Nigeria says U.S. help against insurgents must respect its sovereignty

Nigeria said on Sunday it would welcome U.S. help in fighting Islamist insurgents as long as its territorial integrity is respected, responding to threats of military action by President Donald Trump over what he said was the ill treatment of Christians in the West African country.

Trump said on Saturday that he had asked the Defense Department to prepare for possible "fast" military action in Nigeria if Africa's most populous country fails to crack down on the killing of Christians.

"We welcome U.S. assistance as long as it recognizes our territorial integrity," Daniel Bwala, an adviser to Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, told Reuters.

Trump on Sunday told reporters that the U.S. military could deploy troops to Nigeria or carry out air strikes to stop what he called the killing of "very large numbers" of Christians there, but gave no further details.

"I envisage a lot of things," Trump said aboard Air Force One, without elaborating.

Bwala sought to play down tensions between the two states, despite Trump calling Nigeria a "disgraced country."

"We don't take it literally because we know Donald Trump thinks well of Nigeria," Bwala said.

"I am sure by the time these two leaders meet and sit, there would be better outcomes in our joint resolve to fight terrorism," he said.

Nigeria, a country of more than 200 million people and around 200 ethnic groups, is divided between the largely Muslim north and mostly Christian south.

Islamist insurgents, such as Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province, have wrought havoc in the country for more than 15 years, killing thousands of people, but their attacks have been largely confined to the northeast of the country, which is majority Muslim.

While Christians have been killed, the vast majority of the victims have been Muslims, analysts say.

In central Nigeria, there have been frequent clashes between mostly Muslim herders and mainly Christian farmers over access to water and pasture, while in the northwest of the country, gunmen routinely attack villages, kidnapping residents for ransom.

Nigeria "does not discriminate against any tribe or religion in the fight against insecurity," Bwala said. "There is no Christian genocide."

"Insurgent groups, such as Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa, often present their campaigns as anti-Christian, but in practice their violence is indiscriminate and devastates entire communities," said Ladd Serwat, a senior Africa analyst at U.S. crisis-monitoring group ACLED.

"Islamist violence is part of the complex and often overlapping conflict dynamics in the country over political power, land disputes, ethnicity, cult affiliation, and banditry," he said.

ACLED research shows that out of 1,923 attacks on civilians in Nigeria so far this year, the number of those targeting Christians because of their religion stood at 50. Serwat said recent claims circulating among some U.S. right-wing circles that as many as 100,000 Christians had been killed in Nigeria since 2009 are not supported by available data.