at least 51 soldiers killed in new bloody attack in the Sahel

At least 51 soldiers were killed on Friday February 17 in an ambush by suspected jihadists in northern Burkina Faso, where attacks by “terrorist” armed groups have intensified since the beginning of the year, while the he army of Burkina Faso has announced the official end of operations by French soldiers on its territory.

This ambush in the Sahel region bordering Mali and Niger, the provisional toll of which was announced by the army on Monday, could prove to be the deadliest ever committed against the security forces since that of November 2021 in Inata, in the north of the country, when 57 gendarmes were then killed after unsuccessfully appealing for help.

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Monday evening, “43 new bodies were found, establishing the provisional balance sheet at 51 fallen soldiers”, the Burkinabe army said in a statement. She had given Monday morning a toll of eight soldiers killed. The army says that “Operations are continuing with an intensification of air actions which has made it possible to neutralize a hundred terrorists and destroy their equipment. This figure is added to the sixty terrorists neutralized since the start of the response.”

Spiral of jihadist violence since 2015

A military patrol “moving” was the victim of an attack “complex” Friday between Deou and Oursi, in the province of Oudalan, in the Sahel region, the army said on Saturday without giving an assessment. She added that “intense fighting” had opposed the members of the military unit taken to task “to an armed terrorist group”.

Deadly raids attributed to jihadists have multiplied in recent weeks in Burkina. With Friday’s attack, nearly 200 people, civilians and military, have died in the past two, according to an AFP tally.

Burkina Faso, the scene of two military coups in 2022, has been caught since 2015 in a spiral of jihadist violence that appeared in Mali and Niger a few years earlier and which has spread beyond their borders. The violence over the past seven years has claimed more than 10,000 lives according to NGOs, and around two million displaced people.