Unidentified armed men have killed four villagers in northeastern Ivory Coast near Burkina Faso, while another remains missing following the west African country’s first such deadly attack since 2021, the army said Tuesday.
Ivory Coast shares a porous border spanning nearly 600 kilometres (around 370 miles) with Burkina Faso, where jihadist groups are active across much of the junta-run country.
The attack comes as fears grow of a spillover of the Sahel region’s jihadist insurgencies towards the west African coast, with Benin and Togo also experiencing a spike in violence.
It took place in the region of Tehini in the small village of Difita, two kilometres from the Burkinabe border, during the night of Sunday to Monday, the Ivorian army’s chief of staff, General Lassina Doumbia, said in a statement.
The toll is “four farmers killed, one resident missing, a woman seriously burnt”, he said, adding that several huts had been set on fire and livestock taken.
Contacted by AFP, an Ivorian government source raised the possibility that the assault was a revenge attack targeted at people “suspected of bringing support to Burkina Faso’s Volunteers for the Defence of the Fatherland”.
Established in late 2019, the civilian volunteer force supports the Burkinabe army in its anti-jihadist fight. Its members have often been accused of rights abuses against civilians.
The Ivorian army said it had deployed air and ground forces against the attackers, “who fled before the troops arrived”.
– ‘Worrying but under control’ –
An attack in northern Ivory Coast in June 2020 left 14 army personnel dead in Kafolo.
Two soldiers were also killed in March 2021.
“We are in an environment where terrorist groups are active. But for several years, there have been no attacks or major incidents attributed to or claimed by these groups” on the Ivorian side of the border, William Assanvo, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), told AFP.
“The fact that we are now witnessing an attack of this nature against civilian populations resulting in deaths, people being intentionally burnt alive, this is new, this is unusual,” he added.
Clashes between jihadists and Burkina Faso’s Volunteers for the Defence of the Fatherland (VDP) can sometimes take place just a few kilometres over the border from the Ivory Coast.
The Burkina Faso-Ivory Coast frontier is itself poorly marked and frequently criss-crossed by various traffickers smuggling goods between the two countries.
Earlier this month, Defence Minister Tene Birahima Ouattara acknowledged that security was among the many challenges the Ivory Coast faces.
“The situation is worrying but under control,” he added in an interview with the Fraternite Matin daily.
Besides the army’s deployment, the Ivory Coast has sought to dissuade young people in the north from joining armed groups by launching a large social programme in the region.
Ivory Coast has had tense relations with neighbouring Burkina Faso since a military coup brought Captain Ibrahim Traore to power in the Sahel nation in 2022.
Both countries have traded accusations of attempted destabilisation, with Traore blaming the Ivory Coast for harbouring his opponents.
Like its fellow junta-run allies in Mali and Niger, Burkina Faso has been battling jihadist fighters linked to Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State group for more than a decade.
Ivory Coast experienced its first deadly jihadist attack in March 2016, when fighters killed 19 people in an assault on Grand-Bassam, a seaside resort near the economic capital Abidjan.
AFP
