According to the army, at least 40 of the terrorists were neutralised when the authorities launched a counterattack, which resulted in the deaths of at least five Burkinabe police officers in an attack in the country’s center-east.
Members of a police mobile intervention squad were attacked on Saturday afternoon at Diougo-Yourga in Koulpelogo province close to the Togo border, according to the army.
That attack “cost the lives of five police officers. Four others were evacuated and treated for injuries,” the military added in a statement.
“In response, at least forty terrorists were neutralised and equipment seized,” it said.
According to security and local sources, Koulpelogo was the scene of a second devastating incident on August 7 that claimed the lives of about 20 people in Nohao, a town close to Bittou.
Captain Ibrahim Traore, the interim president of Burkina Faso who took office following a coup in September 2022, lamented the “increasingly frequent attacks against civilians” in mid-July and accused the jihadists of acting “cowardly.”
Anger at the country’s two recent coups and from inability to quell insurgency since it erupted from neighbouring Mali in 2015 was the obvious driving force.
According to one NGO count, more than 16,000 civilians, soldiers, and police have perished in terrorist strikes, including more than 5,000 since the year’s beginning.
More than two million people have also been displaced within Burkina Faso, making it one of the worst internal displacement crises in Africa.