Nigerian and American forces have killed Abu-Bilal al-Minuki, a senior Islamic State (IS) commander, in a joint precision operation targeting his compound in Metele, a border community in Borno State in north-eastern Nigeria, near the edge of the Lake Chad Basin — a vast region of waterways and swampland shared by Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon. US President Donald Trump announced the operation in a late-night social media post, describing al-Minuki as the "second in command of ISIS globally" and "the most active terrorist in the world." Nigerian President Bola Tinubu confirmed the strike, saying it dealt "a heavy blow" to the Islamic State.
The operation was conducted by Nigeria's Operation Hadin Kai joint task force alongside US Africa Command (AFRICOM) and was described as a "highly complex precision air-land operation" carried out during three hours of darkness early Saturday, following months of intelligence gathering, communications intercepts, and human intelligence work. Officials say security agencies initially sought to capture al-Minuki alive, which partly explains the extended surveillance period before the final strike was authorised. No casualties or losses were reported on the Nigerian-American side. AFRICOM subsequently released footage of a battle damage assessment. Al-Minuki was killed alongside several of his lieutenants.
Born in Borno State in 1982, al-Minuki was a former senior Boko Haram commander who became a leading figure when the group pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2015. He is regarded as a central architect of the formation of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) after its split from Boko Haram in 2016, and took command of the West African branch after the previous regional leader was killed in 2018. Nigerian and US intelligence assessments indicate he had more recently been elevated to head the IS General Directorate of States, placing him among the most senior figures in the global IS hierarchy. He was sanctioned by the United States as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2023. Authorities also linked him to the 2018 Dapchi kidnapping, in which more than 100 schoolgirls were abducted in north-eastern Nigeria.
The announcement has been met with some public scepticism inside Nigeria, because the military made an earlier claim in 2024 that al-Minuki had been killed in Kaduna State — a claim the government now attributes to mistaken battlefield identification. The Nigerian presidency insists that this operation underwent "far stricter verification procedures" involving multiple intelligence sources. The history of premature death announcements in the region is well established: former Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau was declared dead approximately six times before his confirmed death in 2021.
Analysts nevertheless describe the outcome as potentially significant. "If confirmed, the killing of al-Minuki is huge because this is the first time a security agency has killed someone this high in the ranking of ISWAP," said Malik Samuel, a senior researcher at Good Governance Africa. The Lake Chad Basin has long served as a stronghold for Boko Haram and ISWAP, and IS affiliates in sub-Saharan Africa now account for roughly 90% of the group's attacks worldwide following the collapse of its caliphate in Syria and Iraq in 2017. The operation is the latest in a series of joint US-Nigerian counterterrorism actions and reflects deepening security cooperation between the two countries, which has included the deployment of US advisory troops and drones to Nigeria earlier this year.