A slew of extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, and instances of torture by Burkina Faso’s military has terrorized communities in the country’s northeast this year, according to a Human Rights Watch report released Thursday.
The violence took place between February and May across the province of Séno. The report identifies at least 27 people who were either summarily executed or disappeared and then killed, most of them members of the Fulani ethnic group.
Jihadi fighters linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group have waged a violent insurgency in Burkina Faso for seven years. The violence has killed thousands of people and divided the country, leading to two coups last year.
The report by the New York-based watchdog comes in the wake of an April massacre in which residents say security forces killed at least 150 civilians in Karma, a northern village near the Mali border.
A Burkina Faso government spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the report.
In one account, 10 men in the village of Gangaol, all of the Fulani ethnic group, were hauled away in the backs of trucks, pushed out, and fired upon.
“The soldiers shot and I ran. I saw the others falling on the ground, but I kept running,” the HRW report quoted a survivor of the incident. Only four of the men survived, two of whom suffered critical injuries.
“In the cases we documented, most of those who have been victims of these crimes were from the Fulani ethnic group,” explained Ilaria Allegrozzi, the senior regional researcher at Human Rights Watch.
The Fulani people in Burkina Faso and Mali have been accused of collaborating with Islamic extremists, and as a result have often been targeted by security forces and others.
