Jos, Nigeria -- Patience Dassah, a smartly dressed young Nigerian, has recently had trouble getting a taxi. But her trouble with okadas, the motorcycles that zip through the streets here in Africa's most populous country, does not lie with the typical traffic jams or fuel shortages.

"I live in a mostly Christian area, and now my Muslim okada driver will not take me there," she says, explaining that he is too afraid of being attacked or even killed. "He won't even pick up my calls."

Ms. Dassah lives in Jos, a city in central Nigeria now caught in a cycle of religious and ethnic violence.

Sandwiched between the country's largely Muslim north and mostly Christian south, Jos has endured a decade of periodic clashes between followers of the two faiths, a conflict that has flared up in recent months.

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