Last week a story flashed across the BBC, garnering far too little attention. More than 180 bodies were found in a set of mass graves in Burkina Faso. According to Human Rights Watch and recorded accounts from locals, the bodies accumulated between November 2019 to June 2020. Many of the victim’s bodies showed gunshots in the head. Some died with their hands tied behind their backs. No one is sure if these are the remains of jihadists in the region, dumped off by security forces, or victims of the jihadists themselves.
Such is the state of carelessness and unconcern by the global community toward one of the fastest-growing extremist situations in the world. The violence in the region has accelerated to such an extent that it is difficult to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys. Indeed, those labels can change daily. The crisis in the Sahel has spread from a local concern in Mali to a regional issue of increasing alarm. Burkina Faso is one of the nations hardest hit by the crisis.
Longstanding issues of corruption and dysfunction were the hallmarks of colonialism’s aftermath for many nations in this region of the world over the last half-century. In 2011 Libya’s collapse added to these pressures as jihadists and extremists hailing loyalty to many different groups flooded the region.
Mali was the first focus of this latest round of chaos. Leveraging various ethnic and cultural divisions, different jihadist organizations turned the country into a virtual civil war. Locals found themselves throwing their support not behind a particular ideology or belief system, but the group most capable of stopping the fighting and maintain some level of stability. Humanitarian and non-governmental organizations documented widespread human atrocities throughout this time.
In 2012 the French intervened and pushed the jihadists back for a time. A small force from the US and a peacekeeping mission of more than 13,000 from the United Nations also joined. These foreign incursions helped push the jihadists beyond the borders of Mali and into neighboring lands, swelling the crisis into a regional conflict.
As the jihadists lost ground in Mali, they regrouped across the border in Burkina Faso. In March 2017, many of the groups merged into a new al Qaeda affiliate, Group to Support Islam and Muslims, or JNIM. JNIM ramped up the levels of organized violence striking from Burkina Faso into Mali. Targets included schools, buses, churches, mosques, and military bases.
Soon the jihadist violence morphed into a regional concern between Mali and Burkina Faso, and then beyond. In 2017 a regional counter-terror force known as the G5 Sahel was formed. Its members included Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad, Mauritania, and Niger. By the beginning of 2019, the G5 Sahel boasted significant steps forward in driving JNIM and other splinter jihadist groups back, but the worst of the violence was only beginning.
Mali and Burkina Faso’s security forces continued to push against the jihadist on the gains of the G5 Sahel. The violence and injustice of these security forces were often difficult to distinguish from that of the jihadists.
A Human Rights Watch Report at the beginning of 2019 noted jihadists killed 86 civilians in Burkina Faso in the last half of 2018. Mali’s government security forces killed another 116 civilians in that same period for providing safe harbor to the jihadists.
The people of Burkina Faso found themselves caught between jihadists on one side and violent security forces on the other side. This corruption and violence helped push more civilians toward the jihadists and swell the ranks.
The UN Office for West Africa and the Sahel (UNOWAS) noted that terrorist attacks in Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso jumped fivefold in 2019, killing more than 4,000 people. Burkina Faso alone counted 1,800 of these victims, compared to only 80 three years before. The unrest resulted in half a million displaced people by the beginning of 2020.
Seeing the violence of Burkina Faso as merely a struggle against terrorism misses the point. The agricultural sector once provided nearly 80% of all jobs in the country. In recent years, one-third of the land in Burkina Faso degraded due to decreases in rainfall and soil depletion. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, that trend will only spread further across the country in the coming years.
In response, a mass migration of the country’s population transpired. People left the countryside to the cities to escape poverty and terrorism.
The same tragic trends unfolding in Burkina Faso are amplifying across the region of the Sahel. Food resources are collapsing. Cities are bulging. Corrupt and dysfunctional governments find themselves unprepared for the crisis, and unrest is growing. In the void leadership, violence is spreading.
The whole world is watching COVID19 today, but the violence in Burkina Faso and the Sahel has not stopped, neither did the underlying issues driving the chaos.
