The June 11 attack was one of the deadliest suffered by the West African country’s army.
An al-Qaeda-linked armed group, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), claimed responsibility for what it said was an attack on June 11 that killed more than 100 Burkina Faso soldiers in the Mansila area. , near the border with Niger, SITE Intelligence Group said.
On Sunday, SITE cited a JNIM statement as saying that five days ago “fighters stormed a military post in the city, where they killed 107 soldiers and took control of the site.”
Several videos shared online by JNIM showed violent gunfire around the military base. Another video showed ammunition and dozens of weapons, and at least seven captured soldiers from Burkina Faso.
The attack reported in June was one of the deadliest suffered by the West African Sahel nation’s army.
Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel program at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, told Al Jazeera that the government is trying to combat armed groups but has not recruited professional soldiers to do so.
“They recruited 50,000 volunteers, many of whom only received a short period of training. So they’re kind of vulnerable to losses and that’s not very efficient, unfortunately. Incidents like this happen almost every day,” he said.
“Right now you have 50-60 percent [Burkina Faso’s] territory that is outside the control of the government… The government is making efforts, it is buying weapons, it has a military partnership with Russia, but it is not very successful.”
Niger and Mali are also struggling to contain fighting linked to al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS). The unrest also threatens the stability of the Sahel region, as armed groups, which control swaths of territory in Burkina Faso and Mali, use them as bases to attack southern coastal countries.
Laessing noted that although Mali and Niger have similar problems, their countries are much larger.
“Burkina Faso is the smallest of the three and is very densely populated… Whenever the army attacks, there are many more civilian casualties, which makes it so brutal,” he said.
Over more than a decade, armed groups have killed thousands of people and displaced more than two million in Burkina Faso.
Furthermore, the country topped the Norwegian Refugee Council’s (NRC) recent list of the world’s most neglected displacement crises.
Violence killed more than 8,400 people last year, double the number of deaths from the previous year, according to the NRC.
Around two million civilians were trapped in 36 blockaded cities in Burkina Faso until the end of 2023.
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
