Not everyone took Christmas day off from work, apparently. While the rest of us celebrated the holiday with families, friends, gifts, meals, and whatever the Kansas City Chiefs did last night, Donald Trump acted to protect Nigerian Christians and others from Islamist terror. The US military conducted a series of strikes on terrorist strongholds, with the cooperation of the Nigerian government.
Trump announced the action on Truth Social yesterday, calling the Islamists "ISIS terrorist scum":
Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries! I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was. The Department of War executed numerous perfect strikes, as only the United States is capable of doing. Under my leadership, our Country will not allow Radical Islamic Terrorism to prosper. May God Bless our Military, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues.
DONALD J. TRUMP
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Fox News offered breaking-news coverage last night:
The Washington Post noted that Trump had gotten support from Nigeria to take military action against the terrorist networks in the northwestern part of the nation. The Post noted that these terror networks had also targeted Muslims and animists, and the Nigerian government emphasized that it considers this more of a territorial conflict than a religious cleansing. Either way, though, the government seemed happy enough to see some serious disincentives applied to the terrorists:
U.S. forces struck Islamic State targets in northwestern Nigeria on Thursday evening, the U.S. and Nigerian governments said, acting after threats by President Donald Trump to attack the country in an effort to stop what he has said are the killings of Christians. ...
On Friday morning, Nigerian Foreign Affairs Minister Yusuf Tuggar told Nigerian broadcaster Channels Television that his country provided intelligence to the U.S. for the strikes and that he had spoken with Secretary of State Marco Rubio twice in the lead-up, including in one call that lasted 19 minutes.
“This is what we’ve always been hoping for — to work with the Americans, work with other countries to combat terrorism,” he said. But in several media interviews after the strikes, he pushed back against the framing of the country’s security issues as being about religion.
Tuggar did a lengthy interview with CNN this morning to deflect from the religious aspect. "This is not about religion," Tuggar insisted:
Simplistic labels don’t solve complex threats. On @CNN, I made clear that terrorism in Nigeria is not a religious conflict; it is a regional security threat.
— Hon. Yusuf Maitama Tuggar (@YusufTuggar) December 26, 2025
Nigeria’s focus remains the protection of innocent lives and the defeat of terrorism through coordinated action with… pic.twitter.com/p83FSp9CTw
Pardon us if we retain skepticism over that point. Regardless of whether these networks are offshoots of ISIS or al-Qaeda, the purpose of these networks is to claim territory for an Islamist caliphate. That gives it a "regional" context, but ground acquisition is not the primary motive, and Tuggar knows it. Islamist networks such as ISIS, al-Shabaab, Boko Haram, Hamas, and Hezbollah want to impose their extreme version of an Islamist theocracy/dictatorship and will kill everyone who opposes it, including fellow Muslims who will not adhere to their interpretation of Islam. That's nothing new; one could claim that the rise of ISIS itself in western Iraq and eastern Syria was a "regional" conflict on the same basis.
Why pretend otherwise? Tuggar must be concerned – and should be – that casting this as a religious conflict will push other Nigerian Muslims to join the terror networks. The Nigerian government needs to prevent that, and so it has to stage this Kabuki theater rather than speak with raw truth. And that's fine, but it doesn't mean we have to pretend that this is simply a land dispute.
Trump is done pretending, if he ever bothered to play that game at all. The New York Times points out that Trump warned the terrorists that he would act if they continued their attacks, and gave some specifics on the strikes themselves:
The strike involved more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles fired off a Navy ship in the Gulf of Guinea, hitting insurgents in two ISIS camps in northwest Nigeria’s Sokoto State, according to a U.S. military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. The operation was done in coordination with the Nigerian military, the official said.
In a statement, U.S. Africa Command said its initial assessment concluded that “multiple” ISIS terrorists were killed in the strike. ...
The Christmas Day attack came after the U.S. had been conducting intelligence-gathering surveillance flights over large parts of Nigeria since late November, according to the military official.
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote in a post on social media, “The President was clear last month: the killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria (and elsewhere) must end.”
“The @DeptofWar is always ready, so ISIS found out tonight — on Christmas,” he added. “More to come…”
We can assume Hegseth means that literally as well as figuratively. Will this stop these ISIS-related terror networks from their attacks on Christians and others? Not right away, but at least the disincentives have started. Let's hope this provides some positive incentives for Nigeria to take care of its own business in Sokoto and elsewhere.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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