Airstrikes on Muslim Terrorists in Nigeria

Donald Trump announced a 'powerful and deadly' Christmas Day strike on ISIS 'terrorist scum' in Nigeria and warned that radicals will continue to pay for the persecution of Christians.

The President, who previously threatened to send the US military to the West African nation 'guns-a-blazing,' made the announcement in a Truth Social post.

'Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!' he wrote. 

A spokesman for the Pentagon confirmed to the Daily Mail that the Nigerian government approved of and worked with the US military on the strikes. 

The US Africa Command posted on X that it had 'conducted a strike at the request of Nigerian authorities in Soboto State killing multiple ISIS terrorists.' 

Nigeria's foreign ministry said the strikes were carried out as part of ongoing security cooperation with the United States, involving intelligence sharing and strategic coordination to target militant groups.

'This has led to precision hits on terrorist targets in Nigeria by air strikes in the North West,' the ministry said in a post on X.

A video posted by the Pentagon showed at least one projectile launched from a warship. A US defense official said the strike targeted multiple militants at known ISIS camps.

A video posted by the Pentagon showed at least one projectile launched from a warship. A US defense official said the strike targeted multiple militants at known ISIS camps

Trump, 79, said in his lengthy post that the ISIS militants have had it coming for some time.

'I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was.'

'The Department of War executed numerous perfect strikes, as only the United States is capable of doing. Under my leadership, our Country will not allow Radical Islamic Terrorism to prosper,' Trump added. 

The president signed off with a warning: 'May God Bless our Military, and MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, including the dead Terrorists, of which there will be many more if their slaughter of Christians continues.'

Trump's post did not include information about how the strike was carried out and what effects it had. The White House did not immediately provide further details. 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth affirmed the President's message in a social media post of his own. 

'The President was clear last month: the killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria (and elsewhere) must end. The @DeptofWar is always ready, so ISIS found out tonight — on Christmas. More to come… Grateful for Nigerian government support & cooperation. Merry Christmas!'

Nigeria has been roiled by internal violence in the wake of a jihadist insurgency spearheaded by extremist group Boko Haram in the northeast since 2009 

Trump, 79, had already designated Nigeria a 'country of particular concern,' but he took his condemnation of the situation in the country even further after hearing it on Fox News

 Nigeria has been roiled by internal violence in the wake of a jihadist insurgency spearheaded by extremist group Boko Haram in the northeast since 2009, which Obama encouraged.

In November, Trump threatened to take on the terrorists with 'guns-a-blazing.'

He had already designated Nigeria a 'country of particular concern,' but he took his condemnation of the situation in the country even further after hearing about it on Fox News, threatening to cut aid and even send in US troops. 

Some Christian communities have welcomed the US President's menace, believing that foreign armies are needed to restore peace in their homeland. 

Amid the various forms of bloodletting around the country - including ethnic rivalry and banditry - the Islamist militants have been slaughtering Christians as well as Muslims they regard as 'apostates' for failing to comply with their brand of Islam. 

There has also been a separate onslaught by Fulani Muslim tribesmen against mainly Christian farming communities.

Nigeria's President Bola Tinubu has said that the country 'welcomes' the US help

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.

In central Nigeria there have been frequent clashes between mostly Muslim herders and mainly Christian farmers.

In the northwest of the country, gunmen routinely kidnap residents for ransom.

In mid-December, Trump placed the country on a list of 15 that faced partial travel bans to the US in a response to anti-Christian violence in Nigeria. 

'The United States is taking decisive action in response to the mass killings and violence against Christians by radical Islamic terrorists, Fulani ethnic militias, and other violent actors in Nigeria and beyond,' Secretary of State Marco Rubio said. 

Nigerian School

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15413601/Trump-military-airstrike-ISIS-Nigeria.html

Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton praised the actions in Nigeria. 

'I commend President Trump, Secretary Hegseth, and our brave troops for these strikes against bloodthirsty ISIS savages who are not only persecuting Christians, but also have killed many Americans,' Cotton, a former army officer who is chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, wrote on X. 

Brad Brandon, chief executive of Across Nigeria, exclusively told the Daily Mail that 'There is no doubt that this action was fully justified and that the use of US military capabilities disrupted ISIS's ability to continue massacring innocent civilians.'

