American Strikes in Nigeria Are Presented as Defense of Christians, but Behind the Rhetoric Lie Resources, China, Evangelicals, and the Struggle for New Control Over Africa
The American airstrikes on ISIL positions in Nigeria, carried out on Christmas itself after weeks of Trump’s dramatic warnings over the “killing of Christians,” are presented to the American public as a moral act of protecting a persecuted community. The story is simple, almost black-and-white: a president saving innocent believers on another continent. However, once one steps out of the propaganda framework and looks at Nigerian reality, it becomes clear that this involves a much more complex web of interests, where humanitarian language is used as a cover for geopolitical games.
To begin with, Trump’s sudden focus on Nigeria perfectly suits his domestic political needs. The most loyal part of his voter base consists of evangelical Protestant circles, for whom the motif of persecuted Christians is emotionally extremely powerful. When it is announced on Christmas that America has bombed ISIL fighters in defense of Christians in Africa, it creates a scene that mobilizes precisely that bloc and reinforces the image of a decisive defender of the faith. At the same time, those same structures completely ignore Christian communities that have been disappearing for years in the Middle East and other parts of Africa, without any similar moral outcry in Washington, suggesting that the criterion is not suffering but political exploitability.
Nigeria was not chosen as the stage by accident. It is a country with over two hundred million inhabitants, roughly divided between a Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south, with a broad belt of mixed communities in the center. British colonial rule left behind a legacy in which traditional emirate systems were preserved in the north, while missionary work and the introduction of Western education were encouraged in the south. Along that line of tension, occasional religious and ethnic unrest has erupted since the 1980s, but the current wave of extreme violence is linked to the rise of Boko Haram.
Boko Haram emerged at the beginning of this century as a radical movement that rejects “Western” education and declares the Nigerian state infidel. After the bloody suppression of an uprising in 2009, it transitioned to guerrilla warfare in northeastern Nigeria. In the following years, it mined both churches and mosques, attacked schools and markets, and killed and abducted both Muslims and Christians. Part of the organization pledged allegiance to the so-called Islamic State, forming the branch ISWAP (Islamic State – West Africa Province), while the rest continued operating under the old name. Estimates of the death toll run into hundreds of thousands, with a significant share of Christians but also enormous losses in Muslim communities, showing that this is a general collapse of security across the region.
In that environment, other forms of violence develop, which Western media often simplistically portray as “Muslim attacks on Christians.” In Nigeria’s central states, in the zone known as the Middle Belt, conflicts between mostly Muslim herders and predominantly Christian farmers result from a combination of climate change, population growth, and unregulated land rights. When nomadic herders seek new pastures, they enter disputes with local villages that respond to violence with their own armed groups. The result is attacks in which entire villages are burned, leaving the public with an image of simple “religious hatred,” although the roots of the conflict are much deeper and more material.
Religion in Nigeria has an exceptionally strong social presence, but its internal structure is far more complex than the image of an orthodox or fundamentalist society. Both Christians and Muslims, in the vast majority, live religion as identity, community, and moral framework, rather than as a strict set of dogmas followed literally in everyday life. Among Christians, especially in the south, faith is deeply marked by the missionary legacy of the British colonial period, yet at the same time strongly syncretistic, interwoven with local customs, beliefs in ancestral spirits, and charismatic forms of worship that emphasize emotion, healing, and prosperity more than theological orthodoxy. The same applies to Muslims in the north, where Islam is historically rooted before colonialism but is often practiced through local Sufi traditions and social norms rather than rigid Salafism. Radical Islamism and Christian fundamentalism exist, but these are relatively narrow, loud, and politically instrumentalized currents that do not reflect the everyday religiosity of the majority. For a large number of Nigerians, religion is above all a language of belonging and dignity in a country where the state often fails, rather than a conscious project of ideological struggle, which explains why extremism is more easily imposed from outside than organically growing from society itself.
In recent years, massacres in Christian villages, the destruction and burning of churches, and kidnappings of pastors and believers have been recorded, creating the impression of systematic cleansing. Figures cited by church and activist organizations warn of thousands killed annually. At the same time, in other parts of the country, jihadists and gangs massacre Muslim villages, abduct children from Islamic schools, and kill imams who oppose them. The state responds slowly and selectively, the military is often compromised by corruption, and poor communities feel abandoned to fate. In such an atmosphere, some Nigerian Christian leaders turn to American evangelical networks and lobby for Washington to declare Nigeria a “country violating religious freedoms,” to force authorities in Abuja to take more decisive action.
