The United States has withdrawn most of the troops sent to Nigeria earlier this year, after wrapping up a combat operation against Islamic State fighters in the country.
Gen. Dagvin Anderson, head of U.S. Africa Command, confirmed the drawdown of “much of our forces that were just there for that operation.” Speaking at the 2026 African Chiefs of Defense Conference, Anderson said that the campaign around the Lake Chad Basin in the spring “not only helped the countries in that immediate region; it also helped countries globally as that disrupted the ISIS network.”
As a result, he added, “ISIS’s leadership has been significantly degraded there.”
An AFRICOM spokesperson told Task & Purpose that the U.S.-Nigeria partnership “is ongoing and remains strong, focused on disrupting and eliminating shared security threats. At the invitation of the government, we continue to have forces in Nigeria. The number of personnel will fluctuate as required to meet requirements.”
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The United States has more than 100 service members in Nigeria for a training and advising mission, but deployed additional combat forces — including special operations personnel — this spring specifically for the operations in the Lake Chad region, Nigeria’s defense minister told Agence France-Presse.
That operation ramped up in May, with a series of airstrikes and raids in northeastern Nigeria between May 15-18. A joint U.S.-Nigerian raid targeted Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, the global second-in-command of the terrorist group. The New York Times, citing multiple officials, said that roughly two dozen commandos including members of SEAL Team 6 attacked al-Minuki’s position to capture him but after a nearly three-hour fight, the commandos called in an airstrike, killing him.
Additional strikes followed over the next few days. AFRICOM later said that approximately 200 ISIS fighters were killed in the mission.
“Nigeria has been very active since that operation in May,” Anderson said at the conference . “They continue to prosecute targets themselves.”
The drawdown of combat forces comes after several months of escalation. Last fall, President Donald Trump repeatedly threatened the use of military force in Nigeria, accusing the government of failing to protect Christians from violence; Nigeria’s government has disputed this. On Christmas, the U.S. fired several missiles into Nigeria, targeting militants in the northwestern state of Sokoto. In February, the United States sent roughly 200 service members to train its military on counter terrorism tactics, but are not combat forces, according to Nigeria.
Until this spring, most of the American operations against ISIS have been in Somalia, where the U.S. military is carrying out dozens of airstrikes against both ISIS’s arm in the country and the militant group al-Shabab. AFRICOM reports at least 69 airstrikes in Somalia this year.
