The military regime in Burkina Faso on Friday announced that it was creating new rapid response forces, recruiting 14,000 soldiers and thousands of civilian support staff, to fight jihadist violence.
Burkina Faso has been plagued by Islamist attacks in the last 10 years, leaving an estimated 26,000 soldiers and civilians dead.
Prime Minister Rimtalba Jean Emmanuel Ouedraogo told the transitional parliament that the new battalions would bring the number of army rapid response forces in the country to 28 and police mobile units to 13.
“More than 14,000 soldiers of all types and thousands of (civilian defense force volunteers) have been recruited, trained, and equipped,” he added.
The rapid intervention battalions (BIR) and civilian defense volunteers (VDP) have been accused multiple times of abuses against civilians, including earlier this week in western Burkina Faso.
The years of violence have forced more than two million people to flee their homes, according to the last available UN refugee agency figures from March 2023.
But Ouedraogo said more than one million of the internally displaced have now been resettled in nearly 700 localities.
He also said that more than two-thirds (71 percent) of land occupied by armed groups had been recaptured. AFP could not independently confirm that figure.
“Burkina Faso has never been confronted with such a deep and massive crisis in all its history,” the prime minister said.
According to a Western military source, “the terrorist armed groups are dangerously close to the capital and are now at least 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Ouagadougou to the north and east.”
The groups control main roads using ambushes and kidnapping and “disrupt supply chains,” the source added.
Of the two main jihadist groups carrying out deadly attacks, the Al-Qaeda affiliated Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims “seems to have established a large corridor from the north to the south to the east of Burkina Faso, stretching as far as the Tillaberi region of Niger,” the source said.
The other jihadist group in Burkina Faso is the Islamic State Sahel Province.