Nigeria said Friday it provided the United States with intelligence on jihadists before the Christmas Day strikes by US forces against what President Donald Trump said were Islamic State militants in the northwest of the country.

The US strikes come after Abuja and Washington were locked in a diplomatic dispute over what Trump characterised as mass killings of Christians amid the west African country’s myriad armed conflicts.

“It’s Nigeria that provided the intelligence,” Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar told broadcaster ChannelsTV, saying he was on the phone with US State Secretary Marco Rubio.

“We spoke twice. We spoke for 19 minutes before the strike and then we spoke again for another five minutes before it went on,” Tuggar said.

He added that they spoke “extensively” and that President Bola Tinubu gave “the go ahead” to launch the strikes.

The strikes would be an “ongoing process” that would also involve other countries, he said without disclosing details.

He stressed that Nigeria’s approach to the fight against terrorism was not influenced by the religion of the victims, “whether they are Muslims or Christians, and irrespective of what type of terrorism”.

Trump said on social media he had “previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was.”

The Department of Defense’s US Africa Command said “multiple ISIS terrorists” were killed in an attack in Sokoto state, using an acronym for the Islamic State group.

AFP