Not fewer than 18 civilians including 16 army volunteers have died in an attack by Jihadists in Burkina Faso on Thursday, January 20.
The attacks that claimed the lives of the victims occurred in the north of the country.
The northern region of Burkina Faso has been volatile to Islamist unrest and attacks since 2005, as government soldiers have been in a war path with jihadist groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.
In the recent months the attacks have doubled killing thousands of people and making over 2million homeless.
The country has witnessed two president in a space of eight months, the second Captain Ibrahim Traoré, has promised the people that he will defeat the Jihadist and therefore has set a goal of “reconquering the territory occupied by these terrorist hordes”.
In a recruitment drive in 2022, the government launched a campaign of strengthening the capacity and number of armed forces to fight the Islamists, an exercise that attracted 90,000 volunteers , exceeding the actual numbers of 50,000 it was targeting.
The conflict that started in Mali has now turn the country into a hotspot of attack by Islamic fundamentalists.
Thursday’s attacks came in two waves, the “first attack targeted an advance party of Volunteers for the Defence of the Fatherland [VDP] in Rakoegtenga”, a town in the northern province of Bam, claiming the lives of Six auxiliaries and a woman, a VDP official said.
He said10 people were also wounded and were “evacuated to Ouagadougou for appropriate care”.
In the second attack 10 vigilantes and a person died. They were ambushed in their convoy when being escorted by soldiers at Nayala province in the northwest along Siena-Saran road.
Security sources confirmed two “jihadist attacks” but gave no precise death toll, referring only to “a number of losses”.
The VDP was set up in December 2019. The Volunteers comprises civilian volunteers who are given two weeks of military training and then deployed alongside the army, typically carrying out surveillance, information-gathering or escort duties.
