Nigeria has been out of U.S. headlines since President Donald Trump launched missile strikes against Islamic State targets in Nigeria on Christmas, but the United States has quietly continued to increase cooperation with the Nigerian military to start 2026. The Christmas Day strikes were seemingly a one-off, largely symbolic event for Trump to follow through on his October promise to protect Christians in Nigeria. U.S. officials held an inaugural working group meeting with their Nigerian counterparts to address violence against Christians, and have since said that the United States plans to increase material and intelligence support for Nigerian forces to enable Nigeria to take the lead.
This kind of military cooperation will lead to quick, quantifiable outcomes such as drone strikes and terrorists killed, but military action alone will not protect Nigeria’s Christians in the way the President and his allies hope. The armed abduction of 300 Catholic schoolchildren in early January highlights that the strikes did little to address the much wider problem. If U.S. officials truly want to protect Nigerians, they’ll need to engage the country’s complex security landscape and support Nigerians to pursue much needed—albeit frustratingly hard to quantify, long-term, and nuanced—efforts related to local mediation, policing, and resource sharing.
Since the Trump administration heightened its focus on Nigeria, the U.S. has flown almost daily intelligence operations surveilling Salafi-jihadi and some bandit strongholds across northern Nigeria. These flights are part of a much larger program of U.S.-Nigerian security cooperation. In late 2025, the U.S. has hosted several high-level Nigerian delegations focused on security and established a U.S.-Nigerian military framework. The framework will reportedly accelerate the delivery of 24 military grade helicopters and enable U.S. strikes against armed groups throughout the country.
While this cooperation is certainly a step in the right direction, a securitized response alone will fall short of addressing religious violence. Nigeria’s religious violence is a result of a broader, more complex security landscape involving multiple actors. Islamic State—linked militants and the infamous Boko Haram, that U.S. security cooperation is predominantly focused on, are the most public perpetrators of this instability, massacring tens of thousands of Christians and Muslims who resist their radicalism in Nigeria’s Muslim-majority northeast and spreading in small numbers to the northwest in recent years.
Less in the spotlight, ethnic militias and roving bandits in Nigeria’s Middle Belt are equally if not more responsible for the thousands of Nigerian citizens killed. Open Doors, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) researching the persecution of Christians, reported that Fulani Muslim militias operating in Middle Belt states were responsible for 55 percent of Christian deaths in Nigeria from 2019 to 2023. Furthermore, Reuters reported in July 2025 that bandits had killed 2,226 people in the first half of 2025, more than Salafi-jihadists over the same period and the entirety of bandit-correlated deaths in 2024.
These numbers signal but fail to fully capture that while religion undeniably plays a role in how violence manifests, the root driver of the violence is resources, not religion. Communal insecurity, particularly in the Middle Belt, is largely driven by longstanding tensions over scarce resources between Fulani Muslim pastoralists and sedentary Christian farming communities. Bandits in majority Muslim northern Nigeria are similarly less concerned with religious affiliations and more concerned with plundering resources, which has in some cases led to opportunistic cooperation with jihadists that has little to do with religion.
As the U.S. continues to increase its role in Nigerian security, it should take a more holistic approach that pairs military action against armed groups with a focus on addressing the core issues of this cyclical violence. Salafi-jihadi groups have entrenched themselves in Nigeria’s periphery since 2010 and remained resilient to both government led-counterinsurgency campaigns and Salafi-jihadi infighting. Degrading these organizations in the short- to mid-term will require enhanced intelligence collaboration and air support for Nigerian counterinsurgency operations that target these groups’ strongholds. Kinetic action must be carefully Weakening these organizations in the long term will require pairing a securitized approach with some of the same non-kinetic efforts discussed next in regard to non-Salafi-jihadi conflict.
As U.S. officials look to quickly and cheaply push for structural change, their best chance for success will be pushing for pre-existing Nigerian-led reforms that have gone unimplemented. Pursuing a comprehensive approach that addresses “root causes” sounds reminiscent of the last several decades of U.S. state-building efforts, something the U.S. is increasingly unwilling and unable to do. Supporting pre-existing Nigerian efforts helps address “root causes” while being cognizant of the fact that the era of large-scale U.S.-backed state building is over.
The U.S. should hold its Nigerian allies accountable for promises made to strengthen the capacity of the Nigerian police and support Nigerian initiatives on the issue. In November, President Tinubu ordered the police to recruit an additional 20,000 officers to address the police’s lacking capacity. Months later, he floated the idea of deploying police tasked with escorting officials elsewhere. Nigerian police are the only Nigerian security force capable, despite their limited capacity, to secure rural communities across Nigeria. The Nigerian military, which has at this point been responsible for maintaining communal security, is beyond overstretched, fighting Salafi-jihadists, bandits, and other insurgencies throughout the country, securing Nigeria’s borders, and on standby for regional crises, such as the recent coup in Benin. The U.S. can provide technical and training support for new police units, a traditionally used U.S. tool, to help Nigeria address this police capacity challenge.
The U.S. should support Nigerian and Nigerian-supported NGO efforts to pursue communal land resource agreements across the Middle Belt. Resource agreements are a proven method to resolve cyclical violence. Several Nigerian- and U.S.-accredited NGOs such as Humanitarian Dialogue (HD), Mercy Corps, and Pastoral Resolve, have implemented such agreements in the Middle Belt. The agreements facilitated the access and joint management of water, forests, farmlands, markets, and land demarcation leading to substantial reductions in violence between participating farming and herding communities. The U.S. should work with the Nigerian government and NGO experts to help scale these efforts.
The U.S. should urge its Nigerian allies to strengthen and institutionalize the role of traditional leadership, such as communal elders and religious leaders. Traditional leadership in the Middle Belt is pivotal to the resilience of resource agreements and deterring the recruitment of youth into armed groups. NGOs have reaffirmed this through their work in the Middle Belt, finding that traditional authorities were key to securing land resource agreements, aligning customary laws to peace efforts, leading communal mediation, and linking community mechanisms with more formal governance structures. HD also found that enhancing traditional leadership led to a more cohesive communal identity, a potential deterrent to youth recruitment into armed groups. Again, state-led or -funded agreements could scale this success across the Middle Belt.
As the U.S. continues to map its involvement in Nigeria, it must remember that civilians lie at the center of the problem. To ensure the U.S. doesn’t alienate the very population it intends to help, U.S. military officials must ensure there is no collateral damage or civilian deaths, and political officials must avoid using the same charged Christians versus Muslims framing that the Islamic State uses to recruit. Furthermore, the U.S. should identify ways to work with the Nigerian government to address issues at the communal level in addition to the security expertise the U.S. brings to bear. Nigerians are experiencing firsthand the result of an overly securitized approach, which has led to the current crisis.
Liam Karr is a the Africa Team Lead for the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. Miles Charles is an Africa analyst at AEI.
