They escaped the worst. Four French soldiers were injured in Burkina Faso, one of them seriously, when an improvised explosive device (IED) exploded as their vehicle passed by in the north of the country, the French general staff announced on Tuesday evening. .
“The all-terrain vehicle exploded on an IED at the exit of Ouahigouya airport”, indicated a source at the staff, specifying that it was a “Barkhane unit on a mission to acknowledgement “. “They were immediately evacuated to Gao”, in Mali. “Those who deserve it will be evacuated to France”.
Tensions with the ruling junta in Bamako
The area is rather frequented by jihadists from the GSIM (or JNIM, a jihadist nebula affiliated with Al-Qaeda). But “it’s a transit zone, we have no certainty” about the origin of the machine, said the same source. The Sahel is also the prey of the jihadists of the EIGS, linked to the Islamic State group.
The Barkhane anti-jihadist force, which has been present in Mali since 2014 and whose mission is extended to the Sahel, is at the heart of major bilateral political issues, against the backdrop of accusations that Mali has used the services of the Russian mercenary group Wagner , as well as the reorganization of the French military presence in the country. Last week, the junta in power in Bamako since the August 2020 putsch closed its borders to the States of the Organization of West African States (ECOWAS), after the latter had done the same to sanction the project of the soldiers to stay in power for several years without an election.
Like its neighbors in Mali and Niger, Burkina Faso has also been caught up in a spiral of violence since 2015 attributed to armed jihadist groups. The army is struggling to contain the violence that has killed more than 2,000 people in six years, and forced more than 1.5 million people to flee their homes. At least a dozen civilians were killed on Saturday during an attack in northern Burkina Faso, security and local sources said on Sunday.