Nigeria’s Government Trumpets Its Role in American Airstrikes on ISIS Insurgents

Nigeria’s government, sensitive to accusations of foreign interference, moved swiftly on Friday to stress its role in approving and directing the previous day’s American airstrikes against ISIS targets in the north of the country.“It is a collaboration, it is what we have been calling for,” Nigeria’s foreign minister, Yusuf Tuggar, told the nation’s largest broadcaster, Channels TV, during a Friday morning breakfast show.“It was Nigeria that provided intelligence for the U.S. strike in Nigeria. I spoke with the U.S. Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, for 19 minutes before the strike, and we agreed to talk to President [Bola] Tinubu for his go-ahead, and he gave it,” said the minister, himself a native of the troubled northern region.“After the approval, I spoke again with Marco Rabio 5 minutes before the strike was launched against the terrorists.”President Trump announced on Thursday the strikes, involving more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from an American warship in the Gulf of Guinea and aimed at two ISIS camps in northwest Nigeria.“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!…” Mr. Trump posted on social media.The president did not comment on the number of casualties or the extent of the damage caused by the strikes. However Nigerian military sources told Vanguard, one of the most visited websites in the country, that “only confirmed terrorist combatants and their logistics hubs were decimated.”“It was a successful joint operation with the U.S. military,” the source is quoted as saying. “We provided the targets, they conducted the strikes. Right now we are mopping up.”The news site quoted its source as saying the strikes were based on actionable intelligence that revealed a “massive convergence” of armed terrorists moving from Mali and Burkina Faso with a goal of launching coordinated attacks on communities in four provinces of northwestern Nigeria.“The ISIS-linked terror cells targeted included the Lakurawa and Jenni groups, which intelligence reports confirmed had been mobilising members from Burkina Faso and Mali to carry out attacks during the Christmas and New Year festivities,” the site said.While enthusiastically welcomed by the government, which has been battling Islamist insurgents for more than 16 years, the strikes irked some critics who saw them as a infringement on Nigerian sovereignty.In a Facebook post on Friday, a prominent Islamic cleric, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, maintained that annihilating terrorists is an Islamic obligation that should be undertaken by “clean, holy hands” rather than foreign powers.The posting, quoted by the widely read newspaper Punch, argued that the government should stop cooperating with America and instead seek help from “neutral countries” such as China, Turkey, and Pakistan.“The US involvement in Nigeria will attract the real anti-US forces, making our land the theater of war. The USA’s involvement in Nigeria, citing coming to ‘protect Christians’, will ultimately polarize our nation and infringe on our sovereignty,” the cleric wrote.While heralding the Nigerian government’s participation in the strikes, Mr. Tuggar, the foreign minister, took pains to stress that — despite Mr. Trump’s insistence that he acted to protect Christians — the insurgents were not targeted because of their religion.“It must be made clear that it is a joint operation, and it is not targeting any religion nor simply in the name of one religion or the other,” he said on the Channels TV morning show. “We are a multi-religious country, and we are working with partners like the US to fight terrorism and safeguard the lives and properties of Nigerians.”Nigeria has long insisted that the insurgents attack Christians and Muslims indiscriminately and have killed more Muslims than Christians. In the most recent attack on Wednesday, a suicide bomber killed five people and injured 35 at a mosque during evening prayers.

Nigeria’s Government Trumpets Its Role in American Airstrikes on ISIS Insurgents

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