“Many terrorists were neutralized during the retaliation,” said Defense Minister General Barthelemy Sibore.
Fourteen members of Burkina Faso’s armed forces were killed Monday morning in an attack on a military unit in the north of the African country, the Ministry of Defense announced.
Sources close to the security forces initially spoke of at least nine dead.
In a statement, the defense minister, General Barthelemy Sibore, said that a “military detachment in Girgu” in the north-central part of the country “became a target of a terrorist attack ” yesterday Monday “around 05:00”
According to General Sibore, “we counted 14 soldiers killed during the fighting, seven wounded were taken to hospital”, while “many terrorists were neutralized (killed) during retaliation”.
The military, faced with a “large number of heavily armed” attackers, showed “great fighting spirit” and treated them with “vigor”, the minister continued. “Immediately land and air counterattack to neutralize the attackers.”
In addition to the casualties, the material damage “is enormous”, a source close to the security forces told AFP, as the perpetrators of the attack either “set fire” or “snatched” equipment.
Burkina Faso, a poor country in West Africa, has been facing increasingly frequent and deadly attacks and ambushes by jihadist organizations since 2015, especially in its northern and eastern parts, as well as neighboring states Mali and Niger.
However, there are occasional attacks in the south, such as on Saturday, when two soldiers were killed when an improvised explosive device was detonated in Laraben, near the Ivory Coast border.
Five other soldiers on a reconnaissance mission in Mentao, in the north of the country, were killed last Wednesday when an improvised explosive device (IED) exploded, according to the general staff.
On September 15, one soldier was killed and two others wounded in an attack on a unit in the eastern part of the country, which borders Niger. Three days earlier, in the same area, six gendarmes were killed in an attack by alleged jihadists on a convoy of fuel tankers destined for the mining company Semafo Boungou, a subsidiary of Canada’s Endeavor Mining.
Attacks and ambushes in Burkina Faso attributed to jihadist organizations swearing allegiance to either Islamic State or al Qaeda, combined with outbreaks of inter-ethnic and inter-communal violence, have claimed the lives of nearly 2,000 people and forced of 1.4 million others to leave their homes, according to official figures.
