- Safiu Kehinde
The United States President, Donald Trump, has threatened to launch military attacks in Nigeria over alleged Christian genocide in the country.
Trump was reported to have engaged the Pentagon on possible military action as well as the renamed Department of War.
In a social media post on Saturday, Trump said the United States would immediately cut off all assistance to the African country “if the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians”.
The US, he wrote, “may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities”, Trump added, without specifying which groups or alleged “atrocities” he was referring to.
“I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians! WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!” he declared.
The Nigerian government did not immediately respond to Trump’s threat.
According to Al Jazeera, the social media post comes a day after the US president announced that Nigeria would be added to the Department of State’s list of “Countries of Particular Concern”, which is set up to monitor religious persecution around the world.
In recent months, right-wing lawmakers and other prominent figures in the US have claimed that violent disputes in Nigeria are part of a campaign of “Christian genocide”.
While human rights groups have urged the Nigerian government to do more to address unrest in the country, which has experienced deadly attacks by Boko Haram and other armed groups, experts say that claims of a “Christian genocide” are false and simplistic.
Speaking with Al Jazeera, Ebenezer Obadare, a senior fellow for Africa Studies at the Washinton, DC-based Council on Foreign Relations, said that Trump was right in identifying a lacking response from the Nigerian government towards Boko Haram.
Obadare said that those facing persecution in Nigeria included “not just of Christians…but Muslims, non-Christians, agnostics, everybody in between”. He added that the Trump administration should work with Nigerian authorities to address the “common enemy”.
“This is precisely the moment when Nigeria needs assistance, especially military assistance,
“The wrong thing to do is to invade Nigeria and override the authorities or the authority of the Nigerian government. Doing that will be counterproductive.” Obadare said.