Soldiers sit sweltering in bunkers made from sandbags on the streets of Maiduguri, a town in north-eastern Nigeria at the centre of a four-year Islamist revolt. Around them, young boys on clanking bicycles carve through sand blown in from the Sahara, which has been slowly burying a town that was once, long ago, a thriving Islamic trading centre. It now faces desertification, literal and figurative. This month Nigeria's army launched its most determined effort yet to crush Boko Haram, a terror group whose campaign to create an Islamic state in the religiously mixed country has led to the deaths of about 3,000 people in the past four years.
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