Trump threatens war over religious freedom issue | Political News

President Donald Trump’s controversial threats to launch army motion against Nigeria, one of America’s key African companions, caught his own advisers off guard.

Trump warned he would invade Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” if the Nigerian authorities failed to take stronger motion to shield Christian civilians from assaults by Islamic extremists. The president issued his weekend threats of army intervention after viewing a Fox News section on the subject.

The Washington Post now studies the president’s threats caught by shock “even those who had been pushing the issue,” and triggered “immediate concern” among confused officers at United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), which manages U.S. army operations across the area.

Personnel from the division had been instructed to keep concentrated on makes an attempt to rescue an American missionary kidnapped in October, The Post added.

A source told The Post that those efforts had been “of greater value than anything that can be achieved” in Nigeria, contemplating the constrained assets obtainable to broaden current operations in the nation, studies the Mirror US.

One day before declaring his willingness to launch a army marketing campaign in Nigeria, the president had announced he would designate Nigeria as a “country of particular concern”– a classification that sometimes applies to state actors thought of to have dedicated or in any other case permitted “particularly severe violations of religious freedom.”

Click right here to comply with the Mirror US on Google News to keep up to date with all the latest news, sports activities and leisure tales. Right-wing Christian nationalists are accusing the Nigerian authorities of turning a blind eye to Islamic extremist teams’ mass assaults on civilians in Nigeria’s “Middle Belt’ and north-central states.During his first term, Trump designated Nigeria as a ” and north-central states.

During his first time period, Trump labeled Nigeria as a “country of particular concern”, a designation that was later reversed by the Joe Biden administration, stating that Nigeria “did not meet” the mandatory legal standards.

The Wall Street Journal reported this past Sunday that Pentagon officers and White House aides had been shocked by the president’s announcement.

Since then, the West African nation has resorted to diplomatic channels to search clarification on the U.S. president’s feedback and to stress that any exterior help must respect Nigeria’s sovereignty.

President Bola Tinubu has also publicly dismissed Trump’s portrayal of Nigeria as “religiously tolerant,” arguing that such a description “does not reflect our national reality” in a nation where Christians and Muslims each make-up about half of the population.

“Religious freedom and tolerance have been a core tenet of our collective identity and shall always remain so,” he said. “Nigeria opposes religious persecution and does not encourage it.”