Arizona Tribune - US strikes targeted IS militants, Lakurawa jihadists, Nigeria says

The exact targets of the strikes, launched overnight Thursday into Friday, had been unclear.

Washington and Abuja previously said they targeted IS-linked militants, without providing details on which of Nigeria's myriad armed groups were attacked.

"ISIS, Lakurawa and bandits were targeted," Daniel Bwala, a spokesman for President Bola Tinubu, told AFP on Saturday.

"ISIS found their way through the Sahel to go and assist the Lakurawa and the bandits with supplies and with training," he said.

The Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP) group is active in neighbouring Niger, as well as Burkina Faso and Mali, where it is fighting a bloody insurgency against the governments of those countries.

While Nigeria has long battled its own, separate jihadist conflict, analysts have been worried about the spread of armed groups from the Sahel into the west African country.

"The strike was conducted at a location where, historically, you have the bandits and the Lakurawa parading around that axis," Bwala said.

"The intelligence the US government gathered, also, is that there is a mass movement of ISIS from the Sahel to that part."

There were casualties, but it was unclear who among those targeted were killed, Bwala added.

The site of the strikes -- in Nigeria's northwest state of Sokoto -- has puzzled analysts, since Nigeria's jihadist insurgency is mostly concentrated in the northeast.

Researchers have recently linked some members of the armed group known as Lakurawa -- the main jihadist group located in Sokoto State -- to the ISSP.

Other analysts have disputed those links, however, and research on Lakurawa is complicated as the term has been used to describe various armed fighters in the northwest.

- Diplomatic spat -

In the northwest, the biggest security concern is that from criminal gangs known as bandits.

They loot villages, conduct kidnappings for ransom and extort farmers and artisanal miners across swathes of rural countryside outside of government control.

On Friday, Information Minister Mohammed Idris said the strikes hit "two major Islamic State (ISIS) terrorist enclaves" in Sokoto state's Tangaza district.

Other villages were hit by what the information minister said was debris from the strikes.

Images from an AFP photographer in Offa, in neighbouring Kwara state, showed crumbled buildings with roofs caved in and belongings scattered among the wreckage.

The strikes -- which US President Donald Trump said he pushed back to happen on Christmas Day in order to "give a Christmas present" to the militants -- come after a diplomatic spat between Washington and Abuja.

Trump accused Nigeria in October and November of allowing "persecution" and "genocide" against Christians.

The Nigerian government and independent analysts reject that framing of the country's violence, which has long been used by the US religious right that backs Trump.

The country faces multiple conflicts -- from jihadists and bandits to farmer-herder violence and southeastern separatists -- that kill both Christians and Muslims.

On Christmas Eve, a suspected suicide bomber killed at least five people in an attack on a mosque in northeastern Borno state.

After the strikes, Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar said: "It is a joint operation, and it is not targeting any religion nor simply in the name of one religion or the other."

P.Smith--AT