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| Displaced people wait for help at a village in Dablo area, Burkina Faso March 1, 2019 |
FAUBE, Burkina Faso (Reuters)
When an Islamist preacher took up the fight in Burkina Faso’s
northern borderlands almost a decade ago, his only weapon was a radio station.
The words he spoke kindled the anger of a frustrated population, and helped
turn their homes into a breeding ground for jihad.
Residents of this parched region in the Sahel - a
vast band of thorny scrub beneath the Sahara Desert - remember applauding
Ibrahim “Malam” Dicko as he denounced his country’s Western-backed government
and racketeering police over the airwaves.
“We cheered,” said Adama Kone, a 32-year-old
teacher from the town of Djibo near the frontier with Mali, who was one of
those thrilled by Dicko’s words. “He understood our anger. He gave the Fulani
youth a new confidence.”
Mostly herders, young men like Kone from the Fulani
people were feeling hemmed in by more prosperous farmers, whom they felt the
government in Ouagadougou favored. The preacher successfully exploited their
conflicts over dwindling land and water resources, and the frustrations of
people angered by corrupt and ineffective government, to launch the country’s
first indigenous jihadi movement. That cleared a path for groups affiliated
with al Qaeda and Islamic State.
Since Dicko’s first broadcasts, Burkina Faso has
become the focus of a determined jihadi campaign by three of West Africa’s most
dangerous armed groups who have carved out influence in nearly a third of the
country, while much of the world was focused on the crisis in neighboring Mali.
Militant Islamist fighters close schools, gun down Christians in their places
of worship and booby-trap corpses to blow up first responders. At least 39
people died last week in an ambush on a convoy ferrying workers from a
Canadian-owned mine in the country. There has been no claim for that ambush,
but the modus operandi – a bomb attack on military escorts followed by gunmen
unleashing bullets – was characteristic of Islamist groups.
Since 2016, the violence has killed more than 1,000
people and displaced nearly 500,000 – most of them this year.
In 2019, at least 755 people had died through
October in violence involving jihadist groups across Burkina Faso, according to
Reuters’ analysis of political violence events recorded by the Armed Conflict
Location and Event Data Project, an NGO. Actual numbers are likely higher -
researchers aren’t always able to identify who is involved in the violence.
The teacher Kone is one of many of Dicko’s former
supporters who regret their earlier enthusiasm.
“We handed them the microphones in our mosques,” he
said. “By the time we realized what they were up to, it was too late.”
He fled to Ouagadougou two years ago, after armed
Islamists showed up at his school. More than 2,000 schools have closed due to
the violence, the U.N. children’s fund UNICEF said in August.
A lean, bespectacled Fulani from the north, Malam
Dicko broadcast a message of equality and modesty. He reportedly died of an
illness in late 2017, but his sermons channeled deep grievances in Burkina
Faso’s north where impoverished people have long been frustrated by corrupt
officials.
The province of northern Burkina Faso where Dicko
lived scores 2.7 on the United Nations Human Development Index, compared with 6
for the area around the capital, Ouagadougou. About 40% of its children are
stunted by malnutrition, against only 6% in the capital, according to U.S. AID.
From Ouagadougou to Djibo is a four-hour drive on a
road which peters out into a sandy track. Sparse villages dot a landscape of
sand and withered trees. Goats devour scrappy patches of grass.
Residents complain that their few interactions with
the state tend to be predatory: Bureaucrats demand money to issue title deeds
for houses, then never provide the papers; gendarmes charge up to $40 to take
down a complaint; there are mysterious taxes and extortion at police
roadblocks. Lieutenant Colonel Kanou Coulibaly, a military police squadron
commander and head of training for Burkina Faso’s armed forces, acknowledged
that northerners “feel marginalized and abandoned by the central government.”
In about 2010 preacher Dicko, who had studied in
Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, began tapping this discontent, recalled Kone and
other former Djibo residents. He denounced corruption by traditional religious
leaders and practices that he deemed un-Islamic, including lavish wedding and
naming ceremonies.
The movement he created, Ansarul Islam (Defenders
of Islam), opened a path to militants from outside Burkina Faso — particularly
Mali.
Early in 2013, French forces were pounding northern
Mali to wrest control from al Qaeda-linked fighters who had seized the region
the previous year. Dicko slipped over the border to join the militants, said
Oumarou Ibrahim, a Sufi preacher who knew Dicko and was close to the No. 2 in
his movement, Amadou Boly.
In Mali, Ibrahim said, Dicko linked up with Amadou
Koufa, a fellow Fulani whose forces have unleashed turmoil on central Mali in
recent years. French forces detained Dicko near the border with Algeria; he was
released in 2015.
He set up his own training camp in a forest along
the Mali-Burkina border, Kone, the teacher, and Ibrahim, the Sufi preacher,
told Reuters.
Dicko forged ties with a group of Malian armed
bandits who controlled drug and livestock trade routes.
On the radio that year, he urged youths to back
him, “even at the cost of spilling blood.”
