Ten people were killed by armed men in a Malian village near Burkina Faso, Kourkanda, which was burned down, local officials said on Wednesday (March 11th).
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The attackers were not identified. In general, in Mali, jihadists attack the security forces while civilians perish in inter-community clashes. “Around dusk, they came in small groups on motorcycles, all armed. They started to ride motorcycles around small villages. It was not until around 8 pm on March 9 that they started attacking the villages, " an adviser to the village chief of Kourkanda, Youssouf Togo, told AFP. They then regrouped and "attacked and torched our village," he added, contacted by phone.
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“There were 10 dead, the village burned down. And nobody knows where the attackers come from , " said an official with the administration of Bankass, the nearest town, Yanah Dolo, whose agents inspected the place.
Kourkanda is located in the same region as the martyred village of Ogossagou, where 31 Fulani civilians were killed on February 14, a year after the massacre of 160 members of this same community, in March 2019. Central Mali is the theater of a large number of violence since 2015 and the appearance of a jihadist group led by the Peul preacher Amadou Koufa, who widely recruited from his community, and joined the Support Group for Islam and Muslims (GSIM) , the main jihadist alliance in the Sahel affiliated with Al-Qaeda, since its creation in 2017.
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Attacks, often followed by reprisals, have multiplied between the Peuls, mainly breeders, and the Bambara and Dogon ethnic groups, who mainly practice agriculture.