Burkinabe Soldiers Implicated in Massacre

ADF STAFF

More than 100 Burkinabe soldiers on motorbikes, in pickup trucks and at least two armored cars entered the village of Nondin in the country’s northern Yatenga province between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m. on February 25.

The soldiers systematically ordered people out of their homes and told them to show their identity cards. They are accused of then opening fire on villagers they had rounded up into groups. By the time they left, 44 civilians, including 20 children, were dead, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report.

About an hour later, the soldiers entered the nearby village of Soro, where they are accused of slaughtering 179 people, including 36 children.

“They separated men and women in groups,” a 48-year-old farmer from Soro told HRW. “I was in the garden with other people when they [soldiers] called us. As we started moving forward, they opened fire on us indiscriminately. I ran behind a tree, and this saved my life.”

Some survivors said they believed the attacks were in response to terror attacks on security forces.

Radiodiffusion Télévision du Burkina, the national television network operated by the military-run government, reported “a major attack” by insurgents on a military base in Ouahigouya, near the Mali border, about 7 a.m. that morning. The network said a special forces unit chased the fleeing rebels but did not report any civilian casualties.

Witnesses told HRW that armed terrorists had passed through Nondin earlier that morning.

“Before the soldiers started shooting at us, they accused us of being complicit with the jihadists [Islamist fighters],” a 32-year-old woman survivor from Soro, who was shot in the leg, told HRW. “They said we do not cooperate with them [the army] because we did not inform them about the jihadists’ movements.”

The HRW report was based on interviews with 14 witnesses to the killings, three local civil society activists and three members of international organizations. It also obtained lists of the victims’ names compiled by survivors and geolocated eight mass graves using satellite imagery.

The ruling junta led by Capt. Ibrahim Traoré said the HRW report was “baseless” and subsequently banned international and regional media outlets that reported on its investigation.

Military attacks on Burkinabe civilians, including those committed with the help of self-defense militias aligned with the government and Russian mercenaries, are common and rarely accounted for.

In November 2023,  security forces killed about 70 to more than 200 civilians in Zaongo in Burkina Faso’s Centre-North region, according to reports from survivors, the United Nations and aid groups.

“The Burkinabe army has repeatedly committed mass atrocities against civilians in the name of fighting terrorism with almost no one held to account,” HRW Executive Director

Tirana Hassan said in the report. “Victims, survivors and their families are entitled to see those responsible for grave abuses brought to justice. Support from [African Union] or UN investigators and legal experts is the best way to ensure credible investigations and fair trials.”

Countering terror groups linked to the Islamic State group and al-Qaida was the rationale behind two military coups in Burkina Faso in 2022. However, the number of killings by terror groups tripled in the first 18 months after Burkina Faso’s January 2022 coup, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.

Surging violence in 2023 accounted for the deaths of 8,000 people, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project reported.

Rebel groups control more than one-third of the country, and about 500,000 people in dozens of rural towns and villages are now under siege. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, aid from international nongovernmental organizations has reached only 1% of civilians in half of the blockaded areas.