An armed group kills a hundred people in Burkina Faso in one of the most serious attacks since 2015

The coffins covered with the Burkinabe flag of 14 soldiers killed by jihadists in November 2020, during their funeral in Dori, in the north of the country.AGENCE D'INFORMATION DU BURKINA / Reuters

Armed men murdered about 100 people in the northeast of Burkina Faso this Saturday morning, as confirmed by the country's president, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, through his Twitter account.

The attack began at around two in the morning, local time - four in Spain - in the town of Solhan, located about ten kilometers from Sebba, capital of the Yagha province in the Sahel region.

Their objective was the base of the Volunteers for the Defense of the Fatherland (VDP), a paramilitary body created by the Burkinabe government to combat the numerous jihadist groups that operate in the area, security sources confirmed.

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The assailants stormed the town at dawn and, in addition to attacking the VDP base, penetrated numerous homes, executed those they encountered, and set fire to homes and the local market. The clashes lasted throughout the night, according to the same sources, who reported a strong detonation of an improvised explosive device this Saturday at seven in the morning. Last February, the deputy mayor of Solhan was kidnapped by a jihadist group and managed to escape three weeks later.

The Burkinabe president called the events a "barbaric attack" and decreed three days of national mourning that will begin at midnight this Saturday.

“The defense and security forces are on the ground to search for and neutralize the perpetrators of this ignoble act.

We must remain united and cohesive against these forces of evil, ”said Kaboré through Twitter.

It is one of the attacks with the most fatalities in Burkina Faso since jihadist violence broke out in 2015, comparable in size to the Yirgou massacre that took place on New Year's Eve 2018 and caused 72 deaths, according to the Government, and 210, according to a group of civil society.

Six years of jihadist violence

For six years the Sahel region, in the north of the country, has been the frequent scene of the activity of different terrorist groups, especially the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM, according to its acronym in Arabic) and the State Islamic of the Greater Sahara (EIGS). This violence, which was initially spread from neighboring Mali, has progressively spread to the rest of the country with special intensity in the aforementioned North region and those of Boucle de Mouhoun, Center-North and East. In the latter, gunmen murdered Spanish journalists David Beriain and Roberto Fraile and Irish conservationist Rory Young on April 26 when they were making a documentary on poaching. The JNIM group claimed responsibility for the attack.

Overwhelmed by the increase in jihadist violence, the Burkinabe government has its own Army, which has been withdrawing on the cities in large areas of the country, the Koglweogo self-defense militias (the guardians of the countryside, in Mossi language) and with the VDP, groups of volunteers created after the approval of a law on January 21, 2020 in the Burkina Faso Parliament. A Human Rights Watch report from last January pointed to the commission of extrajudicial executions and massacres both by jihadist groups and by the Army and these paramilitary groups.

This spiral of violence has caused some 5,000 deaths since 2015, according to data from the NGO Acled, and the forced displacement of at least 1,650,000 Burkinabe from their homes in a country that has about 20 million inhabitants, according to figures from the United Nations Refugee Agency (Acnur). Jihadism is also spreading to neighboring Mali and Niger, threatening to infect northern Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, Togo and Ghana.