IS leader killed in joint US-Nigerian mission, says Trump

US and Nigerian forces killed a leader of the Islamic State group in Nigeria, mission US President Donald Trump said.

Trump announced the joint operation in Africa’s most populous country in a late-night social media post that offered few details. He said Abu Bakr al-Mainuki was second-in-command of the Islamic State group globally and “thought he could hide in Africa, but little did he know we had sources who kept us informed on what he was doing”.

Al-Mainuki was viewed as the key figure in IS organising and finance, and had been plotting attacks against the United States and its interests, according to an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to share sensitive information. Nigerian President Bola Tinubu confirmed the operation and said Al-Mainuki was killed alongside “several of his lieutenants, during a strike on his compound in the Lake Chad Basin”.

According to the spokesperson for the Nigerian military task force that carried out the operation, the operation was a “highly complex precision air-land operation” and was carried out during three hours of darkness early Saturday without any casualties or loss of assets.

“His elimination represents the single most consequential counterterrorism outcome” in the region since the inception of the operation in 2015, Sani Uba, the spokesperson for the task force, said in a statement. Born in Nigeria’s Borno province in 1982, al-Mainuki took the helm of the IS branch in West Africa after the group’s previous leader in the region, Mamman Nur, was killed in 2018, according to the Counter Extremism Project, which tracks militant groups. Al-Mainuki was based in the Sahel area, the monitoring group said, adding that it is believed that he fought in Libya when IS was active in the North African nation more than a decade ago. He was sanctioned by the US in 2023.

Trump, in his social media announcement, said Al-Mainuki was “second in command globally”, hiding in Africa, a claim that some analysts say is off the mark. The military, in a statement, also said intelligence shows that earlier this year, Al-Mainuki might have been “elevated to the position of Head of the General Directorate of States, placing him the second most senior leader within the ISIS hierarchy.”

There is no way to verify his position within IS independently. Analysts say Al-Mainuki was the deputy to Abu Musab al-Barnawi, the leader of the Islamic State West African Province, who was reported to have died in 2021.

He is regarded as one of the central proponents of the formation of ISWAP, after its split with Boko Haram in 2016. “If confirmed, the killing of Al-Mainuki is huge because this is the first time a security agency has killed someone this high in the ranking of ISWAP,” Malik Samuel, a senior researcher at Good Governance Africa who specializes in insurgent groups in Nigeria, said.