Around fifty towns and villages in Burkina Faso are today open-air prisons. According to Amnesty International, 46 localities, in which more than a million inhabitants normally reside – out of the country’s 22 million – are under siege by jihadist groups. In its report published Thursday, November 2, ““Death awaited us”, living under siege in Burkina Faso,” the human rights organization details the strategy first established by the jihadist group Ansaroul Islam and its dramatic consequences on civilians.

These blockades, which began to be put in place by armed Islamist groups in 2019, according to Amnesty International “to put pressure on local populations considered hostile towards them, dissuade them from collaborating with the defense and security forces and to increase their influence on the front lines”, multiplied at the end of 2022.

These sieges would be acts of retaliation for the recruitment campaign of more than 50,000 volunteers for the defense of the homeland (VDP), civilian auxiliaries, launched in November 2022 by the new junta led by Captain Ibrahim Traoré, less than two months after coming to power.

Banning civilians from accessing their fields to cultivate, mines placed around besieged towns to block their water and food supplies, sabotage of communications infrastructure to prevent citizens from sounding the alarm: jihadist groups have starved the civilians, sometimes to submit them to their authority, sometimes to force them to desert their village. As of April, nearly 2 million people, or 10% of Burkina Faso’s population, were internally displaced. The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), a non-governmental organization (NGO), calls this one of the world’s most neglected displacement crises.

Feeding on leaves

However, not all Burkinabé citizens were able to flee. In Djibo, a northern town of more than 80,000 inhabitants, there are still thousands trying to survive under a jihadist blockade since February 2022. Some have, however, managed to escape the clutches of Ansaroul Islam, an offshoot of the Support Group to Islam and Muslims (GSIM), the affiliate of Al-Qaeda in the Sahel, and told Amnesty International “of the death that slowly awaited them in Djibo”. “I saw seven children starve to death. I lost my niece like that. In September 2022,” said a 39-year-old displaced woman, saying she herself “gradually lost her sight” due to malnutrition. Like her, all the inhabitants had to eat leaves, harvested from the trees, to cope with the exhaustion of stocks of rice and millet.

More than 2.6 million civilians faced acute food insecurity in the final quarter of 2022 and nearly 42,000 civilians were exposed to famine between June and August this year, according to the United Nations. The UN also estimates that one in five Burkinabés, or 4.7 million people, needs humanitarian assistance, while “the authority of the Burkinabé government is confined to between 40% and 60% of the territory in reason for the expansion of the conflict,” notes Amnesty International.

To escape the influence of armed Islamists, many teachers and health workers have deserted their workplaces. Schools and health centers have closed, depriving a growing segment of the population of education and care.

Some health workers and humanitarian workers have even been targeted by jihadist groups. In February, “Ansaroul Islam fired on a Médecins sans frontières (MSF) vehicle which was traveling on the road linking Dédougou and Tougan (in the northwest), which Ansaroul Islam had just besieged. Two MSF staff members were killed,” recalls Amnesty. The attack led to the suspension of most MSF activities in Burkina Faso.

In Solhan, a village in the northeast of the country where at least 132 people were killed by suspected Ansaroul Islam fighters in June 2021, the nurse who worked in the health district was also subsequently killed by them. while he was supplying medicine,” said a 54-year-old displaced person. “After his death, all the doctors fled,” she relates.

Reprisals

As the country sinks into a deep security crisis since 2015 and the start of jihadist attacks, the number of civilians killed is growing alarmingly.

Citizens say they are caught between the attacks perpetrated by jihadist groups and the retaliatory actions carried out by the Burkinabe army or their proxies. In Holdé, a village in the north, Amnesty International reports “the death of 49 civilians, most of them women and children”, killed in early November 2022 by the army and VDP, following the attack on one of their nearby positions by Ansaroul Islam.

The fifty civilians had fled the siege of Djibo and thought they had found peace in Holdé. Wrongly. After escaping the jihadists, a 21-year-old woman explained the violence of the soldiers and their aides in what she thought was a safe haven: “When I entered the room with my two children, one of the attackers followed us. He pulled me out into the yard and shot me. I lost consciousness and when I woke up I was in the hospital. I was told that my two children, Fatimata and Hannatou (5 and 3 years old), who were behind my back, had been killed during the attack and that my brother Hassimi* had buried them. »