The June 11 attack was one of the deadliest suffered by the West African nation's military.
An al-Qaeda-linked armed group, Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), claimed responsibility for what it said was an attack on June 11 that killed more than 100 Burkina Faso soldiers in the area. from Mansila, near the border with Niger, the SITE Intelligence Group said.
On Sunday, SITE cited a JNIM statement saying that five days ago “fighters stormed a military post in the city, where they killed 107 soldiers and took control of the place.”
Several videos shared online by JNIM showed intense gunfire around the military base. Another video showed a display of ammunition and dozens of weapons, and at least seven captured Burkina Faso soldiers.
The attack reported in June has been one of the deadliest suffered by the army of the West African Sahel nation.
Ulf Laessing, head of the Sahel program at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, told Al Jazeera that the government is trying to fight armed groups but has not recruited professional soldiers to do so.
“They recruited 50,000 volunteers, many of whom received only a short period of training. Therefore, they are somewhat vulnerable to losses and, unfortunately, it is not very efficient. Incidents like this happen almost every day,” he said.
“Right now you have between 50 and 60 percent of [Burkina Faso’s] territory that is outside the control of the government… The government is trying very hard, it is buying weapons, it has a military partnership with Russia, but it is not having much success.”
Niger and Mali are also struggling to contain fighting linked to Al Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS). The unrest also threatens the stability of the Sahel region as armed groups, which control swaths of territory in Burkina Faso and Mali, use them as bases to attack southern coastal countries.
Laessing noted that while Mali and Niger have similar problems, their countries are much larger.
“Burkina Faso is the smallest of the three and is very densely populated… Every time the army attacks, there are many more civilian casualties, which makes it so brutal,” he said.
For more than a decade, armed groups have killed thousands of people and displaced more than two million in Burkina Faso.
Additionally, the country has topped the Norwegian Refugee Council's (NRC) recent list of the world's most neglected displacement crises.
Violence killed more than 8,400 people last year, double the number the year before, according to the NRC.
By the end of 2023, around two million civilians were trapped in 36 blockaded cities across Burkina Faso.
