Faith and firepower: Inside Trump’s turn on Nigeria

A years-long effort to convince Washington of religious persecution is shifting foreign policy towards the West African nation, with major consequences

Top advisers from the Trump administration sat at the head of a giant wooden table in an office near the White House in late October listening as religious activists described attacks on Christian churches and pastors in Nigeria. The activists wanted President Donald Trump to do something about it.

Three days later, the president threatened to enter Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” to avenge what he has called a “Christian genocide.” Then, on Christmas Day, Trump launched Tomahawk missiles at “terrorist scum” he said were responsible for killing Nigerian Christians.

The strike was the explosive outcome of an intense, yearslong push led by Christian activists, Republican lawmakers and American celebrities seeking US intervention in a long-simmering security crisis in Nigeria.

Thousands are killed annually in Nigeria, and the victims include large numbers of Christians and Muslims. The violence involves battles over land, kidnappings for ransom, sectarian tensions and terrorism, but the activists wanted Trump to see the conflict through a single lens: the persecution of Christians.

Now the activists have seized on his support to orchestrate a rapid shift in US foreign policy toward Nigeria, with major consequences for the West African nation, including the threat of more bombings.

“Our challenge,” said Nina Shea, an activist and the former commissioner for the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, “was to break through the narrative that this was not religious-based.”

In Davos, Switzerland, on January 22, Trump praised the December strikes. A congressional spending measure released last month would condition half of US aid to Nigeria on whether the country has done enough to stop the violence, advance “religious freedom” and investigate “jihadist terror groups.” Trump told The New York Times recently that he would approve more strikes if Christians continued to be killed, and senior US leaders were in Nigeria’s capital to announce a new, closer military partnership between the two nations.

For the Christian activists, Trump’s support has been the rightful outcome of a mission one key US Congress member described as a calling from God. For the Nigerian government, correcting the record on who bears the brunt of the violence has become less important than making concessions to Trump.

For years, the Christian activists had tried to get the Biden administration to redesignate Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern, a category reserved for nations where religious freedom is threatened, making them vulnerable to sanctions.

Trump had put Nigeria on the list during his first term, but the Biden administration lifted the designation in 2021. The State Department’s report on religious freedom in Nigeria that year said there were mass killings of Christians and Muslims but did not single out Christians as a singular target.

The return of Trump offered a new opening.

Armed with gruesome anecdotes and shocking but in some cases unreliable data on the number of Nigerian Christians killed for their faith, two dozen activists from groups dedicated to exposing Christian persecution throughout the world, such as the international organisation Aid to the Church in Need, pursued various Trump officials.

The Rev Wilfred C Anagbe, a prominent bishop from the Middle Belt of Nigeria, a central area where the mostly Muslim north meets the mostly Christian south, was invited to testify on Capitol Hill last March. He told members of a House subcommittee on Africa that “the experience of the Nigerian Christians today can be summed up as that of a Church under Islamist extermination.”

Brutal attacks are also perpetrated against Muslims, including herders who are often nomadic and don’t have political representation, said Matthew Page, a former diplomat and a Nigeria expert. “The extent to which they are victims is just never revealed,” he said.

Religious groups on Capitol Hill circulated stories about the Yelwata attack to get lawmakers’ attention. One that resonated, lawmakers said, was an article in The Free Press, founded by media executive Bari Weiss. The article focused heavily on the killing of Christians. By fall, Republican Sen Ted Cruz had introduced a measure calling for sanctions against Nigeria.

The atrocity at Yelwata was a breakthrough moment for the activists, but not everyone in the Trump administration saw the massacre as proof of genocide. Massad Boulos, Trump’s Africa adviser who spent decades selling trucks in Nigeria, arrived in Rome in October for a meeting with Nigeria’s president, Bola Tinubu, to discuss strengthening US-Nigeria ties. Boulos said afterward that Islamist groups were killing more Muslims than Christians and that the Trump administration understood the complexity of the violence plaguing Africa’s most populous country.

