The Burkinabè army announced in a press release on April 27th that they had suffered a large-scale complex attack in eastern Burkina Faso, resulting in the death of thirty-three soldiers from the Ougarou military detachment and the injury of twelve others.
“During the fighting, which was particularly intense, the soldiers of the detachment showed remarkable determination in the face of an enemy who had come in large numbers”, according to the army, which affirms that they “thus succeeded in neutralizing least forty terrorists before the arrival of reinforcements”. The deployment of these reinforcements “made it possible to evacuate the wounded who are currently being cared for by the health services”, according to the army.
The violence left 10,000 dead and two million displaced
The press release specifies that “the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces salutes the memory of the soldiers who have made the supreme sacrifice in the performance of their duty”. “He encourages all the units engaged in the operations to maintain efforts to strengthen the dynamics of reconquest in progress”, adds the text.
Since 2015, Burkina Faso has been caught in a spiral of jihadist violence that has spread beyond its borders and appeared in Mali and Niger a few years earlier, leading to two military coups in 2022.
The violence over the past seven years has left more than 10,000 dead – civilians and soldiers – according to NGOs, and some two million displaced. The transitional president, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who came to power in a putsch in September 2022, signed a one-year “general mobilization” decree last week.