Women fleeing attacks by Islamist militants in northern Burkina Faso are pictured at a camp for internally displaced people in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, January 29, 2022. ZOHRA BENSEMRA / Portal
The wait is endless. “We haven’t heard from them in a week. We continue to pray that we may find them safe and sound,” hopes a Burkina Faso legislator, who asked not to be identified, in Ouagadougou, the Burkina Faso capital. On January 12 and 13, gunmen abducted more than fifty women from his hometown of Arbinda in the north of the country.
Even if no lawsuit has yet been filed, the young man has little doubt: the support group for Islam and Muslims (GSIM, affiliated with al-Qaeda), which controls this part of the region, is the origin of this kidnapping, which is assuming the proportions The number of abducted women varies by source: around fifty according to the authorities, 75 according to the Burkinabe Movement for the Defense of Human and Peoples’ Rights.
At dawn on Thursday January 12, according to the chosen ones, a first group of about thirty women were captured by the jihadists east of Arbinda while looking for food outside the village. The next morning, about twenty others who had not heard of the kidnapping went in their turn to get supplies, this time to the west of the city. “Only six of them came back after they managed to escape,” continues the native of Arbinda, who has lived in Ouagadougou for several years.
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In Burkina Faso, kidnappings of civilians are on the rise as terrorists — sometimes linked to al-Qaeda, sometimes to the Organization of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (EIGS) — expand their influence: in 2018, these groups were down from around thirty Abductions attributed to more than 220 in 2022, according to the NGO Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (Acled).
Recruitment of volunteers
In Arbinda, the population is surviving the blockade imposed by terrorists since 2021 as best they can. There, as in other villages in the north and east of Burkina Faso, two large parts of the country where almost all the villages are under siege, “the attics are empty” and “only women can go out without being killed,” assures the local elected official According to the United Nations, a total of one million people are living under the blockade.
Women often have no choice but to leave their villages at their own risk. In Arbinda, “women are abducted from time to time but usually return the next day after being abused and sometimes raped by their captors”. On January 12 and 13, the kidnapped women did not return this time, and the scale of the kidnapping led villagers to say it was a symbolic act by the jihadists “out of revenge.”
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“Terrorists have held a grudge against the people of Arbinda since citizens took up arms to defend their community in 2017,” said Ali Nana, coordinator of the Popular Resistance Movement, a militia whose members recently volunteered for the Defense of the city, Heimatland (VDP), the new name for civilian aid workers who, according to the government, have been responsible for “strengthening the ranks of the army in the fight against terrorism” since their regularization at the beginning of 2020.
After being taken over in a coup in September 2022, transitional president Captain Ibrahim Traoré announced that he had launched a massive recruitment of 50,000 VDPs across the country to help soldiers regain ground against terrorist groups now taking over the Control more than 40% of the territory. In Arbinda, several local sources indicate that many young people have followed the young 34-year-old captain’s call in recent weeks. Their training by the Defense and Security Forces had begun.
“We have to help ourselves”
“The kidnapping of the Arbinda women is clearly a message to the VDPs to encourage them to stop collaborating with the state,” analyzes Mahamoudou Savadogo, a former gendarme and security issues specialist. For his part, Daouda Diallo, spokesman for the collective against impunity and stigmatization of communities, fears that “the massive arming of civilians” is a “factor in the aggravation of conflicts and the excessive exposure of civilians to violence because the villages represent a VDP stamp the privileged.” target of the terrorist groups”. In November 2022, Jafar Dicko, the leader of Ansarul Islam, a jihadist group that has pledged allegiance to GSIM, threatened reprisals against villages whose residents were tempted to fight alongside the army in a video broadcast on social media .
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But in Arbinda, citizens “have no choice but to keep their guns. The survival of our town depends on it,” assures the local elected official. Two hundred miles north of the capital, his people now live “terrorized” by the January 12-13 kidnappings. “No one dares defy the blockade, and the famine advances. How will they feed themselves? You must help us,” he asked. On January 17, part of the population demonstrated in front of the military command stationed on the outskirts of the city to demand a new food supply from the army. The contents of previous convoys organized by the authorities were not sufficient to feed everyone.