Burkina lawmaker killed in militants-ravaged area

Bloomberg

A Burkina parliament member, who was also one of the last authorities in a region ravaged by militants, was killed in a suicide bomb attack in the northern Djibo region, security and government officials said.
The lawmaker, Oumarou Dicko, who had gone to officiate the launch of a Red Cross programme to tackle youth employment, was travelling back to the capital Ouagadougou when his car hit a roadside bomb that killed the driver before gunmen opened fire and killed the lawmaker, a civil servant and Dicko’s cousin.
The assault comes as Burkina Faso grapples with an extremist insurgency that has displaced more than half a million people, according to the UN Over 200,000 people have been
displaced in four months, most of them from the West African nation’s northern regions.
The Sahel, a semi-arid region on the southern fringe of the Sahara, stands out as a region where violent extremism is on the rise in contrast to progress made fighting IS in Iraq and Syria.
The spike in violence has led to increasing discontent with how President Roch Marc Christian Kabore’s government is tackling the situation.
Around 20,000 people gathered at a stadium in Ouagadougou to show support for the country’s security forces, according to the organisers.