The group Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), an affiliate of Al Qaeda, has claimed responsibility for an attack on June 11 that resulted in the deaths of more than 100 Burkina Faso soldiers in the Mansila area near the Niger border, as reported by the SITE Intelligence Group on Sunday.
SITE quoted a JNIM statement as saying that five days ago “fighters stormed a military post in the town, where they killed 107 soldiers and took control of the site”.
The reported attack was one of the deadliest suffered by the West African Sahel nation’s army as it, alongside neighbours Niger and Mali, struggle to contain insurgencies linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State.
According to Al Jazeera’s report: Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel programme at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, told Al Jazeera that the government is trying to fight the armed groups but has not recruited professional soldiers to do so.
“They recruited 50,000 volunteers, many of whom got only a short period of training. So they’re kind of vulnerable to losses and it is not very efficient, unfortunately. Almost every day now, there are incidents like this,” he said.
“Right now you have 50-60 percent of [Burkina Faso’s] territory which is outside government control … The government is trying hard, they’re buying weapons, they have a military partnership with Russia but they’re not very successful.”
Laessing noted that while Mali and Niger have similar problems, their countries are much bigger.
“Burkina Faso is the smallest of the three and very densely populated … Whenever the army attacks, you have many more civilian victims, that makes it so brutal,” he said.
Over more than a decade, the insurgencies have killed thousands and displaced over two million in Burkina Faso. The unrest is also threatening the stability of the region as the insurgents, who control swathes of territories in Burkina Faso and Mali, use them as bases to target southern coastal countries.
Information for this report was sourced from Reuters and Aljazeera.
