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Suspected suicide bombers struck three locations in the heart of Maiduguri on Monday evening, detonating devices at the Monday Market, a nearby post office area, and the entrance gate of the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital within minutes of each other shortly after the Ramadan iftar meal, killing an unconfirmed number of people and sending more than 200 wounded civilians flooding into the hospital’s emergency department in what emergency services described as the deadliest attack on the city in years.
The blasts occurred at the entrance of the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital and two local markets known as Post Office Market and Monday Market, according to Sirajo Abdullahi, head of operations at Nigeria’s National Emergency Management Agency in Maiduguri.
“There are casualties and they are still managing the casualties at the hospital,” Abdullahi told the Associated Press. “Many victims were rushed to the emergency ward, but some died at the hospital. We’re in dire need of blood,” he said. “This attack has been one of the deadliest in Maiduguri in years.”
Eyewitness Bagoni Alkali told the AP he had brought wounded people to the hospital for emergency treatment.
“Right now, over 200 people have been injured and are receiving care in the accident and emergency department,” he said. “While I could tell you so many people have died, to be honest, many lost their lives at the scene immediately after the bomb exploded. It’s disheartening.” Mohammed Hassan, a member of a volunteer group that often assists security forces in the northeast, said he personally evacuated ten bodies from the Post Office and Monday Market blast scenes. The total death toll had not been officially confirmed as of late Monday, with assessments still ongoing.
The explosions occurred between approximately 6:45 p.m. and 7:20 p.m., in the period just after iftar, when Muslim residents across the city had broken their Ramadan fast and markets and public spaces were at their busiest with evening activity. The timing is consistent with the tactical pattern documented in previous suicide bombing campaigns in Maiduguri, in which attackers have deliberately targeted the peak gathering hours around prayers, meals, and market activity to maximize casualties.
A fourth blast also struck the residential neighborhood of Kaleri in eastern Maiduguri. Residents described loud explosions triggering immediate panic across the city, with large numbers of people fleeing main roads and markets and returning home for safety.
Borno State Governor Babagana Zulum confirmed the attacks in a statement and said the explosions had claimed lives and injured others. “The act is utterly condemnable, barbaric, and inhumane,” Zulum said. “My thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims and those injured as a result of the blast.” He called on residents to remain calm and report any suspicious movements to security agencies. Borno State Police Command spokesperson Nahum Kenneth Daso confirmed that joint security operatives, emergency responders, and the Police Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit had been deployed. The Federal Fire Service also confirmed deploying teams to the affected areas.
No group claimed immediate responsibility for the attacks. The absence of an immediate claim is not unusual in the context of Borno State, where both Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province have a long history of conducting mass-casualty bombing campaigns against civilian markets, places of worship, and public spaces in and around Maiduguri without promptly acknowledging involvement.
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Monday evening’s bombings came less than 24 hours after security forces had repelled a separate armed attack. In the early hours of Monday, suspected Boko Haram or ISWAP fighters launched an assault on a military base in the Ajilari Cross district, a southwestern suburb of Maiduguri located a few kilometers from the city’s airport. The attack was repelled, with no casualties reported among the military or civilians. A secondary incident was also thwarted the same night in Damboa Local Government Area, south of the city. The two-pronged pattern of a failed conventional military attack followed hours later by civilian suicide bombings is consistent with ISWAP’s known operational doctrine: when direct assaults on military targets are repelled, the group has historically redirected to soft civilian targets to demonstrate continued operational capability and inflict mass psychological impact on the surrounding population.
Maiduguri had been largely spared from mass-casualty civilian bombings in recent years. The last major attack on the city dated to 2021, when Boko Haram fighters fired mortars on the city, killing ten people. The relative quiet of the preceding years had encouraged a return of commercial and social activity in the city center, with Monday Market and the post office area — both of which were struck on Monday — among the most frequented gathering points in the capital.
The attack compounds a month of deteriorating security across Borno State. Multiple military forward operating bases have been overrun by insurgents since the beginning of March, at least three commanding officers have been killed in ambushes, and significant quantities of weapons have been seized from army positions. In a separate operation in Yobe State earlier in March, more than twenty ISWAP fighters were killed when a coordinated encirclement assault on military positions in Goniri was repelled after surveillance assets detected the approach. The Nigerian military has publicly acknowledged the losses and directed reinforcements to the northeast, with President Bola Tinubu convening an emergency security summit of all service chiefs last week that resulted in the approval of additional military equipment procurement.
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The insurgency in Borno State, which Boko Haram initiated in 2009 under its founder Mohammed Yusuf, has killed more than 40,000 people and displaced approximately two million across the Lake Chad Basin over seventeen years. ISWAP split from Boko Haram in 2016 and has since become the more militarily capable of the two organizations, controlling substantial rural and semi-rural territory across the northeastern states and the Lake Chad island communities, and conducting both conventional military assaults and suicide bombing campaigns against civilian targets. The Ramadan period has historically coincided with increased operational tempo from both groups, which have ideological doctrines that incentivize martyrdom operations during the holy month.
Blood donation appeals were being circulated on social media in Maiduguri on Monday night as the hospital struggled to manage the number of casualties. No final casualty count had been confirmed by any official authority as of the time of publication. The police EOD unit continued its forensic assessment of the blast sites.
