What happened
Gunmen attacked the gendarmerie detachment at Inata, near the gold mine in Soum province, on the morning of 14 November 2021. The government's first toll of at least 19 gendarmes and a civilian, given as provisional, rose to 49 gendarmes and four civilians, the heaviest loss the security forces had suffered since the insurgency began in 2015. The detachment had reported going for about two weeks without food rations before the attack. No group claimed it; reporting attributes it to JNIM-linked fighters.
The attack that turned the war into a political crisis for the state: the account of a garrison left unfed and then overrun went through the ranks and the capital, and the January 2022 coup that deposed President Kaboré was justified by it. It is the origin of the sequence the Burkina Faso lens records — two coups, "total war" and the mass mobilisation of the VDP — and the first of the three mass-casualty attacks on which that lens rests.
Confidence: High
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