American Arms, Nigerian Airstrikes, and the Innocent Civilians Caught in Line of Fire

The United States Africa Command announced this week that more than 200 terrorists have been killed in coordinated operations with Nigerian forces against Islamic State fighters in the country’s northeast — among them Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, whom American officials described as the terror group’s director of global operations and the most active terrorist in the world.President Trump hailed the operation, saying Mr. al-Minuki “thought he could hide in Africa” and crediting the Nigerian government’s partnership. AFRICOM said no American or Nigerian personnel were harmed. The operation involved approximately two dozen U.S. special operations forces, including Navy SEALs, who arrived by helicopter with the intent to capture al-Minuki on islands in the Lake Chad Basin. After a three-hour firefight, an airstrike was called on his compound.Yet even as Washington touts the partnership’s successes, a darker ledger is accumulating beneath the headline numbers. The village head of Metele in Borno state, Zannah Abba Aji, has said that 27 civilians, including 12 women and children, were killed in coordinated American-Nigerian airstrikes that hit his village on May 16, a claim neither the Pentagon nor the Nigerian defense ministry has publicly addressed.It is a familiar pattern in Nigeria’s long air war, where the line between militant and market-goer has repeatedly proven fatal to the wrong people.A Nigerian Air Force jet struck a crowded weekly market in Yobe state on April 11, killing somewhere between 56 and 200 people, depending on the source. A UN security report cited 56 dead, Amnesty International confirmed over 100 with hospital authorities, and a local council member put the combined dead and injured at around 200 — among them children whose photographs Amnesty International says it has obtained.The Air Force said it had conducted a precision strike on a “terrorist enclave and logistics hub” near the village of Jilli along the Borno-Yobe border and made no reference to a civilian market. Presidential spokesman Temitope Ajayi said that the site had long ceased to function as a civilian trading hub.“The narrative that civilians were killed in a military bomb campaign against terrorists at Jilli market is inaccurate,” Mr. Ajayi claimed. “The market was a legitimate military target because it has been turned into a logistics and trading hub by Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists.”The federal government simultaneously announced a full and independent investigation into the incident, stating it would review intelligence, targeting, and execution. The Nigerian Air Force also activated its Civilian Harm Accident and Investigation Cell to conduct a fact-finding mission at the site, the same mechanism established under its 2025 civilian harm framework.However, no findings from either the federal investigation or the Air Force’s Civilian Harm Accident and Investigation Cell have been publicly released.Amnesty International’s Nigeria director, Isa Sanusi, argued that the evidence told a different story.“We have their pictures, and they include children,” Mr. Sanusi said.Amnesty International separately described the use of air raids in such circumstances as unlawful, stating that deploying deadly force in that manner reflects disregard for civilian lives, and called for an immediate, impartial investigation.” It was not the first time. It will not be the last. At least 500 civilians have died since 2017 in such misfires, according to an AP tally of reported deaths. The pattern has repeated across years and states: a report of militants, a scrambled jet, a bomb dropped on the wrong people, a statement of regret, a promise of reform — then silence, until the next one.That next one came within weeks. On May 10, the Nigerian Air Force bombed a village in Niger State’s Shiroro Local Government Area, killing at least 12 civilians in a pre-dawn strike on a residence. On May 11, a Nigerian military airstrike struck the Tumfa market in Zurmi district, Zamfara state, killing at least 100 civilians, many of them women and girls, according to Amnesty International — two strikes on civilians in two days. Less examined in all of this is the American thread running through it: American money, American aircraft, and now American boots on the ground. A Washington PartnershipThe United States approved a $346 million sale of precision munitions to Nigeria in August, the latest in a deepening arms relationship that includes a 2017 sale of 12 A-29 Super Tucano aircraft worth $497 million and a 2022 package of 12 AH-1Z attack helicopters worth $997 million. The Super Tucano deal included training on International Humanitarian Law and an air-to-ground integration program designed to reduce civilian harm. The aircraft were delivered in 2021. The alleged civilian deaths, however, continued anyway.In December 2023, a military drone mistook a religious gathering for bandits in Tudun Biri, Kaduna state, killing at least 85 people — children, women and the elderly among the dead.In January 2025, a strike in Zamfara’s Zurmi district killed at least 17 members of a local vigilante group and farmers near Tungar Kara village, wrongly identified as bandits. A 52-year-old farmer who sustained injuries described how, minutes after seeing the vigilantes ride past his farm on motorcycles, a sand-colored jet appeared overhead.“The area became dusty and smoky, the reverberation was so loud, and then I realized bombs had been dropped on them. Due to my proximity, I was hit by shrapnel,” he told Human Rights Watch.Washington has since expanded the partnership — though the path there was anything but quiet. In November 2025, President Trump threatened to send the United States military into Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” after designating the country a “Country of Particular Concern” over what he called the mass killing of Christians by radical Islamists.Nigerian officials and independent analysts disputed the characterization, noting that Boko Haram and Islamic State-linked groups target people of all faiths. Then, on Christmas Day 2025, the United States Africa Command conducted strikes against Islamic State targets in Sokoto State, the first publicly acknowledged American kinetic operation on Nigerian soil in years, using Tomahawk missiles launched from the USS Paul Ignatius.Four of the 16 Tomahawk missiles fired that night failed to detonate, with unexploded