Major General David Kabre, the Chief of Staff of Burkina Faso, chats with the trainers of the International Anti-Terrorist Academy in the United States on March 14, 2023. Photo: Issouf Sanogo / AFP
More than 220 civilians, including at least 56 minors, were massacred by the army in Burkina Faso at the end of February.
– revealed the report of Human Rights Watch published on Thursday. According to the international human rights organization, this was one of the most serious military atrocities in the last decade in the Central African country.
Residents of the village of Nondin reported that a military convoy appeared in the settlement after Islamist fighters retreating after an attack on a base in Acton passed nearby. The soldiers broke into every house, ordered the residents out of their homes, and then started slaughtering the gathered people. After 44 people were shot in Nondin, the convoy left for the village of Soro, located 5 kilometers away, where 179 people were killed in a similar manner. According to one survivor, the soldiers accused the locals of sympathizing with Islamist militias in the region and of not informing the military of the guerrillas’ movements.
Rumors of the atrocity had already leaked out before, and the country’s attorney general asked the survivors to come forward as eyewitnesses in order to initiate court proceedings.
Since 2009, the United States has been providing the armed forces of Burkina Faso with tens of millions of dollars in annual military aid, citing the fight against terrorism, the atrocities against the Muslim tribes soared, and as a reaction to them, the support for Islamist militias and terrorist organizations increased, which the governments then – thus, the military junta that came to power in 2022 in a coup d’etat carried out further draconian retaliatory actions. As a Global Affairs study found,
the army of Burkina Faso, reinforced with American trainers, arms shipments and intelligence information, actively contributed to the creation of the problem it was meant to prevent.
You can read about the wave of political crisis sweeping across the Sahel region and its background here, and you can read in detail about the Hungarian military mission to Chad, which is considered to be the only more, but rather less stable, country in the region, under the supervision of Gáspár Orbán, in this article.
(via BBC)
