Burkina Faso on Tuesday said that more than 7,000 people had fled the country’s volatile north following the bloodiest massacre in a six-year-old jihadist insurgency.
“Steps have already been taken to give [displaced people] a minimum level of comfort, lodgings and food,” Burkinabe Prime Minister Christophe Dabire said, promising on a visit to the area that the attack “will not go unpunished.”
Dabire’s advisers told reporters that 7,600 people had fled to Sebba, the capital of Yagha Province, about 15km from the scene of the attack in Solhan village.
Photo: AFP
In Geneva, Switzerland, UN High Commissioner for Refugees spokesman Babar Baloch said that more than 3,300 people had fled, including more than 2,000 children and 500 women, after gunmen stormed into Solhan on Saturday last week and killed civilians.
At least 138 men, women and children were “executed,” and nearly 40 were seriously wounded, Baloch said.
Local sources have put the death toll at least 160, marking the deadliest attack since violence erupted in the west African country in 2015.
Burkinabe Minister of Communications Ousseni Tamboura said that the village “has been completely emptied of people.”
One local elected official said that most of those who left Solhan had already been fleeing violence, including in the Mansila district to the west.
Attackers “burned almost everything, houses, the market, the school and the dispensary,” Tamboura said.
Displaced people “arrived with few or no belongings,” Baloch said, adding that most “were generously welcomed by local families who are sharing what little they have.”
The new arrivals urgently need water, sanitation, shelter and medical care, he said.
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