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This week has been a particularly bloody one for sub-Saharan, West Africa mining nations, with major terrorist attacks on targets a day apart in Burkina Faso and Mali.
In Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou on Aug. 13, two attackers arriving on motorcycles — described as “very young” by one witness — shot dead 16 people, including at least eight foreigners, in a Turkish restaurant named Aziz Istanbul in what Burkina Faso President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré condemned as “a despicable attack that has Ouagadougou in mourning.”
The restaurant was said to be packed with foreigners, who had gone to spend the evening watching soccer on TV. In a counter assault that lasted until morning, the two attackers were killed by state security forces, five of whom were among the additional 22 people wounded, according to Agence France Presse. Some 40 people were freed by the counter assault.
At press time, there had been no claim of responsibility for the attack, but it bears the hallmarks of the extremist attacks that have plagued West Africa since the ill-judged toppling of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya in 2011.
Global Affairs Canada identified the Canadian victims as Cambridge University PhD student and former Toronto schoolteacher Tammy Chen, who was newly married and pregnant; and Bilel Diffalah, who was a volunteer for Montreal-based Centre for International Studies and Cooperation. Other foreigners killed included a Frenchman, two Kuwaiti women and male victims from Senegal, Niger, Lebanon and Turkey.
For the rest of this editorial: http://www.northernminer.com/news/terrorist-attacks-plague-burkina-faso/1003788687/