Teams with hyperlinks to al-Qaeda and ISIL are accused of ‘massacring villagers, displaced folks, and Christian worshippers’.
Armed teams with hyperlinks to al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS) have escalated assaults on civilians in Burkina Faso, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has stated in a report.
Publishing the report on Wednesday, the NGO documented the killing of at the least 128 civilians in seven assaults by “armed teams” throughout the nation since February 2024 that “violated worldwide humanitarian legislation and represent conflict crimes”.
The report states that the teams have been “massacring villagers, displaced folks, and Christian worshippers”.
“We’re witnessing an extremely regarding surge in Islamist violence,” stated Ilaria Allegrozzi, senior Sahel researcher at HRW. She known as on the leaders of the teams to stop their “lethal assaults”.
Led by the navy authorities of Ibrahim Traore, the West African nation has been grappling with an armed rebellion by the ISIL affiliate within the Higher Sahara (ISGS) and the al-Qaeda-linked Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) since they moved into Burkina Faso from neighbouring Mali in 2016.
Traore has pushed for civilians to play a task in preventing the teams. He has recruited hundreds of volunteer military auxiliaries and compelled civilians to dig defensive trenches.
In a report stuffed with witness accounts, the rights group documented grotesque atrocities, together with an ISGS-claimed assault on a church within the village of Essakane, close to the border with Niger, in February, carried out in obvious retaliation towards Christians who refused to desert their faith, that killed at the least 12 folks.
HRW stated JNIM was concerned in six different assaults, together with a June assault on a military base close to Niger through which 107 troopers and at the least 20 civilians have been killed.
A JNIM assault on civilians digging trenches across the north-central city of Barsalogho on the finish of August was reported to have killed as much as 400 folks.
The Armed Battle Location and Occasion Knowledge Venture was cited within the report as saying greater than 26,000 folks had been killed – together with troopers, militiamen and civilians – in Burkina Faso since 2016.