Trump says IS group leader killed in joint US-Nigerian mission
US and Nigerian forces have killed a senior leader of the so-called Islamic State group (IS) in Nigeria, Donald Trump has said.
The US president announced the joint operation in Africa’s most populous country in a social media post on Friday night that offered few details.
Mr Trump said Abu Bakr al-Mainuki was second-in-command of IS globally and “thought he could hide in Africa, but little did he know we had sources who kept us informed on what he was doing”.
Al-Mainuki was viewed as the key figure in the organisation and financing of IS, and had been plotting attacks against the United States and its interests, according to an official.
Nigerian president Bola Tinubu confirmed the operation and said Al-Mainuki was killed alongside “several of his lieutenants, during a strike on his compound in the Lake Chad Basin”.
According to the spokesperson for the Nigerian military task force that carried out the operation, the mission was a “highly complex precision air-land operation” and was carried out during three hours of darkness early Saturday without any casualties or loss of assets.
“His elimination represents the single most consequential counterterrorism outcome” in the region since the inception of the operation in 2015, a spokesman said.
Born in Nigeria’s Borno province in 1982, al-Mainuki took the helm of the IS branch in West Africa after the group’s previous leader in the region, Mamman Nur, was killed in 2018, according to the Counter Extremism Project, which tracks militant groups.
Al-Mainuki was based in the Sahel area, the monitoring group said, adding that it is believed that he fought in Libya when IS was active in the North African nation more than a decade ago. He was sanctioned by the US in 2023.
Analysts said Mr Trump’s claim Al-Mainuki was “second in command globally” is wide of the mark. The Nigerian military, in a statement, also said intelligence shows that earlier this year, Al-Mainuki might have been “elevated to the position of head of the general directorate of states, placing him the second most senior leader within the Isis (another term for IS) global hierarchy”.
US secretary of defence Pete Hegseth also said Al-Mainuki was the senior IS general directorate of provinces Emir – “the number two for Isis globally – responsible for overseeing the planning of attacks, directing the hostage-taking and managing financial operations”.
In December, Mr Trump directed US forces to launch strikes against IS in Nigeria, though he released few details then about their impact.
Nigeria has been battling multiple armed groups, including at least two affiliated with IS, as it has grappled with a multi-faceted security crisis.
IS affiliates in Africa have emerged as some of the continent’s most active militant groups following the collapse of the IS caliphate in Syria and Iraq in 2017.
The US in February sent troops to the West African nation to help advise its military and in March, America also deployed drones there after Mr Trump alleged that Christians are being targeted in Nigeria’s security crisis.
The Friday night operation was the latest instance in a string of covert missions abroad that Mr Trump has announced this year, starting with the stunning overnight raid in January to capture and remove Venezuela’s then-leader Nicolas Maduro and whisk him to the US, followed nearly two months later by the launch of strikes that kicked off the war with Iran.