MAIDUGURI, Nigeria: Wiping grease onto his T-shirt outside his bicycle repair shack, Baba Gana points to a bomb blast site across the street and explains why this northeastern Nigerian town has sympathy for radical Islamists who terrorize its inhabitants.

Nervous soldiers crouch behind sandbag bunkers and man dozens of checkpoints along the streets of Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, which sits at the base of the rocky Sahel where Africa’s most populous nation borders Chad, Cameroon and Niger.

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