US AFRICOM Commander Confirms Deployment of ‘Small Team’ of Troops to Nigeria

The head of US Africa Command said on Tuesday that the US has deployed a “small team” of troops to Nigeria, comments that come more than a month after the US launched its first missile strikes in the country on Christmas Day.

It’s unclear when the US troops were sent to Nigeria, but AFRICOM Commander Dagvin Anderson said that it came after he and Nigerian President Bola Tinubu held talks in Rome during the Aqaba Process summit in October 2025, before President Trump threatened to go into Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” if the Nigerian government didn’t do more to protect Christians.

“We were able to share some thoughts and agree that we needed to work together on a way forward in the region,” Anderson told reporters during a digital press briefing. “That has led to increased collaboration between our nations, to include a small US team that brings some unique capabilities from the United States in order to augment what Nigeria has been doing for several years.”