Trump Says U.S. and Nigerian Forces
Killed the #2 Commander
of ISIS Worldwide.
Late Friday night, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that brave American forces and the Armed Forces of Nigeria had “flawlessly executed a meticulously planned and very complex mission to eliminate the most active terrorist in the world from the battlefield.” The target was Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, a 44-year-old Nigerian from Mainok in Borno State, designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the U.S. State Department on June 8, 2023.
Saturday morning, U.S. Africa Command and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (R) confirmed the strike. AFRICOM said the operation took place in Northeastern Nigeria, on al-Minuki’s compound in the Lake Chad Basin, and that “multiple terrorists, to include Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, the director of global operations for ISIS, as well as other senior ISIS leaders, were killed.” No U.S. service members were harmed.
Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu publicly thanked Trump and said the operation was the product of a recently formed U.S.-Nigeria partnership. The Pentagon described al-Minuki as the senior emir of the ISIS General Directorate of Provinces— the body that runs ISIS’s external province network — and called him the number two for ISIS globally.
- 44years oldAl-Minuki was born in 1982 in Mainok, Benisheikh area of Borno State, Nigeria — AFRICOM / Leadership (Nigeria)
- Jun 8, 2023SDGTDesignated Specially Designated Global Terrorist by U.S. State Department — Treasury / State public record
- 5thISIS senior kill since 2019Following al-Baghdadi (Oct 2019), al-Qurayshi (Feb 2022), al-Qurayshi II (Oct 2022), al-Hussein (Apr 2023)
- 0U.S. lossesNo U.S. service members harmed in the operation — U.S. Africa Command initial assessment, May 17, 2026
The news broke the way Trump-era national-security news usually breaks now: a post on Truth Social, late Friday night Eastern Time, written in the first person. The President said the operation had been conducted at his direction; named the target by name; and identified him as the second-in-command of ISIS globally.
“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.”
President Donald J. Trump · Truth Social · late May 16, 2026 ET (as transcribed by Fox News, CNN, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg)
The post continued with the name — and a line that, in counter-terror messaging, is the operative phrase: “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.” Trump closed with a statement of effect: “He will no longer terrorize the people of Africa, or help plan operations to target Americans.”
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. 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. He will no longer terrorize the people of Africa, or help plan operations to target Americans.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Reproduced from contemporaneous press transcripts (Fox News, CNN, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg). Truth Social post-ID was not in the public record at publication; we render this as a paraphrased quote card rather than an iframe to avoid a broken embed.
A massive blow to ISIS today. President Tinubu and the Armed Forces of Nigeria were extraordinary partners. Together we will continue to hunt down the worst killers on the planet. Americans are safer tonight.
Paraphrased commentary · not a verbatim post
Editorial paraphrase of Trump's Saturday follow-on Truth Social posts on the strike, consistent with NBC News, NPR, and The Hill reporting.
U.S. Africa Command issued its formal release on Saturday, May 17. The release confirmed the strike and the date, identified the senior target by name, and listed the chain of command: “At the direction of the President of the United States and the Secretary of War, and in coordination with the Government of Nigeria, U.S. Africa Command conducted an operation against ISIS in Northeastern Nigeria on May 16, 2026.”
“The command's initial assessment is that multiple terrorists, to include Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, the director of global operations for ISIS, as well as other senior ISIS leaders, were killed during this operation.”
U.S. Africa Command · official press release · May 17, 2026
AFRICOM described al-Minuki’s portfolio in unusually concrete terms. He had been providing strategic guidance to the ISIS global network on media and financial operations as well as the development and manufacturing of weapons, explosives, and drones. AFRICOM also said he had a significant history of involvement in attack planning and directing hostage-taking. The command released a roughly one-minute aerial video of the strike, distributed through its public-affairs channels and quickly mirrored to YouTube.
What: A strike against an ISIS compound in Northeastern Nigeria, in the Lake Chad Basin.
When: May 16, 2026. Confirmed publicly the next day.
Who was killed:Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, described by AFRICOM as “the director of global operations for ISIS,” plus several lieutenants and other senior ISIS personnel.
Who participated: U.S. Africa Command and the Armed Forces of Nigeria, in coordination with the Government of Nigeria and acting at the direction of the President of the United States and the Secretary of War.
U.S. casualties: None reported.
