It is a week of mourning that Burkina Faso is experiencing, regularly hit by terrorist violence in the Sahel. Forty civilians were killed in attacks in the north and centre-east of the country.
The most recent attack hit the northern province of Yatenga, close to Mali, on Thursday (May 18th). "At around 5:00 a.m. local time (7:00 a.m. Paris time) armed groups carried out an attack on the villages of Pellé, Zanna and Nongofaïré. At least twenty-five people were killed, mainly in Nongofaïré, and several others were wounded," a resident of the area told AFP.
The attack was confirmed by a security source who evokes for his part a balance sheet of "twenty dead". Sweep operations are underway, the source said.
Confirming the attack, another resident said that "the attackers who came on motorcycles were chased by volunteers (civilian auxiliaries of the army) and soldiers".
"They were hit with air support after taking refuge in the Barga forest. Several of them perished," another security source said.
"Women and children"
Wednesday, May 17, it was the province of Koulpélogo (center-east), 400 km further south, bordering Ghana and Togo, which had been targeted.
"Armed groups carried out an incursion into Bilguimdouré," a village in the commune of Sangha, "killing a dozen people," a local official told AFP.
And two days earlier, "another terrorist incursion into the nearby village of Kaongo had caused the death of at least eleven people including women and children," he said. These attacks were confirmed by security sources, specifying that "security operations are underway in the region", without giving details on the toll of the incursions.
Contacted by AFP, residents of the commune of Sangha say that the "desperate populations" were trying "to flee their localities, fearing new attacks".
According to these residents, armed groups ordered the population of Soudougui, another commune in the province, "to empty several villages under penalty of reprisals in the following days".
Burkina Faso, the scene of two military coups in 2022, has been caught since 2015 in a spiral of violence that appeared in Mali and Niger a few years ago and that has spread beyond their borders.
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Like this week's attacks, several parts of its territory are facing violence from terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State organization.
Localities in the north but also in the west, close to Mali, are under blockade by these groups that control the main roads.
In the Centre-East, close to Ghana and Togo, the province of Koulpélogo, where a curfew has been in force for several months, is also the target of recurrent attacks despite counter-terrorism operations carried out by the army and its civilian auxiliaries.
In mid-April, at least 24 people, including 20 Volunteers for the Defence of the Fatherland (VDP), civilian auxiliaries of the army, were killed in two attacks by terrorist groups in the region. Over the past seven years, the violence has left more than 10,000 civilians and soldiers dead, according to NGOs, and more than two million internally displaced.
On Friday 19 May, the Australian government announced that one of its nationals, Kenneth Elliott, an 88-year-old doctor, had been released seven years after he was kidnapped by al-Qaeda-linked terrorists in Burkina Faso. He returned to Australia on Thursday evening, May 18.
With AFP
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