Two hundred US troops are coming for ISWAP. The bandits raiding your village aren't the target.

Two hundred American troops are deploying to Nigeria. Advisory capacity, training support, no combat role. Nigerian forces retain operational command. The focus is the Northeast: ISWAP, Boko Haram, the insurgency that fits American counterterrorism categories and triggers American resource mobilisation.

That framing matters. Because the violence killing and kidnapping the most Nigerians right now is concentrated in the Northwest and the North-central. Bandits. Herders-farmers attacks. Armed groups operating without territory, without international network affiliations, and without the designation that would make them a US foreign policy problem.

Nigerian soldiers killed 16 ISWAP fighters this week. That's a real result from a real operation, and it matters for communities in Borno and Yobe who have lived under that threat for over a decade. But the family taken on the Kaduna highway, the farmers buried after a village raid in Plateau, the worshippers killed in Kogi last month, they're casualties of a different conflict. One that 200 American advisers aren't here to address.

The US has its own reasons for its counterterrorism priorities. They don't map neatly onto where Nigerians are actually dying. That gap is worth naming every time another foreign intervention gets announced.