Terrorists linked to Al-Qaeda affiliate gunned down over 600 civilians within hours in August this year, a report by French security assessment recently said, underscoring the menace of Islamic terrorism faced by the poor West African nation.
As per the intelligence agency, terrorists attacked Barsalogho town in Burkina Faso on August 24 and killed over 600 civilians while digging trenches for defence—one of the deadliest single-day attacks in Africa in recent decades.
The military had ordered locals to dig large trenches around the town to protect themselves from jihadists. However, terrorists belonging to Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), an Al-Qaeda affiliate terror group, attacked these defences while they were still under construction, accusing the civilians of being combatants due to their involvement in the trench digging, eyewitness cited by the report said.
Videos on social media reveal people lying defenceless in the dirt excavated for the trenches as the militants took their lives. Several victims, including women and children, were killed while attempting to feign death. The videos capture the sounds of their screams mixed with automatic gunfire.
The Al-Qaeda affiliate JNIM is based out of Mali and operates actively in Burkina Faso. It has been involved in several terror attacks across the expanse of West Africa, a region long plagued by the scourge of Islamic terrorism. A series of coups in several West African countries have forced Western nations to flee and allowed the jihadist forces to fill in the vacuum.
The United Nations estimated a death toll of 200 but JNIM released a statement claiming responsibility for the killing of 300 individuals it claimed were militias belonging to the army and not civilians. But the French assessment pegs the fatalities to 600, stating that the jihadists shot dead people.
The report released by French security agencies said, “Large-scale deadly attacks (at least a hundred deaths) against civilian populations or defence and security forces have been occurring for several weeks at a rate that seems unsustainable for the government.”
