Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.
Fighters are now streaming in from around the world to wage the final, global jihad.
On May 16, President Trump killed the world’s #2 ISIS commander in a strike on his compound inside Nigeria.
Americans better start paying attention. Nigeria is not a sideline in the war on terror. It is today the center of Islamic end-times theology — what they believe is the prophesied launchpad for the one, final, global jihad Muhammad himself said would end the age.
Muhammad taught two things every Muslim child still learns. The world is divided into two houses — the house of Islam and the house of war. There will be no peace until everywhere submits. And at the end of days, a descendant of Muhammad called the Mahdi will rise, ride west under a black banner, defeat the Christian armies, and bring the whole earth under one global caliphate. For this to happen, the doctrine says, a purified Islamic platform must be ready and waiting. A launchpad. The Mahdi will appear once that platform is in place.
Every great Sunni teacher of the last hundred years has preached some version of this. Qutb in Egypt. Maududi in Pakistan. Khomeini and Khamenei in Iran. The Saudi underground that seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979. The Taliban with their black banners from Khorasan. The official ISIS magazine Dabiq, named for the prophesied final battle in Syria. The Muslim Brotherhood in America, planning what their own internal memos call a “civilizational jihad to destroy Western civilization from within.”
For 1,400 years they have been looking for the place where it would happen.
In 1804, a blood descendant of Muhammad named Usman dan Fodio launched a jihad in what is now northern Nigeria, declared himself the renewer of the age, and founded the Sokoto Caliphate — not as a country, but as the launchpad for the coming of the Mahdi. He wrote it in his own books. He preached the Mahdi would come after him, in his children’s or grandchildren’s lifetime.
The British colonizers never conquered the caliphate. They cut a deal with it. Through what they politely called “indirect rule,” they let the Sokoto throne keep running northern Nigeria as their enforcers. To the secular world they rebranded it a sultanate. To the Islamic world, its caliphate designation never changed. The institution survived. The doctrine went underground.
And the bloodline kept the seat. Dan Fodio’s great-great-grandson Ahmadu Bello promised in 1957 to conquer the south and “dip the Koran in the Atlantic.” His protégé Abubakar Gumi — known colloquially as the Ayatollah of Nigeria — spent the 1970s and 1980s wiring northern Nigeria into the Saudi Wahhabi machine. Gumi’s son, Sheikh Gumi, was spiritual advisor to the Underwear Bomber and is now the leading public advocate for the jihadis. A Gumi disciple named Muhammadu Buhari declared in 2001 he would not stop until total Sharia was implemented across Nigeria. With Barack Obama’s direct intervention, Buhari seized the presidency and held it from 2015 to 2023. Sitting on the Caliphate throne today, Sultan Sa’ad Abubakar III is the 20th hereditary heir of dan Fodio and is recognized as the spiritual head of 108 million Muslims.
One bloodline. Muhammad to dan Fodio to today’s Sultan.
And now look at what is converging in Nigeria today.
The Islamic State’s own magazine al-Naba has formally reframed Africa as the tamkin — the divinely empowered land. The long-anticipated platform. United Nations monitors report that the Nigerian ISIS affiliate, ISWAP, is now the most prolific producer of ISIS propaganda anywhere in the world.
When the Arab Spring tore open Libya in 2011, jihadi weapons, veterans, and trainers poured in from North Africa. So did hundreds of thousands of fighting-age men — straight into the recruiting arms of al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Boko Haram. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger have since fallen to military juntas that kicked out Western forces.
Eyewitness accounts from survivors of the 2014 Gwoza Massacre describe the first wave of attackers as lighter-skinned foreigners. The influx has only accelerated. In 2025, intel reports identified 200 multinational jihadis near Lake Chad in August. Sixty-three more came through Cameroon in November with armed drones. Caucasian fighters confirmed in ISWAP propaganda photosets. Foreign Arab commanders running operations on the ground.
The foreign fighters arriving in Nigeria today are not opportunists. They are pilgrims. They believe this is where Muhammad’s own prophecy is being fulfilled — and that they are privileged to offer their lives in Allah’s final jihad to global Islamic victory.
And four foreign states are actively building the launchpad with them. Turkey just signed nine military and educational cooperation agreements with Nigeria’s president — using a private military company whose own founder publicly stated his mission is “paving the way for the long-awaited Mahdi.” Iran — whose entire regime exists to hasten the Mahdi’s return — has built a three-million-strong proxy network across 35 of Nigeria’s 36 states. Saudi Arabia spent two generations seeding the doctrinal pipeline that birthed Boko Haram. And Qatar bankrolls the Muslim Brotherhood and the Al Jazeera media cover that still tells the world this is “farmer-herder conflict driven by climate change.”
The running tally since dan Fodio is staggering and almost entirely hidden from the history books. Six million dead. Ten million enslaved. Twenty-five million displaced. In 1967, just seven years after Nigeria’s independence, the mainly Christian southeast region known as Biafra tried to break away from the Caliphate-controlled, British-created nation. The federal government answered with a total blockade for the purpose of starving the rebels into submission. As many as three million Biafrans — mostly children — were killed in thirty months, with British weapons and American silence. Their dominance has run uninterrupted ever since. So has the killing: more than 125,000 Christians slaughtered since 2009, more than 20,000 churches destroyed.
Nigeria now accounts for roughly 80 percent of all Christians killed worldwide for their faith. On March 12 this year, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Brandon Shah was killed at Old Dominion University in Virginia by a U.S. citizen radicalized by ISIS in Nigeria. The Caliphate has already struck our homeland.
Nigeria’s trajectory makes this impossible to ignore. Sixth most populous nation on earth, on track to be third by 2050. Largest African economy. Top-five global oil producer. A generation of millions of displaced young people coming of age in the camps right now, ripe for radicalization. A pop-culture engine dominating streaming charts and producing more films a year than Hollywood. And the official school curriculum, for 50 million students from kindergarten through college, is being written by the world’s leading expert in “the Islamization of Knowledge.” They mean to radicalize it, ride the inevitable tide of its rising influence, and carry the black flag of jihad to every nation on earth.
The world must wake up.
You cannot negotiate with prophecy. You cannot partner with a regime whose top leaders call marauding terrorists “brothers” and “prodigal sons,” or expect sanctions to matter to them. You cannot deter a movement that believes Allah Himself has given them this assignment.
In his newly released Counterterrorism Doctrine, President Trump named Islamic jihad as the top threat to U.S. national security — and linked it directly to Nigeria. The May 16 strike proved he meant it.
Let’s hope he sees it through. If we do not finish this fight in Nigeria today, we will fight it here in our own backyard tomorrow.
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