Nigeria said Friday it provided the United States with intelligence on terrorists before the strikes by US forces against what President Donald Trump said were Daesh terrorists in the northwest of the country.

The US strikes come after Abuja and Washington were locked in a diplomatic dispute over what Trump characterised as mass killings of Christians amid the West African country's myriad security challenges.

The Nigerian authorities and researchers have always dismissed Trump’s claims that terrorists particularly target Christians in Nigeria as false, saying the terrorist groups carry out indiscriminate attacks on civilians irrespective of their religious backgrounds.

"It's Nigeria that provided the intelligence," Nigerian Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar told Nigerian broadcaster Channels TV, saying he was on the phone with US State Secretary Marco Rubio.

‘Ongoing process’

"We spoke twice. We spoke for 19 minutes before the strike and then we spoke again for another five minutes before it went on," Tuggar said.

He added that they spoke "extensively" and that President Bola Tinubu gave "the go ahead" to launch the strikes.

The strikes would be an "ongoing process" that would also involve other countries, he said without disclosing details.

He stressed that Nigeria's approach to the fight against terrorism was not influenced by the religion of the victims, "whether they are Muslims or Christians, and irrespective of what type of terrorism".

Trump said on social media he had "previously warned these terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was."