On September 30, 2022, Captain Ibrahim Traoré overthrew Lieutenant-Colonel Damiba, who himself had seized power by force from elected President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré in January of the same year. On October 2, Ibrahim Traoré obtained the resignation of Lieutenant-Colonel Damiba and effectively became the president of the Burkinabè military transition. This second putsch was justified by the inability of the first coup to confront the Islamist insurgency in Burkina Faso. But since then, although the number of attacks has decreased, the number of victims of armed groups has continued to increase.
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Twelve months after Ibrahim Traoré’s coup d’état, insecurity linked to armed groups has not regressed, far from it. And this despite the support given to the Volunteers of the Fatherland, the VDP, and the acquisition by the army of equipment – sometimes misused, it is true, by the jihadists, as recently in Koumbri.
Although the attacks were a little less frequent, 1,700 all the same between January and August of this year, compared to 2,500 over the same period last year, they caused many more victims: 6,000 dead, compared to 4,100. , according to the NGO Acled (The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project).
The situation is particularly degraded in the northern and eastern regions of Burkina: the Sahel, the North Center, the North, the Boucle du Mouhoun and the East. Towns like Dori and Ouahigouya are in fact under blockade by jihadists and depend on special convoys for their supplies.
If according to the junta, 191,000 Burkinabé have returned to their villages and 900 classes have been reopened or relocated, the UNHCR estimates that there are 2 million Burkinabé displaced within their own country, and Unicef puts 1 million children out of school due to lack of classes. 4.7 million people depend on humanitarian aid, or one in five Burkinabés.
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