The head of US Africa Command said on Tuesday that the US has deployed a “small team” of troops to Nigeria, comments that come more than a month after the US launched its first missile strikes in the country on Christmas Day.
It’s unclear when the US troops were sent to Nigeria, but AFRICOM Commander Dagvin Anderson said that it came after he and Nigerian President Bola Tinubu held talks in Rome during the Aqaba Process summit in October 2025, before President Trump threatened to go into Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” if the Nigerian government didn’t do more to protect Christians.
“We were able to share some thoughts and agree that we needed to work together on a way forward in the region,” Anderson told reporters during a digital press briefing. “That has led to increased collaboration between our nations, to include a small US team that brings some unique capabilities from the United States in order to augment what Nigeria has been doing for several years.”
The US missile strikes on Christmas Day were launched by a US warship in the Gulf of Guinea and targeted ISIS-linked militants in the northwestern Sokoto State, though several missiles fell on two villages far from the intended target, causing damage in one village and injuries, though no deaths were reported. AFRICOM claimed that multiple militants were killed in the strikes, but there’s been no confirmation of the casualties.
The US has long been an ally of the Nigerian government, though Trump initially appeared to threaten to take military action without the cooperation of the government over claims that it was looking the other way while a “Christian genocide” was taking place in the country.
While Nigerian Christians face significant attacks in Nigeria, the government disputes the idea of a Christian genocide since many Muslims are also killed in the violence, including in the northeastern Borno state, the hub for Boko Haram and the most significant ISIS affiliate in the country, known as the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP).