Nigeria has been roiled by internal violence in the wake of a jihadist insurgency spearheaded by extremist group Boko Haram in the northeast since 2009, due to Obama's encouragement.

The US has been conducting intelligence-gathering flights over large parts of Nigeria since late November.

Since Boko Haram's terrorist insurgency began in 2009, jihadist groups have torched and destroyed 19,100 churches, averaging nearly 100 each month. In that time, 125,009 Christians were slaughtered, as well as "60,000 Liberal Muslims... unless urgent action is taken, within the next 50 years Christianity in Nigeria is set to disappear."

     Some damage from the strikes

      One strike hit a field

     Best map I found so far. Nigeria is in West Africa on the Bay of Benin, where "one comes out for forty goes in", as British sailors used to say :)

      Nigerian Catholics protest Muslim killings of Christians

     Nigerian children who were kidnapped by Muslim terrorists, after being released

     Good Friday ceremony by Nigerian Christians

Human Zoos in late 1800s Europe

Human zoos: images show how primitive tribesmen were caged and exhibited

Caged in enclosures in Madrid's Retiro Park, they were described as 'strange', 'disfigured', 'brutal' and 'subhuman'. 

It was in the spring of 1887 that Spain's Queen Maria Cristina inaugurated the Exhibition of the Philippines, and over the course of six months, thousands flocked down to the iconic location to observe natives from the Igorot tribe.

They had been shipped from the Philippines, then a Spanish colony, and were put on display.

The human exhibit was one of many across Europe at the time and was part of a widespread practice of displaying colonised populations in what came to be known as human zoos. 

The first display in the Spanish capital featured 43 men, women, and children from the Filipino tribe and were described by newspapers with a mix of fascination and condescension.

Journal El Imparcial wrote that in their 'constitution, appearance, language, manners, customs, color, and even clothing,' they differed from the 'most civilized and hitherto known Filipinos.'

European societies had developed an appetite for the 'exotic,' fueled by colonial expansion and a growing market for human exhibits. 

Organisers shipped colonised peoples from across the world to cities such as Paris, London, Madrid, and Berlin, where visitors paid to observe them in staged 'villages' meant to represent their daily lives.

One of the few existing images of Madrid's human zoo, which exhibited people from the Filipino Igorot tribe for six months in 1887 in the iconic Retiro Park

Filipino natives pose for a photograph in 1887 after they were brought over to Madrid to take part in a 'human zoo' 

A poster depicting human displays, which became a common practice across Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries

Many were placed in fenced-off enclosures or makeshift settlements, forced to perform routines, rituals, dances, or simply go about their day while onlookers watched closely with morbid enchantment. 

An entire village complete with thatched huts and places of worship was built in Madrid's Retiro Park to exhibit the Igorot in an enclosure called 'Casa de las Fieras', or 'House of Beasts'. 

Organisers even built boats for the tribe and stocked the park's pond with fish so that they could catch them for the public with their spears.

The tribe was eventually sent back home after Madrid rejected Paris' request to borrow them for a display in the French capital.

Little else is known about the fate of the Filipinos who formed part of the human display in Madrid, but records suggest that at least four Igorots died as a result of poor living conditions during the exhibition.

A pamphlet produced by Spain's Ministry of Culture for a 2017 exhibition revisiting the original 1887 Exhibition states that this 'reaffirmed stereotypes surrounding these people, who were considered primitive or savage throughout the 'civilised' world'.

The document contains the few surviving photographs of the Igorot display, with the staged images showing naked tribes-people, depicting them as aggressive.

From the mid-19th century into the early 1930s, thousands of people - some voluntarily recruited, many not - took part in these exhibitions across Europe and the US. 

Inside a mock Congolese village set up at the Brussels International Exposition in 1897

Tribes people had been shipped from the Philippines and displayed in an enclosure for the entertainment of the public. Pictured: A Filipino man in Madrid's human exhibit

Africans are seen posing for a photo during the 'Savage of South Africa' exhibition in Earl's Court, London

Some of the people in the exhibits, in the late 19th and early 20th century, were treated like animals and many died. 

