Since 2010 Burkina Faso has been torn apart by Islamic terrorists. Groups associated with the Islamic State group and al-Qaeda have killed thousands and displaced about 2 million people.
Over the weekend, 34 more people were killed in two separate jihadist attacks. The attacks took place in the northern and northwestern part of the West African country. At least 22 people died and many were injured in a July 3 assault on the town of Bourasso (in the north-west of Burkina Faso).
The other attack took place a day earlier in the Namissiguima region, in the province of Yatenga, in the north of the country, with the killing of 12 people. The death toll there included volunteer members of the self-defense militias of the villages formed by the government to try to face the assaults of jihadist groups linked to al-Qaeda or ISIS.
According to the testimony of a survivor of the Bourasso attack, “the jihadists initially fired into the air in the village around 5 a.m. on Sunday, July 3 and left, and then came back firing at random people.”
According to German news agency DW, Burkina Faso’s military ousted Burkina Faso’s democratically elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kabore, in January, accusing him of not doing enough to stem growing militant Islamist violence.
“Even though a new government was formed this March, the violence has only increased,” DW reported.
In April, an American nun was kidnapped from a convent in Burkina Faso where she was serving as a missionary. Sister Suellen Tennyson, an 83-year-old nun from the congregation of the Marianites of the Holy Cross was abducted overnight between April 4 and 5.
In the last two weeks of March, as many as 40 members of the military have been killed by jihadist groups. A car bomb attack on Friday, April 8, left 16 security forces dead, according to a report in the Washington Post.
