A patient lay on a metal gurney at a teaching hospital in Maiduguri on Sunday, her skin coated in the grey dust of a pulverised marketplace. This was the scene 24 hours after a Nigerian military airstrike, conducted with US-backed intelligence, hit the village of Jilli in a remote desert region. While the military initially declared the mission a successful strike on a “known terrorist enclave,” eyewitnesses on the ground reported a different reality. The more than 100 people killed were traders, community members, women, and children who had gathered for the weekend market. First came the thunderous boom, then the air billowed with thick black smoke as fires erupted across the stalls of the Jilli bazaar. This is the human cost of Imperial Triage: while Washington redirects its Patriot missile batteries to guard oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, its secondary allies are left to conduct “anti-terror” operations with a reckless disregard for civilian life. The carnage in Jilli is not an anomaly but a pattern. The Nigerian military, a key U.S. ally against Boko Haram, has faced repeated accusations of liquidating civilian centers under the guise of security. As the world watches the naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, the bodies at Jilli are being buried in the sand, victims of a machine-led war where the distinction between “terrorist” and “trader” is increasingly decided by a remote algorithm.