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President Donald Trump said late Friday that U.S. and Nigerian forces had killed one of the Islamic State group’s highest-ranking leaders in an operation in Africa, where the United States has been targeting Islamic militants who the president says are killing Christians.

In a social media post, Trump said the leader, Abu-Bilal al-Mainuki, had been killed Friday night in a “very complex mission” carried out at his direction by U.S. forces and the Nigerian military.

Al-Mainuki was designated a terrorist and one of the Islamic State group’s leaders by the State Department in 2023. He was a Nigerian citizen, according to the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which had sanctioned him.

Three U.S. officials said Saturday that al-Mainuki was killed in a helicopter-borne assault carried out by about two dozen Nigerian and U.S. commandos, which included members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6. The commandos attacked him and about three dozen fighters on two small islands in Lake Chad, the officials said.

Heavy fighting ensued over a nearly three-hour battle. The U.S. military sought to capture al-Mainuki, but when it became clear he would not surrender, the Americans killed him with an airstrike rather than risk letting him escape, said one of the officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters. No U.S. or Nigerian military casualties were reported, they said.

Military analysts are now poring through the cellphones, laptop computers and other electronic records recovered for information on the recruiting, operational and financial activities of the Islamic State branches in Africa and elsewhere in the world, the U.S. officials said.

Trump and the U.S. and Nigerian militaries identified al-Mainuki as the second-most-senior leader in the Islamic State group. The U.S. officials said al-Mainuki oversaw the group’s global operations, media, recruitment and finances. They said he was directly involved in plots including the kidnapping of an American missionary pilot in Niger last fall.

“Al-Minuki provided strategic guidance to the ISIS global network on media and financial operations as well as the development and manufacturing of weapons, explosives and drones,” the U.S. military’s Africa Command said in a statement Saturday.

Nigeria’s Foreign Ministry said al-Mainuki had been responsible for recent attacks on the military in the country’s northeast.

This article originally appeared in .

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