Beneath the political language — “second in command,” “director of global operations” — sits a fairly specific paper trail. Al-Minuki was 44 years old at the time of his death. He was a Nigerian national, born in 1982 in the village of Mainok, in the Benisheikh area of Borno State — the same northeastern Nigerian state that has been the operational heartland of Boko Haram and its ISIS-aligned successor, the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), since 2014.
On June 8, 2023, the U.S. State Department designated al-Minuki a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) under Executive Order 13224. The designation identified him as a “Sahel-based ISIS GDP al-Furqan Office senior leader.” The GDP — the ISIS General Directorate of Provinces — is the body that runs the franchise’s external province network, from West Africa (ISIS-WA / ISWAP) through Greater Sahara to Khorasan (ISIS-K) and beyond. The al-Furqan Office is its media and external-operations arm.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (R), posting Saturday on X, gave the Pentagon’s formal title:
“Abu-Bilal al-Minuki was the senior ISIS General Directorate of Provinces Emir — the number two for ISIS globally.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (R) · X · May 17, 2026
Analysts at CNN and at The Nationalnoted that the “global #2” framing is contested terminology. Al-Minuki sat atop the GDP — a senior post, controlling external provinces and operational planning — but he was not the caliph and was not located in Iraq or Syria. The shape of ISIS’s top tier since the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (2019) is opaque by design, and successive U.S.-and-Turkish kills of the central caliphal line through 2023 have arguably shifted real operational weight outward to the GDP and the provinces. By that reading, “the number two” and “the director of global operations” are not contradictory descriptions — they describe what the job has become.
SDGT (Specially Designated Global Terrorist):Under Executive Order 13224, the U.S. State Department, in consultation with the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, can freeze the U.S. assets of and prohibit U.S. transactions with anyone determined to have committed, or pose a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism that threaten the United States.
Al-Minuki’s designation, June 8, 2023:publicly announced by then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken; identified him as a “Sahel-based ISIS GDP al-Furqan Office senior leader” with a documented role in attack planning, hostage-taking direction, and the development of weapons, explosives, and drones for the ISIS network.
Effect of the designation:any U.S. property or interest of al-Minuki was blocked; any U.S. person dealing with him faced sanctions. The designation was the formal recognition that he was, in U.S.-government terms, a strategic ISIS asset — not just a regional fighter.
The Nigerian government’s account, conveyed by President Bola Ahmed Tinubuin a Saturday-morning statement and amplified by Channels Television and Daily Post, made the bilateral element explicit. Tinubu thanked Trump personally and said the strike was the product of a recently formed counter-terror partnership. The Nigerian president’s office said the operation took place at al-Minuki’s compound on the Lake Chad Basin, in the country’s northeast.
“Nigeria appreciates this partnership with the United States in advancing our shared security objectives. I look forward to more decisive strikes against all terrorist enclaves across the nation.”
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu of Nigeria · Saturday-morning statement · May 17, 2026
Operationally, AFRICOM’s release describes the strike as having followed months of intelligence gathering and surveillance. Neither the U.S. nor Nigerian government has, at this writing, published unit designations — whether a U.S. Special Operations Command Africa (SOCAFRICA) element executed the strike, whether the Armed Forces of Nigeria’s elite Special Operations Command (NASOC) or the Multinational Joint Task Force participated on the ground, or what aircraft delivered the weapon. The aerial-strike video AFRICOM released suggests an airborne platform; it does not confirm whether it was an MQ-9 Reaper, a fixed-wing strike aircraft, or a rotary-wing asset.
What is confirmed: there was a U.S. strike. There were Nigerian forces in the chain. Al-Minuki and a number of his lieutenants did not survive it. The Nigerian government regards the operation as a success and wants more of them.
The al-Minuki strike fits a sustained cadence of senior-leader kills going back to October 2019. Five caliphs or near-caliphs have been killed since al-Baghdadi detonated his suicide vest in Idlib. Each kill has been hailed as a strategic blow. ISIS as an organization, however, has not collapsed — it has decentralized. The GDP and the provinces have moved up in operational weight, which is precisely what makes a kill at al-Minuki’s level — senior GDP emir, hands-on attack planner, weapons-development supervisor — more consequential than the title alone might suggest.
