US forces launch Christmas strike on ISIS in Nigeria, Trump says

American forces launched airstrikes against ISIS in Nigeria on Thursday, President Donald Trump announced in a post on Truth Social, the administration’s latest show of lethal force in the international arena since Trump returned to the White House early this year.

A Pentagon official told POLITICO the agency worked with the Nigerian government to carry out the strikes.

On his social media platform, the president said the strike was a consequence for the militant group’s killing of Christians “at levels not seen for many years, and even centuries!”

“I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was,” he wrote. “The Department of War executed numerous perfect strikes, as only the United States is capable of doing.”

There was no immediate word on casualties.

Trump has in recent months taken Africa’s most populous country to task for what he claims to be the persecution of Christians within its borders. In November, he threatened to withhold all humanitarian aid — and even invade Nigeria with U.S. troops “guns-a-blazing” — if its government refused to work harder to tamp down the violence.

The president has been far from shy in using American military might to promote his international agenda. Trump has now green-lit military strikes in Iran, Syria, the Caribbean and Nigeria, among other sites, since reentering the White House in January.

“May God Bless our Military, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues,” he wrote.

The Nigerian Embassy did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the strike. Nigeria has claimed that Christians are not persecuted. “The crisis is far more complex than a simple religious framing suggests,” Taiwo Hassan Adebayo, a researcher at the Institute of Security Studies, told the Associated Press last month.