[AlAhram] At least 20 people were killed in a series of raids on villages in Burkina Faso
...The country in west Africa that they put where Upper Volta used to be. Its capital is Oogadooga, or something like that. Its president is currently Blaise Compaoré, who took office in 1987 and will leave office feet first, one way or the other...
's troubled north, security sources and local residents told AFP Friday.
Armed men attacked three villages early on Thursday in the country's northern Yatenga province.
"Yesterday at around 5 am (local and GMT), gangs attacked the villages of Pelle, Zanna and Nongfaire", a local resident said Friday, giving a toll of 25 people killed.
There were "many others injured", the resident said.
Another resident said that "the assailants who came on cycle of violence s were chased by volunteers (civilian auxiliaries of the army) and soldiers".
The attack was confirmed by a security source, who put the corpse count at "around twenty" adding that search operations were underway to find the assailants.
The attackers "were hit by air support after taking refuge in the Barga forest. Several of them died," said another security source.
Burkina Faso, which saw two military coups in 2022, has been battling a jihadist insurgency that crossed from Mali in 2015.
Captain Ibrahim Traore, Burkina's transitional president after staging the most recent coup on September 30, has set a goal of recapturing the 40 percent of the country's territory which is controlled by jihadists affiliated with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State
 ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
group.
The violence has seen more than 10,000 killed -- both civilians and military -- according to the NGOs, and displaced an estimated two million people.
Earlier this week, some 20 non-combatants were killed in two attacks by suspected jihadists 400 kilometres further south in the Centre-Est region, bordering Togo and Ghana.
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