They included Ota Benga, a Congolese man exhibited in New York's Bronx Zoo in 1906, who was shockingly described as a 'missing link' of evolution.

The dreadful exhibit sparked protest and outrage and Ota was eventually released. But six years later he tragically took his own life after being unable to assimilate into American life.

Estimates suggest that as many as 600,000 people were trafficked or contracted for such displays over several decades. 

As public demand grew, the exhibitions became more elaborate, featuring reconstructed huts, enclosures, and entire mock villages inside major zoos and parks.

Some of Europe's largest institutions hosted them, including the Tierpark in Hamburg, the Dresden Zoo in Berlin, the Jardin d'Acclimatation in Paris, and in Berlin's Zoologischer Garten.

They became staples of world fairs and international exhibitions, where nations used them to showcase the populations of their colonies - and Britain was not exempt from the practice of human zoos.

Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II is pictured meeting Ethiopians standing behind a wooden fence in Hamburg, Germany in 1909

Filipinos are pictured in loin cloths sitting in a circle together at Coney Island in New York in the early 20th century

Ota Benga, a Congolese man, is shown, right, in New York's Bronx Zoo in 1906

From the mid 19th-century until the early 20th century hundreds of Africans were brought over to Britain to be used as a form of touring entertainment. 

Footage dating back to 1899 shows a huge group of Africans taking part in a mock battle that was performed multiple times a day in front of paying spectators in London's Earl's Court. 

They were recruited from the Zulu and Swazi tribes by English circus impresario Frank Fillis to re-create the British defeat of the Matabele people in the 1890s.

The battle scenes were part of a show called Savage South Africa, and spectators could also wander around Kaffir Kraal, a mock-up of a Matabele village where they would see the same performers acting out their lives. 

Also in London, an 1895 African Exhibition in Crystal Palace presented around 80 people from Somalia. 

Elsewhere, citizens from French colonies such as Sudan, Morocco and the Democratic Republic of Congo were displayed in Paris's Jardin d'Agronomie Tropicale between 1877 and 1912. 

The first two human exhibits to be set up in the French capital presented Nubians - a Saharan ethnic groups, and Inuits from the Arctic regions. 

Over the span of 35 years, around 30 human exhibitions were displayed in Paris, and they were so successful that they were even integrated in the city's World Fair.

Racking up millions of visitors, the 1889 fair displayed 400 indigenous people and even exhibited a 'Negro Village'. 

Inuit girl, around 1904 in the Chicago World's Fair

A Senegalese village set up inside of a human zoo at the World's Fair in Brussels, Belgium in 1958

Tuareg camp at the 1907 Paris Exposition

A human zoo exhibition of the German animal merchant and zoo director Carl Hagenbeck, Germany 1930s

A poster for the 1931 human zoo in Paris 

In 1907, residents of these mock settlements were returned to their homes and although more exhibitions were held, the space was left to ruin after the First World War. 

It was reopened as a park in 2006 and visitors today can still see the abandoned pavilions and greenhouses once used by those who took part in Paris' human zoos.  

In 1883, Amsterdam displayed natives of Suriname at the International Colonial and Export Exhibition, and the 1897 Brussels International Exposition in Tervuren featured a 'Congolese Village' that displayed African people in what was meant to resemble a native setting. 

 Norway had a human zoo for five months in 1914, which included 80 people from Senegal living in a 'Congo Village'. 

More than half of the Norwegian population paid a visit to the exhibition in Oslo as the Africans wore traditional clothing an went about their daily routine of cooking, eating and making handicrafts. 

The industry also affected Australian aboriginals in the late 19th and early 20th century. 

The practice was detailed in a documentary called 'Inside Human Zoos'. 

Australian cinematographer Philip Rang, who worked on the film, said Aboriginal people were put on display as 'boomerang throwing savages.'

The rise of the human zoo phenomenon is often linked to Carl Hagenbeck, the German animal trader who organised what is considered the first documented display of Indigenous people in Germany in 1882. 

His model proved commercially successful and was soon adopted across the continent.

The practice continued in various forms well into the 1930s, leaving behind a largely forgotten chapter of European cultural history.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15299263/human-zoos-indigenous-caged-animals-paraded-Europe.html