OUAGADOUGOU: A woman who survived the massacre of hundreds of villagers in central Burkina Faso described the horror of searching through bodies to find her brothers, in an interview following the attack claimed by an Al Qaeda-linked group earlier this week.
“We went out with carts to collect the bodies of my older brothers,” said the woman, 38, who escaped with her toddler. “We spent a long time going through bodies piled up under trees.”
The woman gave the interview to an aid worker in Kaya, a nearby town where many survivors have since fled. The aid worker provided the woman’s testimony in an audio recording to Reuters. The woman agreed for her story to be released to the media on condition that her name and voice be withheld for her safety.
The attack outside the town of Barsalogho was one of the deadliest in nearly a decade of Islamist violence in the West African country. A group of victims’ relatives said at least 400 people were killed when jihadists opened fire on civilians digging defensive trenches on the orders of the military.
The massacre took place on Saturday morning, the woman said in the interview. The army had forced every man in the town out to dig trenches to protect it from attackers, while women and younger children were sent to cut long grass and trees to improve visibility for the soldiers stationed there.
The militants, or bushmen as she described them, arrived at about 10 a.m. and began killing, firing on soldiers and civilians alike. They didn’t stop until later in the day when drones arrived overheard. She said it took three days for the survivors, mostly women and children, to collect the bodies.
