LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — President Donald Trump said that a joint operation by U.S. and Nigerian forces killed a top leader of the Islamic State group in Nigeria.Trump wrote in a social media post that the mission in the early hours of Saturday targeted Abu Bakr al-Mainuki, who was part of the top leadership of the local IS chapter in West Africa.Nigeria’s government and military said the operation in the Lake Chad Basin, a stronghold of Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), was the result of a recently formed partnership with the U.S government.
Abu Bakr al-Mainuki was a ‘specially designated global terrorist’Al-Mainuki was born in 1982 in Mainok, or Mainuki, a village in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno, the heart of an insurgency crisis following the formation of the Boko Haram militant group around 2009. He became one of the key commanders of ISWAP following its split from Boko Haram, and was a deputy to Abu Musab al-Barnawi, the ISWAP leader who was reported to have died in 2021.A Nigerian military spokesperson said he was a “key ISIS operational and strategic figure” who was central to the group’s media operations, finances and weapons development. The military also said that recent intelligence indicated he might have been appointed as “Head of the General Directorate of States,” making him second-in-command within the global IS hierarchy, a claim also made by Trump but disputed by some analysts.In 2023, the U.S. Department of State listed him as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.”
