Eager faces filled the dingy hospital ward’s windows, craning for a glimpse of the alleged terrorist. The police had brought him in a few hours earlier, saying he and a friend had been examining some explosives that detonated prematurely. The blast had killed the friend and left the 25-year-old Mohammed Ahmed too badly injured to flee the scene. Now, flanked by police officers with assault rifles, he lay on a rickety iron bed in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna, enduring the whispered taunts of strangers, blood seeping through the bandages on his deeply burned legs. He insisted he had nothing to do with bombmaking and was only keeping his friend company. The police saw it differently. “We think he was part of a team,” a detective standing nearby explained, over the din of excited children. “We went into the house. We saw everything: wires, batteries, pliers, chemicals. They were making them there. This was a network ... a terrorist organization.”

Until recently, few people outside Nigeria had ever heard of Boko Haram. Even among Nigerians, the terrorist group’s obscure aims, together with the general incompetence of young militants like Ahmed—who got himself blown up this past April—led most people to regard it as little more than a nuisance. No longer. For the second Christmas in a row, the group unleashed a series of highly coordinated church bombings, wreaking mass carnage on holiday services. The attacks, evidently designed to provoke broader violence between the country’s Christians and Muslims, left more than 50 dead and capped a year in which the ultrasecretive Islamist movement transformed itself from a local oddity into an organization capable of undermining the precarious unity of Africa’s most populous nation.

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