Tinubu Just Invited Turkey to Build a Jihad Academy in Nigeria
BY MIKE ARNOLD
On April 19th, Nigeria signed a deal to build a permanent Turkish military training facility on its soil. The Nigerian government is calling it “counterterrorism cooperation.”
Turkey runs its military expansion across Africa through a private company called SADAT, founded in 2012 by Adnan Tanriverdi, who was Erdogan’s personal chief military adviser. SADAT’s stated mission — in their own documents — is assisting the Islamic world to achieve military supremacy over what they call “colonist countries of crusade mentality.” That is not a security contractor. That is a religious war with a payroll.
Even more shocking is how SADAT staffs its operations. AFP, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and Foreign Policy magazine have all documented that SADAT recruits its trainers from Syrian jihadist networks — men who fought for al-Nusra, men who fought for ISIS — and deploys them across Africa under the cover of military training agreements exactly like the one Nigeria just signed. Nigeria’s own intelligence consultancy has confirmed SADAT personnel are already on Nigerian soil. When that training facility opens, the men teaching Nigeria’s special forces will be veterans of the organizations Nigeria is supposedly fighting.
They are not coming to stop the jihad. They are coming to train it.
To understand how Nigeria got here, you need to know who recommended it.
After Trump ordered the Christmas Day airstrikes on ISIS in Sokoto, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi went on television and told Nigeria to immediately end all military cooperation with the United States, naming Turkey as one of his preferred replacements. Most people know Gumi as the cleric who photographs himself with the terrorists and lobbies for amnesty for the people slaughtering Christians.
In 2010, Saudi Arabia arrested Gumi in Mecca and held him for more than six months at the request of the United States government, after American investigators found email correspondence between Gumi and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — the Nigerian underwear bomber who tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 with 289 people on board. A WikiLeaks cable identified Gumi as one of those who groomed Abdulmutallab, who is now serving four consecutive life sentences in federal prison. Gumi got out only because the Nigerian government intervened on his behalf.
Then in May 2025, Saudi Arabia denied Gumi entry for the Hajj pilgrimage and deported him. The country that produced fifteen of the nineteen September 11th hijackers decided Ahmad Gumi was too radical to let in for prayer. Gumi himself acknowledged the Saudis were “uncomfortable about my presence.”
This is the man Tinubu listened to when he decided to replace American military partnership with Turkish. Within weeks of Gumi’s recommendation, Tinubu flew to Ankara and signed nine agreements with Erdogan. Four months later came the military base deal. Worth noting: Gumi obtained his Turkish visa on October 16, 2025 — two days after my press conference in Abuja confirming the Nigerian Christian genocide generated more than three billion global impressions.
There is also a prior history between Turkey and Nigerian terrorists that deserves to be on the record. In May 2017, Nigerian authorities intercepted an illegal Turkish arms shipment at Lagos port — 440 rifles. Five months before that, a similar seizure of 661 rifles through the same pipeline. A 2014 recording reported by AFP and the American Enterprise Institute captured what appeared to be Turkish Airlines officials discussing arms shipments to Boko Haram, with a stated preference that the weapons kill only Christians. Nigeria’s military announced an investigation. Then, as tends to happen in Nigeria, it went quiet.
That is the country now building a military training facility on Nigerian soil.
Consider what Tinubu has done in eighteen months. He put the author of a manifesto calling for the purging of Western education from every Nigerian classroom in charge of the national curriculum for fifty million children. He runs a program rehabilitating surrendered jihadists with government money while Christian farmers who defended their villages are sentenced to death. His National Security Adviser armed Miyetti Allah — named in US Magnitsky sanction legislation — and called the men responsible for 125,000 dead Christians his brothers. He hired Washington lobbyists to call the genocide survivors political props. And now he has signed a deal for a jihad training facility staffed by veterans of ISIS and al-Nusra.
These are not separate decisions. Tinubu is methodically institutionalizing jihad across every institution of Nigerian life — the schools, the military, the government, the narrative — and he is doing it in plain sight.
Boko Haram’s name means Western education is forbidden. Tinubu put their academic twin in charge of the national curriculum. Now he has invited their military cousins to train his army.
They are not here to stop the jihad. They are here to train it.
