About sixty jihadists were killed between January 16 and 23, in northern Burkina Faso, during an operation by Burkinabe forces, assisted by French units from Operation Barkhane.
“On four occasions, between January 16 and 23, 2022, different groups of terrorists were located, identified and neutralized,” the French army general staff announced on Sunday. “In total, nearly sixty terrorists were put out of action.”
Twenty motorcycles and several armed pick-ups were also destroyed in these operations punctuated by “air strikes by the Barkhane force, guided by Burkinabè units”, explains the staff in a press release. “The objective was to seek out the terrorists in their refuge areas”.
According to the army, the Burkinabè forces will thus be able to “return (to these) transit and refuge areas” of the jihadist groups in which “they had not operated for a long time”.
Just before the coup
These military successes came just before a military coup on January 24, during which President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré was placed under house arrest and other officials arrested.
Thursday evening, in his first speech since taking power last Monday, Burkina’s new strongman, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, declared on national television that his country “needs its partners more than ever. “. Saying that he understood the “legitimate doubts” aroused by the coup d’etat, he assured that Burkina would continue “to respect international commitments, particularly with regard to respect for human rights”, and specified that independence justice would also be “assured”.
The population criticized Roch Marc Christian Kaboré in particular for not having succeeded in stemming the deterioration in security since 2015, particularly in the north and east of the country. Like Mali and Niger, Burkina Faso is caught in a spiral of violence attributed to armed jihadist groups, affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Daesh group, which have killed more than 2,000 people and forced at least 1.5 million people to flee their homes.