Daesh terrorists claim responsibility for Burkina Faso attack
Burkina Faso has seen regular terrorist attacks which have left hundreds dead since the start of 2015. (Reuters File Photo)


The Daesh terrorist organization claimed responsibility on Friday for an attack on a military outpost in Burkina Faso which occurred on Tuesday.

The terrorist group's alleged West African affiliate group issued a statement saying that one of its members drove into the base in northern Soum Province and set off a car bomb, leaving many civillians dead and injured.

The attack on Tuesday killed 35 civilians, almost all of whom were women. At the same time, a second attack struck a military base at a town in the north, in one of the deadliest assaults in nearly five years of terrorist violence in the West African country.

Seven soldiers and 80 terrorists also died in the double attack Tuesday, in Arbinda in the Soum province which lasted "several hours" and was of "rare intensity," the army said.

Burkina Faso, bordering Mali and Niger, has seen regular terrorist attacks which have left hundreds dead since the start of 2015 when militant violence began to spread across the Sahel region.

"A large group of terrorists simultaneously attacked the military base and the civilian population in Arbinda," the army chief of staff said in a statement.

"This barbaric attack resulted in the deaths of 35 civilian victims, most of them women," President Roch Marc Christian Kabore added on Twitter. He praised the "bravery and commitment" of the defense and security forces.