U.S. and Nigerian forces killed the Islamic State’s global second-in-command in a joint operation overnight Friday, striking a compound in the Lake Chad Basin in northeastern Nigeria, President Donald Trump and Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu announced on Saturday.

The target, identified as Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, was described by U.S. officials as the Senior ISIS General Directorate of Provinces Emir — the number two figure in the terror group’s worldwide command — responsible for overseeing attack planning, directing hostage operations, and managing the group’s financial network.

“Tonight, at my direction, brave American forces and the Armed Forces of Nigeria flawlessly executed a meticulously planned and very complex mission to eliminate the most active terrorist in the world from the battlefield,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late Friday night. “Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, second in command of ISIS globally, thought he could hide in Africa, but little did he know we had sources who kept us informed on what he was doing.”

Al-Minuki, Trump said, “will no longer terrorize the people of Africa, or help plan operations to target Americans.” He added that “with his removal, ISIS’s global operation is greatly diminished.”

According to the Nigerian Army, the strike was carried out in Metele, in Borno State, where ground troops conducted a precision air-and-land operation in close coordination with U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). The operation began at roughly 12:01 a.m. local time and concluded at about 4 a.m. No U.S. service members were harmed.

Tinubu, in a statement issued Saturday morning, called the mission “a significant example of effective collaboration in the fight against terrorism.” Early assessments, he said, confirmed the elimination of al-Minuki — also known as Abu-Mainok — along with “several of his lieutenants, during a strike on his compound in the Lake Chad Basin.” The Nigerian president thanked Trump for his “leadership and unwavering support.”

Al-Minuki was a Nigerian national, born in 1982 in Borno State — the same region in which he was killed — according to documents from the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control. He was designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the State Department in 2023, during the Biden administration, a status that imposed sanctions on his assets and barred American persons from doing business with him.

He had risen through the ranks of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), the regional ISIS franchise that splintered from Boko Haram in 2016 and has waged a brutal insurgency across the Lake Chad Basin for the better part of a decade. The broader Boko Haram and ISWAP insurgency has killed thousands and displaced more than two million people across Borno and neighboring states over 17 years.

In 2024, he was listed among suspected ISWAP and Boko Haram commanders reported killed in the Birnin Gwari forest area of northern Kaduna State, a claim Nigerian officials later walked back. Bayo Onanuga, a spokesman for President Tinubu, acknowledged the earlier reported killing but said it had been “a case of mistaken identity or misattribution,” noting that the Birnin Gwari area was never within al-Minuki’s actual operational hub. “This time, however, security and military authorities maintain a far higher level of confidence,” Onanuga said.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a Saturday morning post on X that U.S. forces had been tracking al-Minuki “for months.”

“Back in November 2025, President Trump declared to the world that we will help protect Christians in Nigeria and instructed the Department of War to prepare for action,” Hegseth wrote. “So, for months, we hunted this top ISIS leader in Nigeria who was killing Christians, and we killed him — and his entire posse.”

Hegseth described al-Minuki’s role as overseeing “the planning of attacks, directing hostage-taking and managing financial operations” for ISIS worldwide. “This should serve as a reminder,” he added, “that we will hunt down those who wish to harm Americans or innocent Christians, wherever they are.”

AFRICOM commander U.S. Air Force Gen. Dagvin Anderson said in a separate statement that the strike “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.”

The operation is the second high-profile U.S. strike on ISIS targets in Nigeria in less than five months. In December 2025, AFRICOM carried out an earlier round of strikes against ISIS-linked militants at camps in the country’s northeast, killing what the command described as “multiple ISIS terrorists.”

The strikes followed a sharp escalation in Trump’s rhetoric on Nigeria last fall, when he accused the Nigerian government of failing to confront Islamists slaughtering Christians, and instructed the Department of War to prepare for direct action. Since then, Washington has deployed drones and approximately 200 U.S. troops to Nigeria in what Nigerian military officials have described as a “strictly non-combat” role focused on training, intelligence support, and targeting assistance for Nigerian operations against ISIS and Al Qaeda-linked groups spreading across West Africa.

The Trump administration’s framing of the campaign — protecting Christians from jihadist violence — has been a defining feature of its Nigeria policy, though the framing has also drawn pushback. Nigerian officials have insisted the country’s security forces target armed groups that attack both Christians and Muslims, and have rejected Trump’s characterization as discriminatory against any single religion. Boko Haram and ISWAP have, in fact, killed large numbers of Muslims as well as Christians over the course of the insurgency, particularly in attacks on villages, mosques, and security forces in the Muslim-majority north.

The killing, if confirmed at the senior leadership level Trump and Hegseth claim, would be the most significant decapitation strike against ISIS since the killing of caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2019. Abu Hafs al-Qurayshi has led the group since August 2023, according to U.S. Congressional Research Service reporting.

Though ISIS lost its territorial caliphate in Iraq and Syria years ago, its decentralized provincial structure — the network al-Minuki helped manage — has continued to project violence across Africa, Afghanistan, and parts of Europe. ISIS-K, the Khorasan affiliate based in Afghanistan, was responsible for the March 2024 Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow that killed more than 140 people. The West African province al-Minuki helped lead has conducted some of the deadliest attacks in the Sahel region in recent years.

Last year’s annual U.S. intelligence community threat assessment continued to identify ISIS as a persistent global threat despite the loss of its Iraqi and Syrian strongholds, citing in particular the strength of its African affiliates.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)