At least 23 people have been killed and more than 100 others injured in multiple suspected suicide bombings in the north-eastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, shattering its reputation as a relative oasis of calm in recent years as a long-running insurgency was pushed to the rural hinterlands.
Authorities said the explosions went off at the post office and market areas, as well as the entrance to the University of Maiduguri teaching hospital, on Monday evening during iftar, the breaking of fast in the month of Ramadan.
The post office and Monday market areas were regularly targeted by suicide bombers at the height of Nigeria’s Boko Haram insurgency, when Maiduguri was a conflict hotspot.
Ten years ago this month, 58 people were killed and more than 140 others injured in four separate suicide blasts including in both locations, in one of the deadliest days in the city’s history.
The latest explosions came on the heels of an attack at a military post on the outskirts of the city, the capital of Borno state, on Sunday night into Monday morning. While no group has yet claimed responsibility for the incident, Nigerian authorities said the reported bombings had been carried out by “suspected Boko Haram terrorist suicide bombers” using improvised explosive devices.
“The cowardly attacks targeted crowded public areas in an attempt by the terrorists to inflict mass casualties and create panic within the metropolis,” Sani Uba, a military spokesperson, said in a statement.
More than 2 million people have been displaced and hundreds of thousands killed in the region by Boko Haram and its offshoots, including the Islamic West Africa Province (ISWAP), as they battle the Nigerian state in an attempt to establish an Islamic caliphate.
Boko Haram was founded in 2002, but intensified attacks after the extrajudicial killing of its then leader, Mohammed Yusuf, in July 2009. During the regime of his successor, the more aggressive Abubakar Shekau, the sect splintered, with ISWAP becoming the more dominant faction and regularly engaging in lethal turf war with its rivals.
Most of the resulting terrorist activity has occurred in rural hinterlands outside Maiduguri, the birthplace of the insurgency. Until a Christmas Eve bombing at a mosque killed at least five people and wounded dozens more last year, there had not been a major attack since 2021 in the city. The mosque attack happened a day before airstrikes by the US in conjunction with Nigeria against Islamic State militants in the north-west.
Last April, the Borno governor, Babagana Zulum, raised the alarm that the jihadists were staging a comeback. Many fear that his warning, which led to a spat with federal authorities, was not properly heeded.
On Tuesday morning, President Bola Tinubu, who is on a state visit to the UK, announced that he had directed security chiefs to relocate to Maiduguri “to take charge of the situation” and “locate them, confront them and completely defeat them”.
