Gasseliki massacre
massacre
On January 10, 2019, Ansarul Islam militants killed 20 civilians in Gasseliki, Burkina Faso. The attack came in the wake of a massacre perpetrated by the Koglweogo in Yirgou, in Barsalogho department, just days earlier.
Prelude
Northern Burkina Faso has been embroiled in a jihadist insurgency since 2015, against Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, Jama'at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, and Ansar Dine. The insurgency began after these groups, along with many other splinter and side groups, breached the instability of the Burkinabe borders from hubs in Mali. Ansar ul Islam formed in 2016, allied with JNIM, as the first homegrown Burkinabe jihadist group. In 2018, attacks by Ansarul Islam led to the US government sanctioning the group and its affiliates. On December 28, 2018, Ansarul Islam began a campaign stepping up its attack, with an ambush in Loroni killing ten Burkinabe police officers.
Massacre
While the town of Gasseliki was attacked four separate times in January by Ansar ul Islam, according to locals, the deadliest attack occurred on January 10, 2019. Locals claimed that the jihadists were wearing a mixed variety of clothing, some wearing boubous, others in camouflage. The militants then broke into homes, ordering civilians to get up before shooting at them.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gasseliki massacre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.