Burkina Faso

About 170 people were “executed” in attacks on three villages in northern Burkina Faso a week ago, a regional prosecutor has said, as jihadist violence flares in the junta-ruled country.

On that same day, 25 February, separate attacks on a mosque in eastern Burkina and a Catholic church in the north left dozens more dead.

Aly Benjamin Coulibaly said he had received reports of the attacks on the villages of Komsilga, Nodin and Soroe in Yatenga province, with a provisional toll of “around 170 people executed”.

OUAGADOUGOU, June 13 (Reuters) – Armed men killed at least 100 civilians in a rural district of northern Burkina Faso close to the border with Niger over the weekend, a security source said.

The attackers targeted men but appeared to spare women and children in Seytenga district on Saturday night, the security source and two other sources said, all speaking on condition of anonymity.

No group immediately claimed responsibility, but the assault happened in borderlands where militants linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State are waging an insurgency.

OUAGADOUGOU, Nov 27 (Reuters) – Protesters burned tyres and pillaged a government building in Burkina Faso’s capital on Saturday after police fired tear gas to disperse a march against the state’s failure to stop a wave of violence by Islamist militants.

Activist groups called for renewed protests in response to a recent surge of attacks in the West African country, including one by al Qaeda-linked militants that killed 49 military police officers and four civilians two weeks ago.

Burkina Faso’s president has declared three days of national mourning after suspected jihadists killed 80 people, including 59 civilians, in an attack in the north of the country.

The attack was the latest bloodshed in an area with high levels of Islamist violence.

The assault on Wednesday near the town of Gorgadji also left six pro-government militiamen and 15 military police dead, the government and the military said on Thursday. The initial death toll was put at 47 on Wednesday.

DORI, Burkina Faso (AP) — Awoken by gunshots in the middle of the night, Fatima Amadou was shocked by what she saw among the attackers: children.

Guns slung over their small frames, the children chanted “Allahu akbar,” as they surrounded her home in Solhan town in Burkina Faso’s Sahel region. Some were so young they couldn’t even pronounce the words, Arabic for “God is great,” said the 43-year-old mother.

“When I saw the kids, what came to my mind was that (the adults) trained these kids to be assassins, and they came to kill my children,” Amadou told The Associated Press by phone from Sebba town, where she now lives.

A massacre in north-east Burkina Faso in which more than 130 people were killed this month was carried out mostly by children between the ages of 12 and 14, the country’s government and the UN have said.

Assailants raided the village of Solhan on the evening of 4 June, opened fire on residents and burned homes. It was the worst attack in years in an area plagued by jihadists linked to Islamic State and al-Qaida.

A government spokesperson, Ousseni Tamboura, said the majority of the attackers were children, prompting condemnation from the UN.

Burkina Faso recently witnessed one of the bloodiest terrorist attacks in its history. On the first weekend of June, armed men attacked the village of Solhan in Yagha province in the north of the Sahel state, set houses on fire and killed at least 138 people. President Roch Marc Christian Kabore described the attack as “barbaric.”

Violence and insecurity caused by terrorist attacks are nothing new in the region. Fear is a constant for many people who live along the border with Mali and Niger.