Dozens of people were killed in separate weekend attacks by suspected Jihadi forces linked to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Burkina Faso and Mali, as a string of insurgencies launched over the past 11 years continued to rage in the Sahel, the arid belt just south of the Sahara Desert.
In Burkina Faso, 20 people were killed on Sunday in an attack in Nohao, near the town of Bittou, in the Centre-East region bordering Togo, French news agency AFP learned on Monday from security and local sources.
"The attack left around 20 people dead, mainly traders," a security source told AFP.
Over 5,000 reportedly killed in Burkina Faso this year
A trader reported, for his part, a toll of "25 people killed" and "more than 15 transport trucks looted and then set on fire by the terrorists." Another trader reported that "around 10 injured" were evacuated to Bittou, where the traders were returning after going to the market in Cinkansé, a commercial town on the border with Togo.
Another attack had occurred "on Thursday at around 6.00 pm" (local and GMT), according to the same security source, which said the attackers "targeted a convoy of several dozen vehicles carrying goods."
Since 2015, Burkina has been caught up in a spiral of violence perpetrated by groups affiliated to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. They have claimed more than 16,000 civilian and military lives since 2015, according to the NGO Armed Conflict Location Action (ACLED), including more than 5,000 since the start of 2023.
The violence has also displaced more than two million people inside Burkina Faso.
'Increasingly recurrent attacks against civilians'
In mid-July, Burkina Faso President Ibrahim Traoré, an army captain who came to power in a September 2022 coup, deplored "increasingly recurrent attacks against civilians," saying the jihadists were showing "cowardice."
In neighouring Mali, 17 people, including five traditional hunters known as 'dozos,' were killed last weekend near Bandiagara, in the centre of the country, in two attacks attributed to "terrorists," the office of the governor of the region said in a statement.
The first attack, which took place on Saturday in the commune of Bodio, left 15 people dead and two wounded, including three 'dozos'. The following day, a motorcycle carrying two 'dozos' hit a mine near the same village. "The two occupants died immediately," said the statement released on Monday.
Jihadi violence in Mali leads to formation of self-defence groups
Jihadist violence started in northern Mali in 2012, then spread to the centre in 2015 with the installation of the al-Qaeda-related Macina Katiba, a group led by an imam from the Fulani ethnic group, Amadou Kouffa.
In response to the proliferation of violence, proclaimed self-defence groups have sprung up. The best known is the Dan Nan Ambassagou, a militia comprising traditional hunters from the Dogon ethnic group. The victims of the weekend attacks came from that militia.
On Thursday, several government soldiers had been killed in an ambush by jihadists affiliated to the Islamic State group in northeastern Mali. According to military and police sources, they had been escorting trucks bound for neighbouring Niger, another country plagued by the spread of jihadists and plunged into a major crisis since a recent military coup.
The Malian army has not commented on the death toll from Thursday's attack.
