In a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote: “If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities.”

He added: “I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action” and warned that if the US attacks: “it will be fast, vicious, and sweet.”

Trump’s warning comes as evidence mounts that Africa has become the world’s most active front in Islamist terrorism. Security researchers have described the continent as “an emerging global epicentre of terrorism.” The European Union Institute for Security Studies estimates that more than half of all conflict violence targeting civilians in Africa arises from Islamic terror groups.

A report by the American Enterprise Institute, a US think tank, notes that Islamic terror groups “linked to al Qaeda and the Islamic State are spreading and strengthening in Africa” and warns that “these groups will grow more lethal over time as they develop military and nonmilitary capabilities.” The report adds that African jihadist movements will “drive an increased transnational terror threat as they mature” and could one day launch regional or global attacks.

The scale of the crisis is stark. The Global Terrorism Index shows that countries such as Mali, Nigeria, Niger, Chad, the DRC, Kenya, and Mozambique now face greater terrorist threats than Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, or Pakistan.

According to Aid to the Church in Need, a Christian aid group: “Across Africa, from sub-Saharan Africa to East Africa, there are at least a couple of dozen terrorist organizations that have the ambition, from their point of view, to install caliphates in their territories.” The Hudson Institute observes that the common thread in attacks against Christians is “radical Islamist ideology, which infects individual Muslims, local mosques and villages, and coalesces into terrorist organizations.”

The brutality of these attacks has shocked even hardened observers. Across Africa, thousands of Christians are killed each year in assaults that often involve beheadings and the burning of worshippers alive in their churches.

Trump’s post marks one of the first serious statements by a Western political leader on the issue of Islamist groups murdering Christians in Africa. Whether it signals a broader policy shift remains unclear, but it is sure to draw new attention to a continent that security experts increasingly describe as the central battlefield of twenty-first-century jihadism.