B. Faso: Sahel governor claims security can't be provided for all villages

People wounded in a suspected jihadist attack in Burkina Faso's volatile north are receiving treatment in the nearby town of Duri.

The weekend attack led to the killing of at least 160 civilians, including around 20 children in the village of Solhan.

"We received a total of forty patients yesterday, half of whom were treated directly at the Sebba Medical Centre and surgical unit", said Dr Ahmed Sidwaya Ouedraogo, Regional Director of Health for the Sahel.

Mannou Tambanga is a resident of Solhan who survived the horrific attack. He narrates the incident.

"It was not, in any case, simple. It was really miserable because there was so much damage. They killed so many people without ever separating women and children. They killed, they burned all the goods they saw. They ransacked", Tambanga recalled.

Governor of the Sahel region Salfo Kabore visited survivors of the attack Monday. He claimed it was impossible to provide security for all villages in the country.

''We cannot foresee everything. We cannot avoid these kinds of situations because Burkina Faso is 274,000 km2, there are 9,000 villages in Burkina Faso, we cannot put a security element behind each Burkinabe'', the Governor of the Sahel region said.

The province of Yagha, where Solhan is located, has seen fighting for control between rivals- the al-Qaeda-linked Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (GSIM) and the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara.

In recent months, the area has been almost totally deserted by security forces.

But, there is a military detachment in the province's main city of Sebba, around 15 km from Solhan, which intervened in the village several hours after the attack in the early hours of Saturday.

Neither IS nor the GSIM had claimed the attack as of Monday.

Burkina Faso, a Sahel country bordering Mali and Niger, has been facing increasingly regular and deadly jihadist attacks for six years.