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died, how many were arrested and where those who fled escaped to were questions the military was refusing to answer in any coherent fashion. The lack of publicly known information also led to concerns that soldiers were again killing civilians whom they accused of cooperating with Boko Haram or simply to instil fear.
    There were also doubts about what exactly the offensive was achieving. Sporadic military statements made grandiose claims of having taken over almost all of Boko Haram’s remote camps, but no one knew for sure who had really been there or what the soldiers had done. Besides that, while the number of insurgent attacks seemed to have diminished since the start of the offensive, they had by no means stopped altogether. Shekau, dressed in camouflage, appeared in a video that surfaced at the end of May, claiming that Nigerian troops were retreating and being killed in the fight against Boko Haram, while also showing weapons and vehicles he said were taken from the military.
    A couple of weeks in, with the military under pressure to give some account of what it claimed to be achieving, it arranged a tour for journalists into an area of the north-east said to have been taken over by insurgents before soldiers chased them out.
    A first attempt was a disappointment. Defence officials invited a mix of local and foreign journalists on the tour a day and a half before it was due to occur, and we scrambled to arrange to be there. We were told to meet in the capital Abuja, where we would take an air force transport plane to Maiduguri, but further details were unclear. Our photographer and I, like other journalists, flew from Lagos to Abuja ready for any possibility, as we had no idea what to expect once we arrived in the north-east. I had not visited the region for about a year by that point, long before the president declared his state of emergency. When our flight landed in Abuja the night before we were to meet the soldiers and I turned my phone back on, I saw that a text message had come through from the army officer who had been arranging logistics. The trip was cancelled, he said. He later assured me by phone that there would be another one scheduled soon.
    The trip was indeed rescheduled about a week later, so we again packed our bags and headed to Abuja, all the while doubting whether it would actually go ahead. This time it would, and along with the other journalists we piled into a military transport plane at an airbase in the capital Abuja and took off for Maiduguri. I had visited Maiduguri twice before, and as the insurgency intensified, it had become a city under lockdown. My previous trip there had been in May 2012, and certain neighbourhoods had eerily seemed like ghost towns, with burnt-out buildings, the carcasses of torched cars and bullet-pocked walls. Schools had been hit by arson, but children were still attending classes in what remained of at least one of them, scampering around the rubble in green and yellow uniforms, one of the teachers telling me that parents insisted that learning continue. A night-time curfew caused a scramble to get home and off the streets toward the end of the day or face the wrath of soldiers. Shop owners and traders said they could no longer support their families. While most Maiduguri residents were Muslim, it was also home to a substantial Christian population, whose churches had been attacked so many times that they wereforced to erect large concrete walls topped with razor wire. Some were protected by small military posts, where soldiers with AK-47s stood behind sandbags near the church entrance. Worshippers attending Sunday mass were scanned with metal detectors and women were forced to leave their handbags outside. On the roads throughout the city, there were regular military checkpoints, causing excruciating traffic jams that left drivers waiting in fear over whether yet another homemade bomb targeting soldiers in the area would explode or a gun battle would break