Trump uses this communication network both externally and internally. Declaring Nigeria a country of particular concern and publicly threatening that if authorities “do not stop the killing of Christians,” the United States will act even without them, serves as leverage to pressure a formally sovereign state. Abuja does not want to lose American aid but also does not want to accept the role of a regime tolerating genocide against Christians. Therefore, its officials emphasize that victims come from all faiths, reject the label of a “Christian country under siege,” and carefully agree to cooperate with America in planning strikes on ISIL structures.
The composition of Nigerian authorities reflects the approximate religious balance in the country, but with several important nuances. Currently, both President Bola Tinubu and Vice President Kashim Shettima are Muslims, breaking the long-standing unwritten practice of combining a Muslim and a Christian at the top of the executive branch and causing outrage among many Christian church leaders. At the same time, Senate President Godswill Akpabio openly emphasizes that he is the highest-ranking Christian in the state, while the Speaker of the House is Muslim, so the parliamentary leadership is divided along religious lines. In the government and cabinet, the number of ministers is relatively balanced, with a slight Muslim advantage, but Christians still hold a series of key economic and security portfolios, making it hard to speak of complete domination by one religious group. In practice, power is shared along ethnic and regional lines as well, and the story of a “Muslim” or “Christian” government more serves to mobilize voters and pressure the central government than it reflects the real, complex mosaic of Nigeria’s political elite.
All this unfolds at a moment when Africa’s security map is rapidly changing. After years of Western military presence in the Sahel, countries like Mali and Niger are expelling French and American troops and turning to new partners, including Russia and private military companies. Like France, the U.S. Africa Command (USAFRICOM) is losing bases, while Chinese economic presence strengthens across West Africa. In this context, Nigeria, as a demographic and economic giant, is too important for Washington to leave to a combination of Chinese loans and Russian instructors. Moral discourse about protecting Christians fits into an old pattern where humanitarian motives are used as justification for firmer security entry into a strategically important country.
China has recognized the opportunity to present itself as the opposite of that pattern. While Trump threatens sanctions and possible intervention, Beijing emphasizes respect for sovereignty and condemns the instrumentalization of religion in foreign policy. Chinese companies are already investing large amounts in Nigerian infrastructure and the exploitation of critical minerals like lithium. A stable Nigeria cooperating with China, rather than depending on the changeable mood of the White House, is useful to Beijing. Trump’s outbursts thus paradoxically push Abuja into an even tighter embrace of Chinese capital and open space for deeper economic integration of China in West Africa.
Behind the armed groups used as an argument for intervention lies a whole network of actors. For years, there have been reports of private donors from Saudi and Qatari circles financing radical preachers and schools, spreading ultra-conservative interpretations of Islam in northern Nigeria. Local preachers trained in that milieu later become the ideological foundation for Boko Haram and related organizations. Alongside this religious layer operates an economy of crime. In northwestern states, illegal gold mining and other ores involve foreign criminal chains, with armed gangs—sometimes linked to jihadists—securing mines and selling ore to global markets.
Great powers have no clean hands in this chaos. The fall of Libya opened a huge weapons depot that spilled across the Sahel, “counter-terrorism” operations armed various local militias that later switched sides, and each new wave of violence served as justification for new military missions. Terrorism, in this logic, turns into a permanent state enabling lasting military presence and political influence, while corridors for oil, gas, gold, and now increasingly important battery minerals are protected in the background. Nigeria, with its resources and position, enters deeply into that story…
In this framework, the fate of Nigerian Christians is tragic but doubly instrumentalized. On one side, they live in the shadow of militias, jihadists, and bandits who see them as easy targets and symbols of the hostile West in their own country. On the other side, their suffering becomes an argument in the hands of politicians and powers that, through moral vocabulary, push their own economic goals. Real protection for these communities will hardly come from missiles fired on Christmas and Trump’s occasional speeches, but from long-term strengthening of the Nigerian state, fairer distribution of land and resources, and cutting off flows of money and weapons that today feed violence in that African country from around the world. Unfortunately, that stable Nigeria is likely far off. What we will watch in the near future are even greater escalations with various arguments, but behind it all firmly stands the new struggle for Africa and its resources.
About the Author
