FEEBLY shaded by trees in the blistering heat, desperate civilians throng a displacement camp in tents and ramshackle shelters after fleeing insurgent violence in northeastern Burkina Faso.
Abandoning their homes and farms as the militants swooped, thousands have run for their lives to these camps near the town of Dori, where little hope awaits them.
Humanitarians call it a “neglected” catastrophe.
“They came to our village and threatened us. They stole our cattle. They killed our people,” said one of the survivors, Kirissi Sawadogo.
“That is why we had to flee and came here,” she said, preparing a meal of millet paste.
From her home village of Lelly in the Sahel desert region, she fled to Wendou 2, an offshoot of a vast initial camp of the same name that is now home to 3,000 people.
Armed insurgents have for almost 10 years been terrorising civilians in this African country on the southern fringe of the Sahel.
The displaced people rarely speak of the groups’ names, but authorities generally identify them as militants linked to Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State group.
In September 2023, armed men attacked the Wendou camp, killing eight inhabitants.
A new ranking by the non-government Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) published on Monday judged that Burkina Faso is suffering the most neglected displacement crisis for the second year in a row.
A quarter of the estimated two million displaced people in Burkina Faso are from the Sahel region in the north, according to the country’s latest official data, which date from 2023.
At the start of this year, 85 per cent of schools and 69 per cent of the health centres in the Sahel sector were closed, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
