US President Donald Trump on Saturday issued an extraordinary threat to deploy American forces to Nigeria, accusing the West African nation of failing to stop what he claimed was the

widespread killing of Christians by Islamist militants.

In a series of fiery social media posts, Trump alleged—without providing evidence—that “Radical Islamists” were carrying out a “mass slaughter” of Christians in Nigeria. He said he had instructed the Pentagon to draw up plans for a potential strike, warning that an intervention would be “fast, vicious, and sweet.”

“If the Nigerian government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will stop all aid and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists,” Trump wrote.

Nigeria has long wrestled with multiple overlapping conflicts, including jihadist insurgencies and violent clashes between farming and herding communities—violence that analysts emphasize has claimed lives among both Christians and Muslims.

Despite this complexity, Trump doubled down Saturday, framing the situation as an existential threat to Christianity in Africa’s most populous nation. Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth amplified the president’s comments, posting “Yes sir,” alongside Trump’s threat and stating that the Department of War was preparing for possible action.

Trump’s allegations echoed claims by several US conservative politicians. Earlier this year, Congressman Chris Smith pushed for Nigeria to be designated a “Country of Particular Concern,” a label the Trump administration formally applied on Friday. In October, Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Riley Moore accused the Nigerian government of ignoring the “mass murder” of Christians.

Nigerian authorities have strongly rejected the accusations.

“The characterisation of Nigeria as religiously intolerant does not reflect our national reality,” President Bola Ahmed Tinubu said in a statement Saturday, stressing that religious tolerance remains central to the country’s identity.

Nigeria is split almost evenly between a Muslim-majority north and a predominantly Christian south. The country continues to face a grinding insurgency in the northeast, where Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province have killed more than 40,000 people since 2009. Meanwhile, clashes between herders and farmers in central regions—often framed as religious conflict—are largely driven by competition over land and resources. Photo by Subomi07, Wikimedia commons.