispersion following military operations by Nigerian forces against bandits in Kaduna and Zamfara states, which has frequently resulted in an expanded scope of insecurity.”
  • Abiodun Jamiu et al. for the Washington Post (January 10): “Unexploded Missiles, Witnesses Undercut Trump Account of Nigeria Strike.” One excerpt: “In linking the targets to the Islamic State, AFRICOM overstated its confidence in the identity of the fighters, one of the U.S. officials said, speaking like others in this article on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. The operation, the official said, ‘was likely not very effective and did not remove any camps or capabilities’…The other U.S. official noted that the decision to target Lakurawa, a relatively minor militant group, seemed to have been driven by Nigeria’s own internal calculations. ‘It’s not clear if it’s incompetence or intention’ on the part of the Nigerian government, said a former U.S. official with experience in the region, saying Washington had placed too much confidence in its counterparts in Abuja.”
  • Malik Samuel for the New Humanitarian (January 12): “Did the US Military Strikes in Nigeria Hit the Right Target?” One important paragraph: “The US military action has political implications. The unpredictability of missile strikes in areas with limited formal information networks can fracture community trust, exacerbate perceptions of insecurity, and deepen scepticism about the role of foreign militaries on Nigerian soil.”

My only additions would be:

  1. Air power offers the illusion of control in this region and beyond; the Nigerian military, much like the Malian military, has used air and drone strikes to inflict substantial casualties but without fundamentally altering the dynamics of insurgent/rebel expansion and diffusion. The U.S. strikes follow in the footsteps of a well-worn approach. Which is in no way to say that ground deployments would be better – in fact that would be even more disastrous.
  2. I continue to see Trump’s actions vis-a-vis Nigeria as driven primarily by U.S. domestic politics. The sloppiness and indeed pointlessness of these strikes owe, I suspect, to a combination of (a) Trump’s own indifference to anything beyond the headlines about ISIS members being killed and (b) what seems to be the inefficacy of AFRICOM’s intelligence and targeting. For broader context, a journalistic investigation of an AFRICOM drone strike in Somalia that killed a major politician concluded, “Behind the escalation of the U.S. campaign against ISIS and al-Shabaab in Somalia lies a targeting process that multiple officials and analysts described as opaque and deeply flawed.”
  3. If I had to predict, I would expect more U.S. strikes on Nigeria. Since Trump catered to U.S. right-wing Christian pressure to label Nigeria a “country of particular concern” in November, he has followed a clear escalatory ladder, from implementing the designation to exploring targeted sanctions to launching these strikes. And he has already threatened more attacks.

Finally, Tim Hirschel-Burns’ post is well worth a read. It’s titled: “Trump bombed Nigeria. Next door, he cancelled a USAID project keeping violence in check.” I’m a real skeptic of USAID’s peacebuilding work, actually, but Hirschel-Burns’ report is one of the most convincing accounts I’ve read arguing that such local-level programs can make a meaningful difference.

Alex Thurston is an associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Cincinnati. He studies Islam and politics in Africa.

This article was first published on Alex Thurston’s Substack.

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