For some years Burkina Faso’s president, Blaise
Compaore, had managed to keep good relations with Mali’s Islamists. But in
2014, he tried to change the constitution to extend his 27-year-rule. Residents
of the capital drove him from office.
Without Compaore, Burkina Faso became a target.
Barely two weeks into a new presidency, in January 2016, an attack on the
Splendid Hotel and a restaurant in Ouagadougou killed 30 people. It was claimed
by al Qaeda-linked militants based in northern Mali.
Dicko became even more radical after that: He fell
out with associates including his No. 2, Boly.
Ibrahim, the Sufi preacher, said Boly came to his
house in Belhoro village in November 2016, agitated because Dicko had ordered
him to raise cash to pay for AK-47 rifles and grenade launchers from Mali.
Boly refused. Dicko threatened him, Ibrahim said.
Boly was either with him, “or with the whites and the colonizers.”
Two weeks later, gunmen assassinated Boly outside
his Djibo home. Ibrahim said he fled his own village the next day.
The teacher Kone, whose house was down the street,
said he heard the gunshots that day. A wave of killings followed. The militants
assassinated civil servants, blew up security posts, executed school teachers.
One day in May 2017, Kone was running late for
school when he got a phone call from a colleague. Armed men from Dicko’s
movement had come and asked after him.
He shuttered the school and sped to Ouagadougou.
Now headed by Dicko’s brother Jafar, Ansarul Islam
was sanctioned by the United States in February 2018. None of its leaders could
be reached.
It still controls much of Burkina Faso’s northern
border areas but two other groups have also built a presence on the country’s
borders, according to the European Council on Foreign Relations. Islamic State
in the Greater Sahara dominates along the eastern frontier with Niger. And
Koufa’s Macina Liberation Front, which is closely aligned to al Qaeda, is
active on the western border with Mali.
These spheres of influence can be loose: Fighters
for all three are believed to cooperate with each other and with bandit groups.
Their attacks - including the kidnap and killing of
a Canadian citizen in January claimed by Islamic State - are becoming more
brutal. In one instance in March, a Burkinabe security official told Reuters,
militants stitched a bomb inside a corpse and dressed it up in an army uniform,
killing two medics - a technique used by Malian fighters.
Recent attacks on churches have killed about 20
people, and a priest was kidnapped in March.
The European Union and member states have committed
8 billion euros ($9 billion) over six years to tackling poverty in the region
but so far, responses from Ouagadougou and the West have been predominantly
military.
The United Nations has spent a billion dollars a
year since 2014 on a 15,000-strong peacekeeping force in Mali. Almost 200
members have been killed - its deadliest mission ever.
France has 4,500 troops stationed across the
region. The United States has set up drone bases, held annual training exercises
and sent 800 troops to the deserts of Niger. Led by France, Western powers have
provided funding and training to a regional counter-terrorism force known as G5
Sahel made up of soldiers from Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mauritania.
Despite all this, Islamist violence has spread to
places previously untouched by it, as tensions like those that first kindled
support for Dicko intensify.
“You have a solution that is absolutely militarized
to a problem that is absolutely political,” said Rinaldo Depagne, West Africa
project director at International Crisis Group, an independent think tank. “The
security response is not addressing these problems.”
The fact that a large number of recruits are Fulani
has triggered a backlash by other ethnic groups, and those who have fled
northern Burkina Faso say they had scant protection.
One woman said gunmen on motorbikes attacked her
village, Biguelel, last December. The gunmen accused her family of colluding
with “terrorists” simply because they were Fulani. They torched her home and
shot her husband and dozens of others dead, but she escaped.
The next day the woman, Mariam Dicko, and about 40
others went to a military police post in the nearby town of Yirgou. “They said
it was over now, so they couldn’t help us,” said Dicko - a common surname in
the country.
Kanou, the military police commander, acknowledged
that troops were sometimes not present when needed. “But when patrols are being
attacked, it’s more difficult,” he added. “We have to take measures to protect
ourselves.”
As Western forces rely increasingly on their Sahel
partners, rights groups and residents say they sometimes overlook abuses by
locals. Four witnesses described to Reuters summary executions of suspected
insurgents during search operations. These included an incident in the village
of Belhoro on Feb. 3, in which security forces ordered nine men out of their
homes and shot them dead, according to two women who saw the killings.
New York-based Human Rights Watch documented 19
such incidents in a report in March, during which it says 116 men and boys were
captured and killed by security forces. The government said the army is
committed to human rights and is investigating the allegations. “In our
struggle there will necessarily be innocent victims, not because we want to,
but because we are in a tough zone,” Kanou said. U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young
said America takes up any “mistakes” with the government.
In November 2018, Burkinabe forces raided the
village home of a lab technician at a clinic in Djibo, accusing his 60-year-old
father of being a terrorist, two friends of his told Reuters.
They killed the father in front of his son.
The following week, the technician, Jibril Dicko,
didn’t show up for work. His phone went dead.
Neighbors said he had gone to join the jihad.
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