Al-Qaeda offshoot claims responsibility for June attack in Burkina Faso | Conflict news

The June 11 attack was one of the deadliest suffered by the West African country’s army.

An al-Qaeda-linked armed group, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), has claimed responsibility for a June 11 attack that killed more than 100 Burkina Faso soldiers in the Mansila region near the border with Niger, the SITE Intelligence Group reported.

On Sunday, SITE quoted a JNIM statement saying that five days ago, “militants stormed a military post in the city, killing 107 soldiers and taking control of the site.”

Several videos shared online by JNIM showed heavy gunfire around the military base. Another video showed ammunition and dozens of weapons, as well as at least seven captured Burkina Faso soldiers.

The reported attack in June was one of the deadliest suffered by the West African Sahel state’s army.

Ulf Laessing, head of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s Sahel program, told Al Jazeera that the government is trying to fight the armed groups but has not recruited professional soldiers for this purpose.

“They have recruited 50,000 volunteers, many of whom have received only brief training. So they are vulnerable to casualties and unfortunately not very efficient. Such incidents are happening almost every day now,” he said.

“Currently, 50 to 60 percent of Burkina Faso’s territory is outside government control. The government is trying very hard, it is buying weapons and has a military partnership with Russia, but it is not very successful.”

Niger and Mali are also struggling to contain fighting linked to al-Qaeda and IS. The unrest is also threatening the stability of the Sahel region, as the armed groups that control large parts of Burkina Faso and Mali are using them as bases for attacks on the southern coastal countries.

Laessing pointed out that although Mali and Niger have similar problems, their countries are much larger.

“Burkina Faso is the smallest of the three countries and very densely populated… Whenever the army attacks, there are many more civilian casualties, that’s what makes it so brutal,” he said.

In Burkina Faso, armed groups have killed thousands of people and displaced more than two million people over the course of more than a decade.

In addition, the country recently topped the Norwegian Refugee Council’s (NRC) list of the world’s most neglected refugee crises.

According to the NRC, more than 8,400 people were killed in the violence last year, twice as many as the year before.

By the end of 2023, about two million civilians were trapped in 36 sealed-off cities in Burkina Faso.