10 years into extremist rebellion, no reprieve for Nigeria’s displaced

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Monitoring desk
MAIDUGURI
Maiduguri resident Ahmed Muhammed wanders through the rubble left behind as he recalls the outbreak of fighting in his city a decade ago that launched the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria.
“We heard shooting — badadadadadada — here, there, everywhere around us,” the 44-year-old railway worker told AFP.
“We thought the end of the universe had come.”
In late July 2009, tensions between the hard-line Islamist sect and authorities in northeast Nigeria boiled over as the group launched a wave of attacks and security forces fought back ruthlessly.
The epicenter of the violence was the compound of the group’s founder Muhammad Yusuf.
After several days of fighting, Yusuf and hundreds of Boko Haram members were dead and a conflict had been unleashed that would devastate the region.
The mosque and the homes that once stood there are now just a pile of debris — an unmarked monument to the suffering of the past 10 years.
In the decade since the uprising began, some two million people have been uprooted from their homes and 27,000 killed as the bloodshed has spilt into neighboring countries.
Boko Haram has turned vast swathes of territory into a no man’s land and forced its way into international headlines by abducting hundreds of schoolgirls.
While the Nigerian army has pushed the fighters from major towns, the jihadists have splintered into factions and spawned an offshoot aligned to the Daesh group that has unleashed its own campaign of violence.
Waves of the conflict crashed over Hadiza Bukar’s village near Baga close to the shores of Lake Chad in 2015 when Boko Haram fighters stormed through the area.
Bukar fled with her newborn twin sons, leaving behind her husband and two other children.
She has not heard from them since.
What remains of the family is now among the roughly quarter-of-a-million people displaced and struggling to survive in and around Maiduguri, capital of Borno State.
Studded across the city are government-approved camps and informal settlements of corrugated iron, sticks and shreds of tarpaulin.
The only place Bukar found to live is at the ground zero of the insurgency that tore her life apart. Her makeshift home stands on the edge of the ruins of Yusuf’s former compound.
When the downpours come in the rainy season the place turns into a quagmire.