Sixty-two women and four babies were freed by Burkina Faso’s armed forces on Friday, more than a week after they were kidnapped in the north of the country by suspected jihadists, state television and a security source said.
In its 8:00 p.m. (GMT and local) newscast, Radio-Television du Burkina (RTB) showed images of these women, broadcast on Friday and returned to Ouagadougou, evoking an “operation” by the armed forces, without further details.
“Learn more about his captors and his arrest”
Several security sources confirmed to AFP his release. These women and their babies were kidnapped on Thursday and Friday in the surroundings of Arbinda, in the Sahel region (north) when they were leaving their village to get food.
According to security sources, they were found in the Tougouri area, in the neighboring Centre-Nord region, 200 km further south, before being airlifted to the Burkina Faso capital at night, where they were received by Army officers. .
“His interrogation will allow us to find out more about his kidnappers, his arrest and his convoy,” continues one of the security sources.
Repeated attacks since 2015
Searches had been launched, by land and air, to find them. Part of the country, specifically the Sahel region where Arbinda is located, has been blocked by jihadist groups for several months and the towns are barely supplied with food, which pushes the inhabitants to leave their villages in search of food.
On Thursday, Burkina Faso suffered a series of attacks in several regions of the north and northwest of the country that caused the death of about thirty people, including about fifteen Volunteers for National Defense (VDP), army auxiliaries.
Burkina Faso, particularly in its northern half, has been facing increasing attacks since 2015 from jihadist groups linked to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. They left thousands dead and at least two million displaced.
Captain Ibrahim Traoré, transitional president resulting from the military coup on September 30 – the second in eight months – has set himself the goal of “recovering the territory occupied by these hordes of terrorists.”
Source: BFM TV
