On February 25, residents of the villages of Nondin and Soro, in northern Burkina Faso, woke up to the sound of knuckles knocking on their doors: they were Burkinabé soldiers. After asking them for their identity card and dividing the neighbors into groups, the carnage began. “They separated the men from the women. I was in a courtyard with other people when they (the soldiers) called us. As soon as we started to advance, they shot at us indiscriminately. "I ran behind a tree, that's why I saved my life."
This testimony of a 48-year-old farmer, collected by an investigation by the Human Rights Watch organization, illustrates the horror of one of the worst massacres allegedly perpetrated by the army of the African country, immersed in a relentless fight against several jihadist groups that control large areas of the country.
According to HRW, Burkinabé soldiers murdered 223 people in cold blood, including 56 children, whom they accused of collaborating with fundamentalist gangs, which a day earlier had carried out various "simultaneous and coordinated" attacks, in which dozens of civilians and soldiers They died.
A 32-year-old survivor points in that direction in the HRW report. “Before the soldiers started shooting at us, they accused us of being accomplices of the jihadists. (...) They told us that we do not cooperate with them because we do not inform them about the movements of the jihadists.”
The report from the human rights defense organization includes the testimony of 23 people, including 14 witnesses, as well as community leaders and activists, and points out that the massacre could be defined as a crime against humanity and asks the country's authorities to open an urgent investigation with the support of the United Nations.
According to HRW researchers, who support their conclusions with verification images and videos, Burkinabé soldiers killed 179 people in a single day in the village of Soro, including 36 minors, and 44 residents in the town of Nondin, five kilometers away. , 20 of them children.
Tirana Hassan, executive director of HRW, asks for a response from the Ouagadougou executive. “The Burkinabé army has repeatedly committed atrocities against civilians in the name of its fight against terrorism, with almost no one being held accountable (…) Victims, survivors and their families deserve to see those responsible for these serious abuses brought to justice.”
The massacre is part of the spiral of violence and revenge that the country has suffered for nine years, which in 2022 experienced two coups d'état.
The new leader of Burkina Faso, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, supported his rebellion, among other reasons, due to the failure of the previous government and the ineffective French military presence on Burkinabe soil to push back jihadism.
In addition to expelling French troops from its territory, a measure shared by its neighbors Mali and Niger, Traoré has approached Russia to close economic and security agreements. The presence of soldiers from the Wagner mercenary group, now renamed Africa Corps, is constant in the trio of Sahel countries.
The violence unleashed has become one of the most worrying issues in the region. In recent years, factions of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State arriving from Mali and Niger have turned Burkina Faso into the global epicenter of terrorist violence.
According to the latest Global Terrorism Index (ITG), which monitors victims of jihadism on the planet, last year Burkina Faso was the state with the most fatalities due to attacks by fundamentalist groups (1,907 deaths), almost a quarter of the occurred in the world, a total of 8,352 deaths.
