Ouagadougou
– An ambush on a police patrol in northern Burkina Faso on Monday left four
people dead, three of them officers, police said.

The
attack, carried out in the morning by unidentified gunmen, killed a police
lieutenant, two sergeants and a civilian, a police statement said.

READ | Burkina violence displacing 4 000 people daily: UN

Another five people were wounded,
the statement added, without saying if they were police officers or civilians.

Monday’s attack happened on the
Pissila-Gibga axis of the Sanmatenga province, in the West African country’s
Centre-Nord region.

Islamist insurgency

An attack last Tuesday killed
three soldiers from a detachment at Kelbo, in the farther north Soum province,
in the Sahel region bordering Mali.

Burkina Faso, which shares a
border with Mali and Niger, is caught up in an Islamist insurgency in which
repeated attacks have claimed 750 lives since 2015.

READ | ‘Jihadists’ kill 18 civilians in Burkina Faso

Under-equipped and poorly
trained, the country’s security forces have not been able to counter the deadly
raids in their territory, despite the help of foreign soldiers, notably French
troops.

According to UN figures, the
jihadist attacks in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso killed 4 000 people in 2019
and caused an unprecedented humanitarian crisis.

The attacks have forced more than
770 000 people to flee their homes, 20 000 of them schoolchildren, according to
the Burkinabe authorities.