(Ouagadougou) Forty-four civilians were killed overnight from Thursday to Friday during the attack on two villages in northeastern Burkina Faso, near the Niger border, a new bloody episode in this country plagued by violence jihadists.
“The provisional assessment of this despicable and barbaric attack” which targeted the villages of Kourakou and Tondobi, “reports 44 civilians killed and wounded”, details the governor of the Sahel region, Lieutenant-Colonel Rodolphe Sorgho.
31 were killed in Kourakou and 13 in Tondobi, he said.
According to a resident of Kourakou, reached by telephone by AFP, “a large number of terrorists burst” into the village late Thursday afternoon.
“All night we heard gunshots. It was on Friday morning that we saw that there were several dozen dead, ”he added.
According to residents, this locality was targeted in retaliation for the lynching a few days earlier of two jihadists who had tried to steal cattle.
This is one of the deadliest attacks since Captain Ibrahim Traoré came to power during a putsch at the end of September 2022, after that of Déou, in the far north of the country, where 51 soldiers were killed. killed in February.
The governor of the Sahel assured Saturday that “actions to stabilize the locality are underway after (an) offensive led by the defense and security forces (FDS) which made it possible to put armed groups out of harm’s way. terrorists who carried out the said attack”.
This double attack took place in localities located five kilometers from Seytenga, a border town with Niger, bereaved in June 2022 by one of the deadliest attacks in the history of Burkina.
Claimed by the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (EIGS) it had killed 86 people.
“Body”
Lieutenant-Colonel Sorgho also invited the local populations on Saturday “to join forces with the FDS and enlist as volunteers for the defense of the homeland (VDP, civilian auxiliaries) in order to participate in the defense of their respective localities”.
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 has claimed more than 10,000 lives over the past seven years – civilians and soldiers – according to NGOs, and some two million displaced.
In February, Captain Traoré expressed his “intact determination” to fight the jihadists, despite the multiplication of attacks.
This week, a new army chief, Colonel-Major Célestin Simporé, was appointed and said he wanted to step up the offensive to force the jihadists to “lay down their arms”.
Anxious to regain their “sovereignty” in the fight against the jihadists who control some 40% of the territory, the Burkina authorities asked the French Saber force, made up of 400 special forces soldiers, to leave the country in January.