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A series of coordinated airstrikes in North-East Nigeria has killed 175 ISIS fighters and dismantled key nodes of the terror network’s operational infrastructure in the region, with the confirmed death of a man U.S. and Nigerian officials described as one of the most consequential ISIS operatives anywhere in the world.
The Defence Headquarters in Abuja disclosed the casualty figures Tuesday, citing assessments completed as of May 19. The operations, conducted jointly by the Nigerian Armed Forces and the United States Africa Command, began several days ago and targeted ISIS positions, supply lines and command structures across the northeast.
The single most significant outcome was the killing of Abu-Bilal al-Minuki.
Nigerian military authorities described al-Minuki as one of ISIS’s most globally significant operatives — a figure who did not direct battlefield assaults so much as make them possible. He ran the network’s financing channels, managed recruitment pipelines, coordinated logistics and oversaw external attack planning directed at civilian populations in Nigeria and beyond. His death, the Defence Headquarters said, has fractured ISIS command and coordination at a level that will reverberate well past the northeast.
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President Donald Trump had confirmed al-Minuki’s killing on Friday alongside President Bola Tinubu, characterizing the militant as the most operationally active terrorist in the world and asserting he ranked second in the ISIS global hierarchy. Trump added that al-Minuki had calculated he could evade capture on African soil — a calculation that proved fatal.
Three other named commanders were killed alongside him. Abd-al Wahhab, identified as a senior ISWAP leader responsible for coordinating attacks and channeling propaganda across the network’s distribution systems, was among those confirmed dead. So were Abu Musa al-Mangawi, a senior ISWAP member, and Abu al-Muthanna al-Muhajir — al-Minuki’s close associate and the man who ran ISWAP’s media production apparatus.
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The breadth of what was destroyed on the ground underscores how the operation was designed: not as a targeted assassination mission but as a systematic dismantling effort. Military authorities confirmed the destruction of ISIS checkpoints, weapons caches, logistical hubs, military equipment and the financial networks that kept the organization funded and mobile. Taken together, the losses represent the kind of multi-layer degradation that counterterrorism planners describe as setting a network back by months or years rather than days.
Director of Defence Information Major General Samaila Uba, who issued the military’s formal statement, said the operations would not stop. Nigerian forces and AFRICOM, he indicated, intend to continue hunting remaining ISIS elements threatening stability in the region.
Monday’s announcement from the Defence Headquarters — that more than 20 ISWAP fighters had been killed in fresh airstrikes earlier in the week — now reads as a precursor to Tuesday’s fuller accounting. The pace of confirmed kills across the span of a few days suggests the joint operation has been running at a sustained tempo rather than as a single strike event.
The northeast has been the epicenter of Nigeria’s jihadist insurgency for more than fifteen years, with Boko Haram’s original uprising eventually fracturing into multiple armed factions, including ISWAP, which pledged allegiance to the Islamic State’s central leadership. That connection to the broader ISIS network is what made al-Minuki’s presence in the region operationally significant far beyond Nigeria’s borders — and what made his elimination a priority for both Abuja and Washington.
For AFRICOM, the partnership with Nigerian forces reflects a broader U.S. posture of working through African military partners rather than deploying American troops into direct ground combat roles.
The coordination required to execute strikes at this scale and with this level of confirmed senior-commander kills points to intelligence-sharing arrangements that have clearly been deepened in recent months.
What the 175 dead and the gutted command structure leave behind is an ISIS presence in Nigeria’s northeast that is operationally degraded, financially disrupted and, for now, without several of the men who knew best how to rebuild it.
