Islamic organizations intensify their reprisals against civilians in Burkina Faso, according to HRW

Human Rights Watch reported on Wednesday that jihadist organizations in Burkina Faso have increased their attacks on civilians, frequently as a form of reprisal against communities that have refused to join them or are suspected of working with government soldiers.

Since they invaded the country from neighboring Mali over ten years ago, Islamist insurgents—some of whom have ties to the Islamic State and al Qaeda—have been a problem for the junta-led West African nation.

Ibrahim Traore, the military chief, has advocated for the participation of citizens in the fight against the insurgency. He has done this by enlisting thousands of VDPs, or volunteer army auxiliaries, and, more recently, by mandating that civilians dig defensive trenches.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) discovered that the jihadists have been responding with increasingly lethal attacks on civilians.

At least 128 civilian deaths were reported as a result of seven Islamist strikes between February and June, according to the monitor. Villages, a camp for displaced persons, and attendees in a Catholic church were all targeted by insurgents.

Six of the attacks were attributed to Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM), an affiliate of Al Qaeda.

Witnesses told HRW that the group’s repeated warnings against people thought to have previously collaborated with the army served as the impetus for the attacks.

When authorities made the villagers return to places where jihadists had driven them because some of them had joined the VDPs, some of the peasants were slain.

“We find ourselves in a difficult situation,” a 56-year-old villager expressed to HRW.

Witnesses said that the February church slaughter was an obvious act of vengeance against Christians who did not renounce their faith, and that the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), an organization associated with ISIS, was the perpetrator.

The junta submitted HRW a rare written response to the study in August. The junta has repeatedly denounced HRW reports on military forces summarily killing civilians accused of working with jihadists.

The justice minister denied HRW’s assertion in a letter that serious crime prosecutions have been sluggish since the conflict began and stated that all claims of abuses and violations of human rights by rebels are being looked into.

The minister added that many who had been displaced have willingly returned to regions that security personnel had retaken and secured.

A JNIM attack on civilians ordered to construct trenches around the north-central town of Barsalogho at the end of August was not mentioned in the HRW report. It was one of the worst in Burkina Faso’s history, with hundreds of people shot to death.

When Traore took over in September 2022—the second coup in Burkina Faso that year—he pledged to be a better leader than his predecessors, partly because he was fed up with the authorities’ perceived worsening of the violence.

However, analysts, human rights organizations, and aid workers claim that under his administration, which has also clamped down on opposition, the security situation has gotten worse.