United States President Donald Trump launched a strike against Islamic State targets on Christmas Day in response to attacks on Nigerian Christians. Last month, Trump said Christianity faces an “existential threat” in Nigeria and promised to defend Christians in the region.

• Fighters from the Islamist group Boko Haram and from an offshoot affiliated with the Islamic State called the “Islamic State West Africa Province” have been attacking Christian and Muslim civilians. Another group, called the Lakurawa group, has recently become more active. Iran also has a powerful proxy in Nigeria—the Islamic Movement of Nigeria—though it is not involved in the latest fighting.

President Trump provided few details about the strike, but an unnamed Defense Department official said it had been approved by the Nigerian government.

Nigeria’s population is split between the predominantly Christian south and the predominantly Muslim north. All manner of disputes, from the sharing of state oil revenue to arguments over grazing lands, can take on a religious dimension.

“Northern Africa is turning into a battleground with enormously important prophetic implications,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote more than 10 years ago.

Now, Mali has fallen to repeated coups, and large parts of the country have fallen to militant groups. Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad and Guinea have all experienced coups. Not all are related to Islamist groups, but the ensuing chaos gives these groups opportunities to expand.

Watch for North Africa to become a new battlefront in the intensifying struggle between Christianity and Islam. Bible prophecy forecasts that it will be Europe, not the United States, that will intervene powerfully and violently take over the leading role. This will escalate into the conflict prophesied in the passage starting in Daniel 11:40. To learn more, read Mr. Flurry’s article “Watch Algeria!”