According to reports, gunshots sounded early on Tuesday near an airbase in the city centre of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso.
In the middle of the city, gunshots could be heard starting around 12:45 a.m, and they stopped around 40 minutes later. The shooting had temporarily stopped traffic, but it was beginning to move again.
The tragedy takes place ten months after a coup, the second in less than a year in the violent West African nation.
Additionally, it occurs less than a week after the military overthrew democratically elected President Mohamed Bazoum in neighbouring Niger.
On September 30, 2022, Captain Ibrahim Traore overthrew Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba of Burkina Faso, who had overthrown the nation’s previous elected leader, Roch Marc Christian Kabore, in January of that same year.
Anger over failures to stop an insurgency that has claimed thousands of lives since it spread from neighbouring Mali in 2015 was the driving force for both coups.
Each coup, however, has made it more difficult for the nation to combat the terrorists, who are linked to both Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State organisation, successfully. Since then, terrorists have controlled about 40% of Burkina Faso.
According to one NGO count, the intensified terrorist attacks have claimed the lives of more than 16,000 civilians, soldiers, and police, including more than 5,000 since the year’s beginning.
One of the largest internal displacement crises in Africa, more than two million people have also been relocated within their own nation.