Burkina Faso: 19 Killed in Assault On Border Put up

Lomé — 19 of us had been killed in an attack during the evening of 1 to 2 October in Fanworgou, a border city between Togo and Burkina Faso.

A commando of armed men attacked a contingent of Togolese troopers in fee of guarding the border and protecting the staff of a local company in fee of building a protective barrier to prevent the infiltration of armed groups into Burkina Faso.

The commando managed to interrupt by the constraints already built and attacked the patrols of the Togolese army. They then attacked the hut the put the staff had been resting and destroyed phase of the building company’s tools.

There beget been 19 casualties on the bottom: 9 troopers and 10 civilians. The wounded are now not any less than 8 civilians and 4 troopers. The army intervened by sending reinforcements and armed helicopters. Females and early life had been believed to be among the many attackers.

The attack has now not been claimed, but it took space about 4 km east of the attack on 20 July this 300 and sixty five days in Kpenkankandi, which killed a minimum of twenty-one Togolese troopers, and which used to be claimed by the JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wa al-Muslimin “Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims”), which had posted footage of the attack from one in every of its drones on its social networks.

The JNIM, affiliated with Al Qaeda, which operates in the Sahelian belt between Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, intends to increase its activities to West African states bordering the Atlantic Ocean, resembling Togo.

In the border space with Burkina Faso, a bid of emergency has been declared since 2022 to tackle armed incursions from the neighbouring bid.

The border areas of Togo and Burkina Faso, as smartly because the latter’s border with Benin, beget long been experiencing tensions linked to the presence of jihadist groups and criminals engaged in illicit trafficking (stare Fides, 6/10/2023).