About fifty soldiers were also injured in this attack on a djibo base, a city under blockade jihadist, in the north of the country. The Burkinabé staff lists eighteen body of terrorists killed in the fights.
Le Monde with AFP
The Burkinabé army was confronted on Monday October 24 with a deadly attack by jihadists on one of its barracks in Djibo in northern Burkina Faso.
“The 14 e Djibo Interarmes regiment faced” Monday morning “to a terrorist attack that targeted its base,” said the staff. “The provisional assessment established reports ten soldiers who have fallen during the fighting and around fifty injured people who have been taken care of,” he added. The text claims that “the elements of the regiment valiantly retaliated to the direct and indirect fire of the enemy who came in large number”.
“On the enemy side, at least eighteen terrorists’ bodies were counted during the sweeping operations which are still in progress,” according to the staff. He specifies that “air reinforcements have been deployed in the area to ensure rescue and response operations”.
Security sources joined by the France-Presse agency said that “the attack started shortly before 5 am local [7 am in Paris] with a military barracks”. “Other strategic city facilities have also been targeted,” according to the same sources.
The city of Djibo has been subjected for three months to a blockade of the jihadists who have cut the main axes leading there by blowing bridges. The testimonies have reported a critical situation in this agglomeration of 300,000 inhabitants – including many displaced – capital of the landlocked Sahel region in northern Burkina and where famine threatened.
40 % of the territory under the control of jihadists
On September 26, a refueling convoy to Djibo had been attacked by armed men. The attack, claimed by Al-Qaida, officially left 37 dead, including 27 soldiers. Seventy truck drivers remain missing, according to their union.
This attack served as a catalyst for the September 30 coup, perpetrated by Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who overthrew Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba. It was the second coup in Burkina Faso in eight months, the putschists invoking each time the deterioration of the security situation in this country in the grip of jihadist violence for seven years.
Invested on October 21 as president of the transition by the Constitutional Council, Captain Traoré assured that their “objectives are none other than the reconquest of the territory occupied by these hordes of terrorists”.
The jihadist groups control approximately 40 % of the Burkinabé territory. The country has been taken since 2015 in a spiral of violence attributed to jihadist movements affiliated with Al-Qaida and the Islamic State group (IS) since 2015. These regular attacks, first concentrated in the north before extending to the rest of the country, particularly the east, left thousands of deaths and forced some two million people to flee their homes.