Northeastern Nigeria does not sit on most American mental maps. It should. Borno State, where al-Minuki was killed, is the eastern edge of the Sahel — the 5,000-kilometer band of semi-arid territory south of the Sahara that has become, over the past five years, the deadliest theater of jihadist conflict on earth. The Lake Chad Basin itself is the geographic and operational pivot between Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, and the home turf of both Boko Haram and ISWAP.
Three regional shifts make the al-Minuki kill more than a one-off:
1. ISWAP’s resurgence. A 2025 Small Wars Journal analysis from Arizona State University documents more than 300 ISWAP attacks in the first half of 2025 alone — on Nigerian military formations, infrastructure, humanitarian facilities, and civilians — killing hundreds. Foreign jihadists, primarily from Arab countries, were reported flowing into ISWAP ranks as combatants and tactical instructors.
2. France out, Wagner in. France formally withdrew its Operation Barkhane counter-terror force from Mali (2022), Burkina Faso (2023), and Niger (2023) after a string of military coups. Russian state-aligned mercenaries (formerly Wagner, now Africa Corps) moved in. ECOWAS — the West African economic and security bloc — lost its three Sahel members (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger) to the new Alliance of Sahel States (AES) in 2024.
3. The bilateral pivot.With the multilateral counter-terror architecture in pieces, Washington and Abuja have rebuilt the relationship bilaterally. The al-Minuki strike — conducted by AFRICOM with Nigerian forces, at the direction of the U.S. President “in coordination with the Government of Nigeria” — is the first major operational result of that pivot.
Read against that backdrop, Tinubu’s call for “more decisive strikes against all terrorist enclaves across the nation” reads less like diplomatic boilerplate and more like an explicit ask. Nigeria has lost tens of thousands of civilians to Boko Haram and ISWAP since 2009. Abuja has been asking Washington for sustained kinetic partnership for years. The Trump administration appears to have said yes.
The four officials whose words are the public record on this strike — Trump, Hegseth, the AFRICOM commander, and Tinubu.
“He will no longer terrorize the people of Africa, or help plan operations to target Americans.”
President Donald J. Trump · Truth Social · May 16, 2026
“The removal of him and other ISIS personnel makes Americans safer by further degrading ISIS's ability to plan and carry out attacks that threaten the U.S. homeland, American citizens, and innocent civilians.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (R) · X · May 17, 2026
“This operation underscores the exceptional value of the U.S.-Nigeria partnership and was made possible through cooperation and coordination of our forces.”
Gen. Dagvin Anderson · U.S. Africa Command · press release · May 17, 2026
“I look forward to more decisive strikes against all terrorist enclaves across the nation.”
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu of Nigeria · public statement · May 17, 2026
Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R) had not, at this writing, issued a separate State Department statement on the strike; the State Department’s public hook is the standing June 8, 2023 SDGT designation, which is now operative against a target who no longer exists.
The official accounts on X — Department of War, AFRICOM, the Secretary of War, the White House — are the primary U.S.-government social record. The cards below route to the live posts on x.com.
Yesterday, U.S. forces, in coordination with the Armed Forces of Nigeria, killed Abu-Bilal al-Minuki and other ISIS leaders. Al-Minuki was the senior ISIS General Directorate of Provinces Emir— the number two for ISIS globally. Americans are safer tonight.
At the direction of the President and the Secretary of War, and in coordination with the Government of Nigeria, U.S. Africa Command conducted an operation against ISIS in Northeastern Nigeria on May 16, 2026. Initial assessment: multiple terrorists, including Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, killed. No U.S. service members were harmed.
Tonight, at the President’s direction, U.S. and Nigerian forces eliminated ISIS’s #2 commander, Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, from the battlefield. He will no longer threaten Americans or terrorize the people of Africa.
The aerial-strike video AFRICOM released has been mirrored across U.S. and international broadcast and explainer channels.
A Specially Designated Global Terrorist, designated in 2023, was killed on his Lake Chad Basin compound on May 16, 2026 by a joint U.S.-Nigerian operation. AFRICOM confirmed the strike Saturday. Trump named him — Abu-Bilal al-Minuki — from Truth Social late Friday and called him the second-in-command of ISIS globally; the Pentagon’s precise title is senior General Directorate of Provinces emir. Either way, he was running ISIS’s external operations, and now he is not. The Sahel security architecture France abandoned in 2023 is being rebuilt, bilaterally, in Abuja. Tinubu’s response was a request for more.