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By Juan Cole for Informed Comment
The Trump administration’s strike on Sokoto State in the far northwest of Nigeria had no legal basis in U.S. law. The United States is not at war with Nigeria, and Congress hasn’t authorized any such actions, as is required by Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the US Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Resolution.
Ironically, the strike was fully supported by the Muslim president of Nigeria, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and coordinated with the federal military. Nigeria’s Daily Post is more positive about the operation than most US newspapers. It says that US naval vessels in the Gulf of Guinea launched 16 guided MQ-9 Reaper missiles at “two major Islamic State ISIS terrorist enclaves located within the Bauni Forest axis of Tangaza Local Government Area, Sokoto State.”
So Trump’s attempt to configure the action as a Christian strike in defense of Christians (for his Evangelical base) is a stretch. He seems actually to have worked hand in glove with Tinibu and the Nigerian Muslim elite to hit a mutual problem. Although parts of Nigeria, especially the northeast, are poor and conflict-ridden, there is no evidence that Christians suffer worse from this violence than Muslims — people from both communities have been kidnapped, brutalized, and killed by forces such as Boko Haram.
The increasing dryness in the Sahel region because of human-driven climate breakdown is at the root of some of the accelerated competition for resources that produces this violence.
The group that was struck at only actually has tenuous links to ISIL, the so-called Islamic State group. It is likely Lakurawa , who are part of a northwestern Nigerian Pied Piper of Hamlet story. I’ll explain below.
It is not clear whether some missiles went astray or what, but it wasn’t only the Bauni Forest area that received fire. Some rockets landed in the fields of farmers outside the town of Jabo, which confused them no end since they don’t have a history of ISIL presence, according to interviews done by Nimi Princewell at CNN.
Juan Cole
Juan Cole, a TomDispatch regular, is the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation From the Persian and Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires. His latest book is Peace Movements in Islam. His award-winning blog is Informed Comment. He is also a non-resident Fellow of the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha and of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).
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