Trump says a top Islamic State leader was killed in a U.S.-Nigerian mission

President Donald Trump said late Friday that U.S. and Nigerian forces had killed one of the Islamic State group’s highest-ranking leaders in an operation in Africa, where the United States has been targeting Islamic militants who the president says are killing Christians.

In a social media post, Trump said the leader, Abu-Bilal al-Mainuki, had been killed Friday night in a “very complex mission” carried out at his direction by U.S. forces and the Nigerian military.

“He will no longer terrorize the people of Africa, or help plan operations to target Americans,” Trump said in the post.

Al-Mainuki was designated a terrorist and one of the Islamic State group’s leaders by the State Department in 2023. He was a Nigerian citizen, according to the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which had sanctioned him.

Three U.S. officials said Saturday that al-Mainuki was killed in a helicopter-borne assault carried out by about two dozen Nigerian and U.S. Special Operations commandos, which included members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6. The commandos attacked him and about three dozen fighters on two small islands in Lake Chad, the officials said. Lake Chad is at the intersection of four countries, including Nigeria.

Heavy fighting ensued over a nearly three-hour battle. The U.S. military sought to capture al-Mainuki, but when it became clear he would not surrender, the Americans killed him with an airstrike rather than risk letting him escape, said one of the officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. No U.S. or Nigerian military casualties were reported, they said.

Military analysts are now poring through the cellphones, laptop computers and other electronic records recovered for information on the recruiting, operational and financial activities of the Islamic State branches in Africa and elsewhere in the world, the U.S. officials said.

Trump and the U.S. and Nigerian militaries identified al-Mainuki as the second-most-senior leader in the Islamic State, a position that the Nigerian military said he might have attained “as recently as February 2026.” He had earlier overseen “ISIS-linked operations across the Sahel and West Africa,” the Nigerian military said in a statement, using an alternative name for the militant group.

As a result of American pressure over the past 18 months on the Islamic State affiliate in northern Somalia -- where the terrorist group’s top leader, Abdul Qadir Mumin, is believed to be holed up -- the affiliate in West Africa, based in the Lake Chad basin, has taken on more responsibility for coordinating the militant group’s global operations, the U.S. officials said.

That dramatically raised the stature of al-Mainuki, who the officials said oversaw the Islamic State group’s global operations, media, recruitment and finances. They said he was directly involved in plots like the kidnapping of Kevin Rideout, an American missionary pilot who was seized in Niger last fall.

“Al-Mainuki provided strategic guidance to the ISIS global network on media and financial operations as well as the development and manufacturing of weapons, explosives and drones,” the U.S. military’s Africa Command said in a statement Saturday.

Nigeria’s Foreign Ministry said al-Mainuki had been responsible for recent attacks on the military in the country’s northeast.

The Nigerian military said in 2024 that it had killed al-Mainuki, which Bayo Onanuga, an adviser to Nigeria’s president, said Saturday had been “a case of mistaken identity or misattribution in the fog of sustained counterinsurgency operations.”

The country’s military has at times claimed to have killed high-ranking jihadis, only for them to reappear later, and there have been cases in which a successor has adopted the name of a prominent slain militant. But Onanuga said that in this instance, “security and military authorities maintain a far higher level of confidence” that al-Mainuki had been killed.

Independent analysts cautioned that while the mission announced by Trump was a significant tactical win, the Islamic State group has proved remarkably resilient. Its global command elements are more diffuse than they were a decade ago, when the group seized huge swaths of Iraq and Syria. Africa is now the hub of Islamic State and al-Qaida activities.

With al-Mainuki’s death, authority will shift to someone else in the Islamic State’s international constellation, analysts said. “The entire episode demonstrates why this group is so difficult to defeat. There is a lot of organizational flexibility,” said Colin P. Clarke, the executive director of the Soufan Center, an intelligence and consulting firm in New York.

Still, the joint commando raid is the latest sign of growing counterterrorism cooperation -- once thought highly unlikely -- between the United States and Nigeria.

“This operation underscores the exceptional value of the U.S.-Nigeria partnership and was made possible through the cooperation and coordination of our forces in recent months,” Gen. Dagvin Anderson, the head of U.S. Africa Command, said in the statement.

The U.S. military has been helping Nigeria with training and surveillance in its fight against jihadis. In December, it carried out missile strikes in the country’s northwest that Trump said targeted Islamic State militants. That operation was done in coordination with the Nigerian military, the Pentagon said at the time.

Thousands of Christians and Muslims have been killed in Nigeria in land disputes, sectarian violence and terrorism, which Christian activists and Republican lawmakers in the United States have viewed as the persecution of Christians. There is no clear evidence to show that Christians are attacked more frequently than any other religious group in Nigeria, analysts say.

This year, a U.S. official said that the Pentagon would send about 200 troops to Nigeria to help train its military to fight Islamic militants but that those U.S. forces would not be involved in combat operations. U.S. officials said that the increasing cooperation led to sharing information and planning for Saturday’s much riskier commando raid, with the Nigerian military providing important intelligence and other support.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Copyright 2026 The New York Times Company