Nigeria, March 23 -- On the evening of 16 March, as families in Maiduguri prepared to eat their evening meal, a series of coordinated suicide bombings ripped through the city. The attacks struck the Monday Market axis, the post office corridor, the entrance to the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital, and the Kaleri area, leaving at least 23 people dead and 108 others injured. But these were not nameless statistics. They were traders closing for the day, students making their way home, patients and visitors gathered near a hospital gate, and ordinary residents trying to navigate an already strained city. Yet as so often happens, their humanity was swiftly compressed into a chilling headline: "at least 23 killed, over 100 injured."

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