Editor TLN
14 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) –
At least 19 people have died, including nine Army auxiliaries, in two alleged terrorist attacks carried out over the weekend in the towns of Dembo and Yargatenga, in Burkina Faso.
In the first attack, carried out last Thursday, about a hundred armed men in trucks and motorcycles opened fire in the town of Dembo, in the northwest of the country, killing seven people, all of whom were Volunteers for the Homeland Defense (VDP), as reported by Al24 News.
On Sunday, another group of suspected terrorists attacked the town of Yargatenga — located in the far east of the country, near the border of Togo and Ghana — killing 12 people, including two VDPs.
Burkina Faso, led by a military junta since the January coup against then-president Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, has generally experienced a significant increase in insecurity since 2015, prompting a wave of internally displaced persons and refugees to other countries in the region.
The attacks, carried out by both the Al Qaeda affiliate and the Islamic State affiliate in the region, have also contributed to an increase in inter-communal violence and have caused self-defense groups to flourish, to which the Burkinabe government has added ‘volunteers ‘ to help in the fight against terrorism.
