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Nigeria’s military announced Tuesday that a series of joint air and ground strikes carried out with the US military’s Africa Command (AFRICOM) over the past several days has now killed 175 ISIS fighters in the country’s northeast.

Getting into it: According to Nigerian Defense Headquarters spokesman Major-General Samaila Uba, assessments as of May 19 indicate that 175 ISIS fighters have been “eliminated from the battlefield” in the joint operations, which also wiped out the group’s logistics hubs, weapons stockpiles, military gear, financing networks, and checkpoints across the northeast. “The joint strikes have further reinforced what the Armed Forces of Nigeria have consistently done over the years – hunt down and kill terrorists anywhere they are in Nigeria.” AFRICOM separately backed up that same 175 figure.

The strikes follow the killing last weekend of Abu-Bilal al-Minuki (whom both the US and Nigeria described as ISIS’s global second-in-command and “the most active terrorist in the world”), which was the first time in over a decade of fighting this insurgency that Nigeria had managed to take out a militant leader that senior. Beyond al-Minuki (who the Nigerian military and AFRICOM say oversaw ISIS’s global media and financial operations as well as “the development and manufacturing of weapons, explosives and drones”), the Nigerian military said the recent strikes also killed three additional senior figures: Abd-al Wahhab (an ISWAP senior leader who handled attack planning and the group’s propaganda), Abu Musa al-Mangawi (a high-ranking ISWAP member), and Abu al-Muthanna al-Muhajir (a senior figure on the group’s media production side and a close associate of al-Minuki).

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said that al-Minuki specifically “targeted Christians in Nigeria” and that his death “severely disrupts ISIS command, operational coordination, and external attack networks.”

This all comes as the US has dramatically escalated its military involvement in Nigeria in recent months as part of a campaign that President Trump has framed around protecting Nigerian Christians, who he has repeatedly claimed are the targets of a genocide being waged by Islamist terrorist groups (a characterization that the Nigerian government has rejected, pointing out that the killing has hit Christians and Muslims alike).