Burkina Faso has had another bloody week: around forty civilians were killed in several attacks in the north and middle east of the Sahel country, which is regularly the victim of jihadist violence.
The latest attack happened on Thursday in Yatenga province in the north of the country near Mali.
“Around 5am (GMT and local), armed groups carried out an attack on the villages of Pellé, Zanna and Nongofaïré. At least 25 people were killed, mostly in Nongofaïré, and several others were injured,” a resident of the area told AFP.
The attack was confirmed by a security source, who in turn summed up a tally of “twenty dead”. Searches are ongoing, the same source continues.
Another local resident confirmed the attack, saying that “the attackers, who came on motorbikes, were being pursued by volunteers (army civilian auxiliaries) and soldiers.”
“They were met by air support after taking refuge in the Barga Forest. Several of them died,” assured another security source.
Koulpélogo province (centre-east), 400 km further south, on the border with Ghana and Togo, was attacked on Wednesday.
“Armed groups attacked Bilguimdouré,” a village in Sangha municipality, killing “about 10 people,” a local official told AFP.
And two days earlier, “another terrorist attack in the neighboring village of Kaongo resulted in the deaths of at least 11 people, including women and children,” he continued.
These attacks were confirmed by security sources, who stated that “security operations are ongoing in the region” without providing details on the number of victims.
Residents of Sangha Township join AFP in saying that the “desperate population” is trying “to flee their communities for fear of fresh attacks.”
According to these residents, armed groups have called on the population of Soudougui, another town in the province, “to evacuate several villages in the following days, under threat of reprisals”.
Burkina, the scene of two military coups in 2022, has been caught in a spiral of jihadist violence since 2015 that emerged a few years earlier in Mali and Niger and has spread beyond their borders.
As with this week’s attacks, several parts of its territory have been subjected to violence from jihadist groups linked to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State organization.
Especially places in the north, but also in the west, near Mali, are blocked by these groups, who control the main roads.
In the Middle East, near Ghana and Togo, the province of Koulpélogo, which has been under a curfew for several months, has also been the target of repeated attacks despite anti-jihadist operations by the army and its auxiliaries. civilians.
In mid-April, at least 24 people were killed in two attacks by suspected jihadists in the region, including 20 Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland (VDP), civilian aid workers of the army.
According to NGOs, violence has killed more than 10,000 civilians and soldiers and more than two million internally displaced people over the past seven years.
On Friday, the Australian government announced that one of its nationals, Kenneth Elliott, an 88-year-old doctor, was released seven years after he was kidnapped by al-Qaeda-linked jihadists in Burkina Faso. He returned to Australia on Thursday evening.