Trump told the Times last month that “Muslims are being killed also in Nigeria, but it’s mostly Christians.”

Back in Washington, anti-persecution groups secured the meeting with Trump officials near the White House just as Republicans were gathering for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference.

Sitting at the grand wooden table, they outlined their concerns to Sebastian Gorka, the National Security Council senior director for counterterrorism, who has falsely argued that violence is a fundamental part of Islam.

On October 31, Trump took to Truth Social to announce he had officially put Nigeria back on the list, and then a short while later, he posted that he had ordered the Pentagon to begin planning potential military action. 

Nigerian officials tried to counter the notion of a Christian genocide. Mohammed Idris, Nigeria’s information minister, described Trump’s claims as “false, baseless, despicable and divisive,” and the foreign minister, Yusuf Tuggar, implied that the true goal was to destabilise Nigeria, take its resources and turn the African nation into a failed state.

‘Why Are You Punishing Us?’

In response to the Country of Particular Concern designation, a Nigerian delegation traveled to Washington to convince US officials of their government’s efforts to bolster security.

Rep Chris Smith, R-NJ and chair of the Africa subcommittee, said the meeting did not satisfy him that the Nigerians were taking the issue seriously.

“‘Why are you punishing us?’” Smith said one of the Nigerian officials asked. The Congress member said he told the official, “This is about helping you to help your own people.”

Accusations of genocide continued to spread.

Television host Piers Morgan interviewed the Rev. Ezekiel Dachomo, a Nigerian who had filmed himself jumping into graves to protest Christian murders. Rapper Nicki Minaj was invited to speak about Christian persecution in Nigeria at the United Nations after she posted about it on social media. Dozens of current and retired NFL players signed an open letter calling on Trump to do more to confront “religious persecution in Nigeria.”

Anagbe testified again, in November, for the same congressional subcommittee. “The Church alone cannot stop the killings; it requires coordinated political, military and humanitarian intervention,” he said.

Orders from the Pentagon arrived at Africa Command in mid-December to dispatch a Navy destroyer to the Gulf of Guinea on a secret mission.

Its crew members had prepared to spend Christmas at their home port in Spain but were summoned on short notice to the ship, steaming at top speed to waters off Nigeria.

By December 24, the destroyer was in place and ready to fire its Tomahawk missiles. Targets had been selected and vetted through a joint U.S.-Nigerian intelligence cooperation.

But Trump decided to delay the strikes by one day so they would happen on Christmas, one of the U.S. officials said. That timing would surely resonate with the Christian activists who had pushed Trump to take stronger action in Nigeria, the U.S. officials said.

On Christmas Day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio phoned Tuggar, Nigeria’s foreign minister, for permission from Nigeria’s president to launch.

The missiles, valued at $32 million, hit northwest Nigeria, an overwhelmingly Muslim area hundreds of miles away from the Middle Belt. US military officials are still assessing damage but said that more than three dozen Islamic State group-affiliated terrorists were flushed out and later arrested by Nigerian authorities.

Residents have said the missiles hit empty fields and vacant militant hideouts.

Several activists said they were surprised by how far Trump went, pointing out that they had not explicitly pressed for military strikes. But they were pleased with the outcome.

“The symbolic value of it is saying the U.S. is taking this seriously, that they’re not going to leave Christians feeling like they’re left behind,” Nelson said.

Moore plans to soon present Trump with the results of an investigation the president requested on the persecution of Christians in Nigeria.

Boulos is now aligned with Trump’s current approach to Nigeria, multiple U.S. officials said. “He’s now changed his tune,” Smith said.

Faced with US pressure, Nigerian officials have stopped arguing with the Trump administration.

“The partnership is working” between the United States and Nigeria, Nuhu Ribadu, Nigeria’s national security adviser, told top US officials in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, in January. Even Tuggar backed away from arguing against the Trump administration on the issue. “We are not going to get bogged down on narratives,” he said in an interview after the strikes.

“We’re more concerned about results,” he added, “and that’s what we’re focusing on.”

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)