00:00If the government in Nigeria does not stop the wide-scale slaughter of Christians there,
00:05the United States military is going to step in, guns a-blazing.
00:10That's the message from President Donald Trump.
00:15No one is really sure exactly what U.S. military action in Nigeria would look like just yet.
00:22The U.S. doesn't have a huge military presence in Africa, just about 6,500 troops or so,
00:27which means military options are a little limited.
00:31But let's go ahead and dive into what led to this moment and what that intervention could look like.
00:37We're going to start with some geography. Nigeria is located in West Africa.
00:41The capital, Lagos, is right here on the coast with the Gulf of Guinea, is what that body of water is called.
00:50Most of the U.S. military presence in Africa, though, is on the other side of the continent,
00:54in Djibouti, which is over here.
00:58Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation.
01:01More than 232 million people live there.
01:05About half of them are Christian, the other half mostly Muslim.
01:10Most of the Christians in Nigeria live in the south of the country and in an area known as the Central Belt region.
01:17So kind of this area, there's also a large Christian population in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria.
01:23Most of the north is populated by Muslims, but there are still some Christians living in this area, mostly in minority communities.
01:31Most of the massacres happening in the area, or in the country, rather, is happening right here in the northeastern part of Nigeria.
01:41That area, there's a scarcity of resources there and also lots of tribal and communal fights that could go back generations.
01:49So while President Trump is right that thousands of Christians were killed in Nigeria in recent years,
01:56thousands of Muslims were also killed.
01:58Islamic extremist groups like Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab murder both Christians and any Muslims they deem as not being Muslim enough.
02:08The scarcity of resources in the northeast of the country is also pitting farmers against herders.
02:14Most herders are Muslims, most farmers in the area are Christian.
02:20So while there may be attacks against Christians, Nigeria's government says the motivations behind those attacks were more about resources, not about religion.
02:31That's why Nigeria's president, Bolo Tenubu, says while Trump is right to want to stop the killings,
02:39it's a mischaracterization of the events on the ground to say only Christians are being killed.
02:46Tenubu and his advisors say this is a classic case of President Trump threatening force as a way to start the negotiating process.
02:54In the days since announcing possible strikes in Nigeria, the White House started walking back the military option a bit.
03:02White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt said the U.S. would immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria
03:08and may take military action if the Nigerian government did not.
03:15But let's go ahead and push things out to the right and assume President Trump is serious about military action in Nigeria.
03:21What would that look like or what could that look like?
03:24As we learned earlier, most of the U.S. troop presence in Africa is here in Djibouti, about 4,000 troops or so stationed there.
03:33That's about 2,300 miles to the east of Nigeria.
03:38Last year, the U.S. pulled out about 1,000 troops that were stationed in Niger.
03:44There was also a drone base that was in Niger.
03:48The American troops were there to monitor Boko Haram in the area, but that's gone now as well.
03:54So really the options include flying some planes or some drones over Nigeria to gather some intelligence, possibly do some strikes.
04:03There could be a possibility of putting some naval assets off the coast here in the Gulf of Guinea.
04:10That might be able to offer some possibility of Tomahawk cruise missiles doing some land strikes into Nigeria.
04:18If it's an airstrike option using planes, there's not going to be a whole lot of warning necessarily for the folks in Nigeria, for Boko Haram or the Nigerian government.
04:28If it's going to be naval assets, that takes more time to get those assets in place.
04:34They would have to sail either around Africa from the Mediterranean or the Red Sea or come over from the Caribbean or come over from the Indo-Pacific.
04:43Either way, there's just not a whole lot of U.S. naval assets in this region right now,
04:48which again is why some critics are saying President Trump is using the threat of military action in Nigeria to really kickstart negotiations
04:57and get something done about the killings taking place in the country, which are definitely happening.
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