Weekend .. INTERNATIONAL EDITION | SATURDAY-SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25-26, 2021 ARTISTS AND QUILTERS IN THE U.S. SOUTH GET HELP IN SAVING THEIR WORK HAVENS PAGE 20 | CULTURE DELVING INTO THE DEPTHS OF ICY CAVES TO STUDY GLACIERS AND CLIMATE CHANGE BACK PAGE | TRAVEL SPACIOUS SUBURBS BECKONED, BUT THIS COUPLE FOUND A WAY TO STAY IN THE CITY PAGE 13 | INTERNATIONAL HOMES A SWIRLING VORTEX IS NO MATCH FOR THIS DEEP-SEA SPONGE PAGE 16 | SCIENCE LAB WIKIPEDIA’S NEXT LEADER DISCUSSES WORKING TO PREVENT MISINFORMATION PAGE 8 | BUSINESS and its frequent target. The compound is next to a middle- class housing development and a prima- ry school, which terrifies residents, teachers and parents. “We are very afraid,” said Maimouna Mohammed, a teacher at the primary school, glancing at the camp’s wall, 50 yards from her classroom. “We don’t know their minds.” Nigerian military and justice officials For over a decade, the extremist group Boko Haram has terrorized northeast- ern Nigeria — killing tens of thousands of people, kidnapping schoolgirls and sending suicide bombers into busy mar- ketplaces. Now, thousands of Boko Haram fight- ers have surrendered, along with their family members, and are being housed by the government in a compound in the city of Maiduguri, the group’s birthplace say that in the past month, as many as 7,000 fighters and family members, along with their captives, have left Boko Haram, the largest wave of defections by far since the jihadist group emerged in 2002. The turning point for its fortunes ap- pears to have been the death of Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram’s long- time leader, who blew himself up in May after being cornered by a rival faction. However weakened Boko Haram may be, though, it does not necessarily mean an end to terror for the people of north- eastern Nigeria, hundreds of thousands of whom have died and millions of whom have fled. Fighters from Boko Haram’s rival splinter group — the Islamic State West Africa Province, or ISWAP — are mov- ing into the vacuum, observers in the re- gion say, ferrying truckloads of military equipment from their strongholds in the Lake Chad area southward to Mr. Shekau’s former dens in the Sambisa forest. ISWAP broke off from Boko NIGERIA, PAGE 5 A 29-year-old midlevel Boko Haram commander who said he had worked his way up from washing the motorcycle of the group’s feared leader, Abubakar Shekau. A teenager who was abducted and married to a fighter at age 10. She is living in a camp in Maiduguri, Nigeria, with many men who kidnapped and enslaved girls like her. The wife of a senior commander, age 30. Shortly after surrendering, she gave birth in the Hajj Camp, where Boko Haram defectors are being housed by the government. A high-ranking Boko Haram commander who said he had surrendered because his leaders were gone and he wanted to give his children a chance to live normal lives. PHOTOGRAPHS BY TOM SAATER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Terrorists next door MAIDUGURI, NIGERIA BY RUTH MACLEAN AND ISMAIL ALFA A Nigerian city is on edge as thousands of defectors from Boko Haram move in When Michael Gandolfini was filming his role in “The Many Saints of Newark,” a period crime drama that casts him as a precocious teenage troublemaker named Tony Soprano, he was having trouble sleeping and would stay up late at night, working on his scenes for the next day. Sometimes he would reflect on the motivations of his character, whose loy- alty is torn between two paternal fig- ures: his frequently absent father, a New Jersey gangster named Johnny Boy; and the film’s protagonist, a char- ismatic mobster named Dickie Molti- santi. In his efforts to get inside his charac- ter, Gandolfini would try to identify with Tony’s desire to please both men. He would find himself drawn back to Johnny Boy and repeat the wish to him- self like a mantra. As Gandolfini recalled recently, “I was always like, ‘I want to make my dad proud. I want to make my dad proud.’” It didn’t take a psychiatrist to deci- pher what it all meant. “Of course that was something inside of me,” he said. Gandolfini is the son of the actor James Gandolfini, who played the men- acing but undeniably engrossing Mafia boss Tony Soprano for six seasons on the revered HBO series “The Sopranos,” and who died unexpectedly of a heart at- tack at age 51 in 2013. The 22-year-old Michael has inher- ited many of his famous father’s fea- tures. They share the same immersive eyes and smirking smiles; like his dad, Michael is soft-spoken with a salty vo- cabulary, and he admits to an occasion- ally argumentative temper. And when Michael — who was born four months after “The Sopranos” made its debut in 1999 and had barely watched the show before preparing for “The Many Saints of Newark” — thinks of his GANDOLFINI, PAGE 2 A son’s turn to solve the riddle of Tony Soprano Michael Gandolfini, left, the son of James Gandolfini, as a young Tony Soprano opposite Jon Bernthal in “The Many Saints of Newark.” “I want to make my dad proud,” he said. BARRY WETCHER/WARNER BROS. Michael