Food donors arrive one by one in front of the municipal stadium in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
They are assembling to prepare supplies for their fellow countrymen who are stranded in areas under the control of jihadists. A notice requesting donations for Djibo locals who are now experiencing starvation.
Due to food shortages and security issues, the population of the Soum Province’s capital has been declining. Over the past few years, it has increased from 60 thousand to almost 300 thousand.
A military-supervised assistance convoy last week traveling to Djibo was assaulted by jihadists, leaving scores dead and unaccounted for.
Everyone agrees that helping the people of Djibo is a humanitarian act and a responsibility of citizenship.
“It is a patriotic gesture because it is also the way for all Burkinabe to contribute as little as it may be, for the fight against terrorism”, civil engineer Don Bosco Steeve Zongo says.
Only 60% of the region is under government authority, according to the ECOWAS representative in Burkina.
Thousands of terrorists escaping are drawn to Ouagadougou and its surroundings. Many form temporary camps, like Bouréima Zabré. On a good day, they converse and debate. The tale of their ordeal is another thing that will never leave their memories.
“The elderly man claims that the terrorists are to blame for asking us to leave our village. Soldiers sent to protect the populace are unable to eliminate all of them. There will be no survivors in the war that they, the jihadists, have come to wage. So we went.”
Leaving frequently entails preserving one’s life while beginning an exile where severe, substandard living conditions and frequently no help from the authorities await.
Can military men provide a solution?
Beginning in 2015, a jihadist insurgency from neighboring Mali extended to Burkina, causing more than two million people to evacuate their homes and killing thousands of lives.
On September 30, a new junta headed by Captain Ibrahim Traore, 34, took control of Burkina Faso. This was the second such coup since January, which was justified by the inability to put an end to jihadist atrocities.
Analysts are skeptical of promises of increased security made by coup planners in the Sahel region.
A putsch often “destroys the army structure and splits members of the military between supporters and opponents of the coup,” according to Djallil Lounnas at Morocco’s Al-Akhawayn University. It denotes turbulence, division, and purges.
According to him and others, coups simply exacerbate issues in nations where the armed forces are already criticized for their effectiveness and management, and where security forces are frequently under-equipped.
Lemine Ould Salem, a Mauritanian journalist and author of a book on jihadism, claimed that political unrest lends credence to extremist rhetoric that “delegitimizes official institutions.”
They assert that there is no constitution, state, or democracy, he stated.
Military coups in the Sahel have also made it harder for the region to work together against extremists.
