Why bomb Sokoto? Trump’s strikes baffle Nigerians

It was around 10pm on Christmas Day when residents of the mainly Muslim village of Jabo in Sokoto state, north-west Nigeria, noticed an object resembling a small aircraft flying overhead.

“Shortly after, we heard a loud explosion and saw a huge ball of fire,” one resident told local media. “Everyone was terrified. People rushed out of their houses with their families and started running in different directions.”

The scene, repeated in at least two other settlements in Sokoto state, which borders on Nigeria’s neighbour Niger, were part of what Donald Trump, US president, called “a powerful and ​deadly strike ‌ against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria”.

The US military said in its initial assessment that “multiple” Isis members had been killed in the strikes on extremist “camps”.

However, residents of Jabo professed surprise at the strikes, saying the bombs had landed in empty fields, causing no casualties, and that Jabo had been relatively shielded from violence. The last attack by militants had occurred two years ago, they said. Video footage on Nigerian television showed pieces of burnt metal in what looked like farmland.

One man told Arise News, a local television station: “Glory be to God, there was no loss of life.”

Major-General Samaila Uba, the Nigerian military’s director of defence information, appeared to confirm Abuja’s close involvement. Nigeria’s armed forces, “in conjunction with” the US, had carried out the strike based on “credible intelligence and careful operational planning”, he said.

Uba went on to say that the “precision strike operations against identified foreign Isis-linked elements” had received approval from federal government authorities. The operation underscored Nigeria’s resolve, alongside strategic partners, “to confront transnational terrorism and prevent foreign fighters from establishing or expanding footholds within Nigeria’s borders”, he said.

Yet some Nigerian analysts questioned the defence ministry’s official version of events, saying the choice of Sokoto state as a target was strange given that its residents were almost entirely Muslim. Other states, including Niger and Kebbi in the north-west, and Borno in the north-east, where Boko Haram has historically been active, had been the victims of much more violence, they said.

Nigeria has been subject for at least a decade to overlapping security crises, in a mixture of banditry, kidnappings, clashes between herders and farmers and Islamist extremism. Last year, nearly 9,500 people were killed in political violence, according to Acled, a non-profit that tracks global conflict. Muslims as well as Christians have been victims.

Trump said US actions were in response to what he called terrorist activity directed against Christians — long a preoccupation of his White House.

The strikes came a day after a bomb attack on a mosque in Maiduguri in north-east Nigeria in which at least five people were reported as having been killed and dozens injured. In November, gunmen kidnapped at least 200 children from a Catholic school in Niger state.

Mustapha Gembu, a security analyst, said the choice of Sokoto was “highly questionable”. Sokoto was more a victim of banditry than of terrorists targeting Christians, who were almost non-existent in the state, he said. It was not what he called one of the country’s “terrorist hotspots” but rather a “predominantly Muslim enclave and the historical seat of the Sokoto Caliphate, a spiritual centre of Islam in Nigeria”.

Since Trump in November threatened to deploy the US military “guns a blazing” in response to attacks on our “cherished Christians”, the Nigerian government has been under strong US pressure to act against the violence. Bola Tinubu, the president, dispatched senior security officials to Washington to discuss the situation and replaced his defence minister with a former general.

But despite the public claims on Friday of co-ordination, Gembu said he doubted whether the Nigerian armed forces had been closely involved in the planning of the strikes.

Umar Ado, an opposition politician, also said he was unconvinced that Nigeria was actively involved. “The targeting of Sokoto state with no prior established Isis presence raises questions about whether Nigerian military authorities do exercise meaningful control over the operation or they are themselves mere onlookers,” he said.

Ado said Tinubu owed “the nation a full and detailed explanation of the legal basis, authorisation process and strategic rationale for the reported US air strikes in Sokoto”.

Other branches of Nigeria’s government were slower than the defence ministry to claim full responsibility for co-ordinating the operation.

One senior government official, speaking on background, said he was still trying to establish the facts, including precisely when Abuja had been informed about the timing and location of the strikes.

Nigeria had been involved in intelligence gathering operations in conjunction with the US in recent weeks, he said, but he acknowledged that Sokoto was not the most obvious choice of target.

The foreign ministry was also more circumspect about its involvement, saying only that it “continues to work closely with its partners through established diplomatic and security channels to weaken terrorist networks”. However, it stopped short of saying explicitly that it had prior knowledge about when or where the attacks would take place.

Until now the Trump administration’s military focus in Africa has largely been in Somalia, where it has mounted more than 100 strikes since February against alleged Islamist militants. In May, US Admiral James Kilby said Washington had launched “the largest air strike in the history of the world — a hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds from a single aircraft carrier — into Somalia”.

After the strikes on Nigeria, the US released a video showing what appeared to be a missile being fired from a ship.

Gembu, the security analyst, said witnesses in Jabo had reported seeing both drones and missiles and that the strikes may have been a combination of the two. Contrary to US claims that “multiple Isis terrorists were killed in the Isis camps”, Gembu said no casualties had been reported. In Tangaza, scene of a separate strike from Jabo, one part of the bush that had been hit was “still smouldering”, he said.