In Nigeria, Schools Become a New Target for Boko Haram Reuters Residents surveyed damage after a bomb at a school in Maiduguri, Nigeria, one of several attacks on schools in recent weeks. MAIDUGURI, Nigeria - The teenager in the immaculate white robe stood in the ruins of what had been his school. There were no classrooms, no desks or chairs, no intact blackboards - there was, in fact, no longer any reason for him to be there. Yet the teenager, Aruna Mustapha, and a friend had come to sign in anyway, just as they did every morning before the fire, expressing a hunger for education and a frustration with the insurgents bent on preventing it. "We can't stay at home any longer; we want to come to school, to learn," explained Aruna, 16. I'm fed up. I want to be in school. The insurgent violence stalking northern Nigeria has struck a long list of official targets, killing police and army officers, elected officials, high-ranking civil servants, United Nations workers and other perceived supporters of the Nigerian government. Now it has an ominous new front: a war against schools. Public and private schools here have been doused with gasoline at night and set on fire. Crude homemade bombs - soda bottles filled with gasoline - have been hurled at the bare-bones concrete classrooms Nigeria offers its children. The simple yellow facades have been blackened and the plain desks melted to twisted pipes, leaving thousands of children without a place to learn, stranded at home and underfoot, while anxious parents plead with Nigerian authorities to come up with a contingency plan for their education. Today, this dusty metropolis in northeastern Nigeria's desert scrub is dotted with the burned-out shells of what were school buildings. The sun pours in as sheets of charred corrugated metal roof hang down into empty schoolrooms, clanging in the hot wind. In the sunny afternoons small children play in the ruins. In recent weeks, at least eight schools have been firebombed, apparently the work of Boko Haram, the Islamist group waging a deadly war against the Nigerian government and suspected of cultivating links with Al Qaeda's affiliates in the region. The group's very name is a rallying cry against schools - "Boko" means "book" or "Western learning" in the Hausa language, and "haram" is Arabic for forbidden - but it has never gone after them to this degree before, analysts say. ""We are Boko Haram, and we will burn the school," " the elderly watchman at Aruna's school, the Abbaganaram Primary School, recounted the arsonists saying after they appeared out of the darkness, ordered him at gunpoint to lie down, doused the school with gasoline and set it on fire, lighting up the night sky. A self-described spokesman for Boko Haram who frequently phones journalists in Maiduguri recently claimed responsibility for the school attacks. The spokesman, who calls himself Abul Qaqa, said they were in response to what he called a targeting of this city's abundant open-air Islamic schools by authorities. Officials here have denied any such campaign. Indeed, young boys can be seen receiving Koranic lessons, untroubled, all over Maiduguri. Around 2,600 students had gone to school at Abbaganaram, at the edge of a neighborhood considered a Boko Haram stronghold. Now, the quadrangle enclosing a sandy courtyard looks like a roofless war ruin. Fragments of a lesson, scrawled on what remains of a blackboard, can be glimpsed through a windowless opening. A lone teacher, as eager to resume work as young Aruna, hung about in the school's remains. There is no public holiday. We are on duty," said Babagana Kolo, who had taught primary school there. We are supposed to be on duty. For several days after the attack in early March, students had come to be taught in the open air, under the hardy light-green neem trees in the courtyard, Mr. Kolo said. But he said the government had failed to provide materials, like chalk for a remaining blackboard, so the students had stopped coming. "They bombed everywhere," said Aliyu Adamu, a longtime teacher at Abbaganaram. Everything. All the classes.