Gandolfini plays a younger version of his father’s iconic role BY DAVE ITZKOFF The New York Times publishes opinion from a wide range of perspectives in hopes of promoting constructive debate about consequential questions. They promised they would “hunt” the elites. They questioned the need for a Holocaust memorial in Berlin and de- scribed Muslim immigrants as “head scarf girls” and “knife men.” Four years ago the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, arrived in the German Parliament like a wrecking ball, the first far-right party to win a place at the heart of Germany’s democracy since World War II. It was a political earthquake in a country that had once seen Hitler and his Nazi party rise from the fringes to win power in free elections. As another election arrives this week- end, the worst fears of many Germans have not been realized: Support for the party has dipped. But neither have the hopes that the AfD would disappear from the political scene as suddenly as it appeared. If Germany’s fate in this elec- tion will not be settled by the far right, political analysts say, Germany’s future will partly be shaped by it. “The AfD is here to stay,” said Matthias Quent, professor of sociology at Magdeburg University of Applied Sci- ences and an expert on the far right. “There was the widespread and naïve hope that this was a short-lived protest phenomenon. The reality is that the far right has become entrenched in the Ger- man political landscape.” The AfD is polling at roughly 11 per- cent, just below its 2017 result of 12.6 per- cent, and is all but guaranteed to retain its presence in Parliament. (Parties with less than 5 percent of the vote do not get any seats.) But with all other parties re- fusing to include the AfD in talks about forming the next governing coalition, it is effectively banned from power. “The AfD is isolated,” said Uwe Jun, a professor of political science at Trier University. Yet with Germany’s two main parties having slipped well below the 30 percent mark, the AfD remains a disruptive force, one that complicates efforts to build a governing coalition with a major- ity of votes and parliamentary seats. Tino Chrupalla, one of the AfD’s two lead candidates in the election, believes that eventually the firewall other parties GERMANY, PAGE 5 The far right in Germany: Isolated but ‘here to stay’ BERLIN AfD, a pariah force, seeks a growing role in shaping the future of the county BY KATRIN BENNHOLD There’s little doubt that Congress will pass and President Biden will sign legislation to provide $1 billion in fund- ing for Iron Dome, the Israeli-Ameri- can missile defense system. Steny Hoyer, the majority leader in the House, promised as much after a hand- ful of progressive members managed in the last few days to get the funding stripped from a must-pass bill to keep the U.S. government afloat. The Israel-bashing progressives won the news cycle, but Hoyer intends to bring Iron Dome to a vote in a stand-alone bill. It will pass with overwhelming bipar- tisan support. That’s the good news. Whatever the tensions between the Democratic Party and Israel, they aren’t anywhere near the point that the mainstream of the party would begrudge the Jewish state funding for a technological marvel that, over a decade of operation, has saved count- less civilian lives by shooting down thousands of rockets fired indiscrimi- nately at Israel by Hamas and other terrorist groups. The bad news: You will almost cer- tainly not see Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, Repre- sentative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan or their fellow travelers in the House progressive caucus paying any serious reputational cost for this supremely foul piece of political grandstanding. Democrats tried that in 2019 with an effort to rebuke Minnesota’s Repre- sentative Ilhan Omar for a string of antisemitic remarks. But the effort fizzled, and Omar’s star in the party has only risen since. Last month, Tlaib gave a talk to the Democratic Social- ists of America in which she darkly A foul play over Israel’s Iron Dome OPINION Progressive Democrats are wrong to target a defensive weapon system. STEPHENS, PAGE 10 Bret Stephens nytimes.com/thedaily How the news should sound. A daily audio report on demand. Hosted by Michael Barbaro. Y(1J85IC*KKOKKR( +.!"!?!@!: Issue Number No. 43,086 Andorra € 5.00 Antilles € 4.50 Austria € 4.00 Belgium € 4.00 Bos. & Herz. KM 5.80 Britain £ 2.60 Cameroon CFA 3000 Croatia KN 24.00 Cyprus € 3.40 Czech Rep CZK 115 Denmark Dkr 37 Estonia € 4.00 Finland € 4.00 France € 4.00 Gabon CFA 3000 Germany € 4.00 Greece € 3.40 Hungary HUF 1100 Israel NIS 14.00/ Friday 27.50 Israel / Eilat NIS 12.00/ Friday 23.50 Italy € 3.80 Ivory Coast CFA 3000 Sweden Skr 50 Switzerland CHF 5.20 Syria US$ 3.00 The Netherlands € 4.00 Tunisia Din 8.00 Turkey TL 22 Poland Zl 19 Portugal € 3.90 Republic of Ireland 3.80 Serbia Din 300 Slovenia € 3.40 Spain € 3.90 Luxembourg € 4.00 Malta € 3.80 Montenegro € 3.40 Morocco MAD 35 Norway Nkr 40 Oman OMR 1.50 NEWSSTAND PRICES U.A.E. AED 15.00 United States Military (Europe) $ 2.30