warheads landing in an onion field in Jabo, residential buildings in Offa, some 300 miles to the south, an agricultural field outside Offa, and a forest near Zugurma — though the military reported no civilian casualties.Two officers were subsequently designated for court martial over the December 2023 Kaduna killings, however, the military never released the investigation’s findings.By February 2026, approximately 100 United States military personnel had arrived at Bauchi Airfield in northeast Nigeria, with plans to expand to 200, serving strictly in an advisory and training capacity to help coordinate intelligence and counterterrorism operations.AFRICOM moved quickly to distance itself from the Jilli strike. Col. Rebecca Heyse, a spokesperson for U.S. Africa Command, said that American forces were not involved in the planning, intelligence sharing, or execution of the operation, and that Nigerian forces retain full command and control of all military operations on their sovereign territory.The Accountability GapAtlantic Council Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism Alex Plitsas tells the New York Sun the problem goes beyond any single strike.“From what I’ve seen across multiple theaters, the recurring pattern points most heavily to intelligence and positive identification shortfalls, compounded by the sheer tempo of operations against highly mobile threats,” Mr. Plitsas says. “When ground reporting is thin or unverified and real-time ISR is limited, the risk of misidentification increases.”Lead analyst for Signal Risk, Menzi Ndhlovu, underscores that all three systemic factors — intelligence, targeting, and oversight — are implicated.“Nigeria lacks the human and technical resources to build reliable, multi-source and integrated intelligence,” Mr. Ndhlovu tells the Sun. “Though it does possess modern Turkish and Chinese drone technology, it still relies heavily on limited source reporting and intermittent surveillance.”Others see the same pattern.Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former United Nations Counterterrorism Coordinator, Edmund Fitton-Brown, tells the Sun the pattern is neither new nor unique to Nigeria.“Over the past decade, there have been repeated incidents — maybe one per year — where civilians were killed. Investigations are announced, but there’s rarely accountability. The cycle resets each time,” Mr. Fitton-Brown says.He points, however, to a more fundamental structural question.“Do they have mandatory civilian presence assessment mechanisms before strikes? Is there a structured process to evaluate that risk? I don’t know the answer, but it’s something the U.S. could push for,” Mr. Fitton-Brown surmises.In the wake of the January Zamfara strike, Chief of Air Staff Air Marshal Hasan Abubakar visited the state, expressed regret, and characterized the incident as a tragic departure from the Air Force’s core mission.By May 2025, the Air Force had unveiled its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan — the first such framework in the Nigerian armed forces. The Zamfara state government, for its part, issued condolences and commended, in the same breath, what it called the military’s “successful” operation.However, a peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Policing, Intelligence and Counter Terrorism, examining Nigerian Air Force operations from 2014 to 2024, concluded that the military’s claims that civilian strikes were “mere accidents” fail to address systemic issues within their intelligence and operations.The Limits of LeverageThe United States has long used human rights conditionality as a lever with Nigeria. The Obama administration blocked the sale of attack aircraft over human rights concerns — a policy that was in place before and after the Nigerian Air Force bombed an IDP camp in Rann in January 2017, killing at least 90 people.The first Trump administration revived the relationship with the Super Tucano deal later that year. Now, with American troops on Nigerian soil, that leverage looks different.Yet, President of defense and intelligence firm The Ulysses Group, Andrew Lewis, takes issue with the framing of culpability.“The idea that U.S. training creates culpability for a foreign force’s independent battlefield decisions is fundamentally flawed,” Mr. Lewis tells the Sun. “When a Nigerian Air Force crew makes a targeting decision at altitude, they are exercising sovereign military judgment. We are not in that cockpit, nor are we approving their strike.”He further warns against disengagement: “The vacuum doesn’t stay empty. Russia fills it. China fills it.”Yet Mr. Plitsas argues the partnership itself must evolve.“Nigeria’s Civilian Harm Accident and Investigation Cell and its newer Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan show awareness of the problem,” he observes, “but this is part of a larger issue for US Africa Command, which is chronically under resourced, under prioritized, and missing basing, access, and overflight to allow short to mid range UAS platforms to provide coverage, strike options, and partner training.”AFRICOM completed its withdrawal from two bases in Niger by September 2024, following a coup the prior year that upended the counterterrorism strategy across the Sahel. Nigeria has since become the region’s new strategic anchor.Mr. Fitton-Brown stresses the stakes extend well beyond any single campaign.“Nigeria is critical — it’s the largest economy in Africa and the most populous,” he continues. “The general direction is right — greater engagement and encouraging Nigeria to improve, especially in protecting civilians. But incidents like this are concerning. They suggest Nigerian operations may be counterproductive.”The question of how to press a partner without losing one has no clean answer.Mr. Ndhlovu argues that the most effective path forward requires simultaneous reform on intelligence integration, targeting validation, and independent investigations. However, he cautions against demanding the impossible.“All reforms, demands and conditionalities must be reasonable, taking into account the complexity of Nigeria’s conflict environment and the very fact that insurgents deliberately embed themselves in civilian settings,” he adds.Meanwhile, United States-Nigerian operations have continued. On May 30, joint airstrikes killed an additional 21 ISWAP fighters in Borno State, the partnership pressing forward.

American Arms, Nigerian Airstrikes, and the Innocent Civilians Caught in Line of Fire

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