Nigeria, Nov. 22 -- In Eruku, prayers ascended and bullets answered first. Church doors splintered; a sanctuary of hope transfigured into an altar of smoke and screams.

Three worshippers collapsed beside their Bibles, their blood seeping like unanswered supplications across the fissured concrete. The pastor was dragged into the night, his lamentations swallowed by bush paths now highways for the damned.

Elsewhere, in the same beleaguered land, Musa who had dedicated his life to the green-white-green was ensnared by ISWAP's shadowed hands.

An ambush. A loyal soldier struck down, while the very soil he bled for continued offering its children as sacrifices to a god of ceaseless violence.

In Tsafe, a teacher's blood stained the blackboar...