On Sunday, at almost the same moment that dozens of world leaders linked arms and led millions of people through the streets of Paris to commemorate the 17 victims of last week’s terror attacks in France, explosives carried by two young girls ripped through a mobile phone market in the northeastern Nigerian town of Potiskum.
The blasts, which killed three people besides the bombers and injured 46 more, came just a day after another bomb, strapped to a girl described by witnesses as about 10 years old, exploded in a busy market in the city of Maiduguri, killing at least 20 people.
While coming in widely divergent settings, thousands of miles apart, the attacks in France and Nigeria were both motivated by an Islamist extremist ideology that rejects a modern world shaped by political, economic, and social liberalism — and in the case of Boko Haram, whose name can be roughly translated as “(Western) education is forbidden,” also abhors scientific progress.
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