Christmas Day strikes in north western Nigeria<\/a> had been unclear.<\/p>\nThe US and Nigeria previously said they targeted IS-linked militants, without providing details on which of Nigeria’s myriad armed groups were attacked.<\/p>\n
“ISIS, Lakurawa and bandits were targeted,” Daniel Bwala, a spokesman for President Bola Tinubu, told AFP. ISIS is an alternative name for Islamic State.<\/p>\n
“ISIS found their way through the Sahel to go and assist the Lakurawa and the bandits with supplies and with training,” he said.<\/p>\n
The Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP) group is active in neighbouring Niger, as well as Burkina Faso and Mali, where it is fighting a bloody insurgency against the governments of those countries.<\/p>\n
While Nigeria has long battled its own, separate jihadist conflict, analysts have been worried about the spread of armed groups from the Sahel into the west African country.<\/p>\n
“The strike was conducted at a location where, historically, you have the bandits and the Lakurawa parading around that axis,” Bwala said.<\/p>\n
“The intelligence the US government gathered, also, is that there is a mass movement of ISIS from the Sahel to that part.”<\/p>\n
There were casualties, but it was unclear who among those targeted were killed, Bwala added.<\/p>\n
The site of some of the strikes, in Nigeria’s northwest state of Sokoto, has puzzled analysts, since Nigeria’s jihadist insurgency is mostly concentrated in the northeast.<\/p>\n
Researchers have recently linked some members of the armed group known as Lakurawa, the main jihadist group located in Sokoto State, to the ISSP.<\/p>\n
Other analysts have disputed those links and research on Lakurawa is complicated as the term has been used to describe various armed fighters in the northwest.<\/p>\n
In the northwest, the biggest security concern is from criminal gangs known as bandits.<\/p>\n
They loot villages, conduct kidnappings for ransom and extort farmers and artisanal miners across swathes of rural countryside outside of government control.<\/p>\n
Nigerian Information Minister Mohammed Idris said the strikes hit “two major Islamic State terrorist enclaves” in Sokoto state’s Tangaza district.<\/p>\n
Other villages were hit by what the information minister said was debris from the strikes.<\/p>\n
Images from an AFP photographer in Offa, in neighbouring Kwara state, showed crumbled buildings with roofs caved in and belongings scattered among the wreckage.<\/p>\n
The strikes, which US President Donald Trump said he pushed back to happen on Christmas Day to “give a Christmas present” to the militants, come after a diplomatic spat between Washington and Abuja.<\/p>\n
Mr Trump accused Nigeria in October and November of allowing “persecution” and “genocide” against Christians.<\/p>\n
The Nigerian government and independent analysts reject that framing of the country’s violence, which has long been used by the US religious right that backs Mr Trump.<\/p>\n
The country faces multiple conflicts, from jihadists and bandits to farmer-herder violence and southeastern separatists, that kill both Christians and Muslims.<\/p>\n
On Christmas Eve, a suspected suicide bomber killed at least five people in an attack on a mosque in northeastern Borno state.<\/p>\n
After the strikes, Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar said: “It is a joint operation, and it is not targeting any religion nor simply in the name of one religion or the other.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US strikes in Nigeria targeted Islamic State (IS) militants from the Sahel who entered the country to work…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":254652,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,13,14,6,11,12,15,16,5,7,8,65,66,67],"class_list":{"0":"post-254651","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-featured-news","11":"tag-featurednews","12":"tag-headlines","13":"tag-latest-news","14":"tag-latestnews","15":"tag-main-news","16":"tag-mainnews","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-top-stories","19":"tag-topstories","20":"tag-world","21":"tag-world-news","22":"tag-worldnews"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115793626663316919","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254651\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/254652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}