Christmas Day 2025 will not be remembered in Nigeria for carols or feasts. It will be remembered as the day U.S. Reaper drones fired guided munitions into the forests of Sokoto, flattening several Islamic State cells and launching a new and unsettled moment in West African geopolitics. What began as Donald Trump’s angry broadside on Truth Social about the killing of northern and Middle Belt Christians quickly escalated into a supposed
kinetic alliance between Washington and Abuja that few analysts saw coming and even fewer fully understand.
The strikes hit sixteen confirmed targets across the northwest, according to Nigeria’s Information Ministry. U.S. Africa Command described the camps as nodes of the Islamic State’s Sahel franchise. The Tinubu administration insisted that the operation was executed with its knowledge, its approval, and its intelligence feeds. Nigerian drones had allegedly been making quiet reconnaissance sweeps weeks earlier, mapping out militants who had terrorised farming villages from Katsina to Zamfara for years. Washington provided the airborne precision; Abuja supposedly provided the ground picture and the political cover.
The domestic reaction across Nigeria was complicated. Relief and vindication came from communities that have been living under jihadist violence for over a decade. Village elders in Sokoto spoke openly to reporters about militants seen fleeing on motorcycles after the strikes. Christian groups in Plateau and Benue praised the attack as overdue recognition of their plight. For many Nigerians, the country has been bleeding in silence for too long while Abuja pretended “banditry” was a mere law enforcement issue rather than a metastasising insurgency.
But there was also suspicion. Commentators from the nationalist left warned that Washington never operates for free and never fights out of pure humanitarian love. Voices in Kano, Kaduna, and Abuja cautioned about hidden agendas, especially with global superpower competition escalating in Africa. Some accused Tinubu of surrendering sovereignty to secure a political boost ahead of the 2027 polls. Others asked why Nigeria required foreign drones to solve a problem that its own generals, budgets, and military hierarchy should have managed years ago.
The weeks after the Christmas strikes were even more telling. A clandestine Nigerian delegation led by National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu travelled to Washington to negotiate rules of engagement, deconfliction channels, and intelligence protocols. Simultaneously, U.S. officials landed in Abuja to verify claims of religious persecution and assess local cooperation. Diplomatic theatre quietly replaced the earlier public bluster.
By January, a pattern had begun to form. The Trump administration, still mouthing “America First” from behind the Resolute Desk, made it clear that it had no appetite for nation-building or endless wars. But targeted counter-terrorism that burned ISIS affiliates without committing U.S. troops on African soil was politically acceptable and strategic. For Trump, Nigeria was not about hearts and minds but about eliminating transnational jihadist actors before they evolve into global operators. For Tinubu, success against militants could patch a security credibility gap that has threatened to swallow his presidency.
The broader region is less simple. The Sahel has become a congested battlefield of competing foreign interests. Russia, through Wagner’s successor networks, is embedded in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. France has retreated in humiliation after two decades of failed counter-insurgency. China still prefers economic penetration to military entanglement, but Beijing is watching Washington’s moves with a cold analytical eye. Into this crowded arena stepped the United States, armed not with bases and battalions but with drones, precision ordnance, and an expanding intelligence footprint along the Gulf of Guinea.
The Christmas strikes also exposed a strategic contradiction in Trump’s Africa doctrine. The administration publicly insists it wants no “long-term commitments” on the continent, yet terrorism in the Sahel does not obey electoral timelines. Militants displaced from Sokoto will not dissolve into thin air; they migrate, rearm, and attack softer targets. If the strikes are to be more than a headline, they will require continuity, logistics, surveillance, and diplomatic finesse, everything Washington swears it wants to avoid. Geopolitical reality is beginning to drag policy back toward engagement, whether Trump likes it or not.
Meanwhile Abuja has signalled there will be more. Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar called the strikes “a new phase of an old war.” Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth echoed him, saying pointedly that the operation was “only the beginning.” If this becomes a sustained campaign, the next logical battlespace is the northeastern axis where Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province have entrenched for fifteen years. A successful offensive in that theatre would give Tinubu a powerful talking point as election season builds in 2027. Failure would turn the current cooperation into political liability and stoke calls for reassessing Nigeria’s foreign alignments.
Nigeria now stands at a crossroads created by its own vulnerabilities. The state failed for years to neutralise terrorists within its borders. Communities were massacred while successive governments debated semantics on whether attackers were bandits, insurgents, or foreign invaders. Into that vacuum stepped the United States, drones humming, missiles falling, and global eyes watching.
Africa has long served as the chessboard where external powers test doctrines, technologies, and influence. The Christmas airstrikes mark the quiet beginning of a new chapter in that tradition. The question hanging over Abuja is whether this chapter ends with restored security and strategic autonomy, or whether it becomes another case study in how foreign intervention slowly reshapes a nation’s sovereignty under the banner of counter-terrorism.
The coming months will reveal much. If the militants regroup, if ISIS affiliates strike back, if diplomatic friction reemerges, or if Washington’s interests shift toward Venezuela, Ukraine, or the Pacific, Nigeria could once again be left holding the bill for a war it never resolved. If, however, the campaign is expanded and calibrated with political reform, military accountability, and genuine regional coordination, then the Christmas Day strikes may yet be remembered as the turning point when Nigeria finally took the insurgency seriously with both domestic and foreign tools.
For now, Nigeria proceeds along a narrow ridge between necessity, legitimacy, and sovereignty. America’s drones have spoken once. The region waits to hear whether they will speak again.
By Hon Chimazuru Nnadi-Oforgu
Duruebube Uzii na Abosi
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