Burkina Faso had long occupied a place of relative stability within a volatile West African neighborhood, but by January 2016 the foundations of that stability were visibly eroding. The country's northern regions had come under increasing pressure from jihadist groups spreading out of Mali, and the political transitions of 2014 and 2015, including the popular uprising that ousted longtime President Blaise Compaoré and the subsequent coup attempt, had left governing institutions weakened and security forces stretched. Burkina Faso was a member of the G5 Sahel grouping of countries working to counter insurgent threats across the region, and the Splendid Hotel in Ouagadougou was sometimes used by French military personnel participating in Operation Barkhane, the France-led counterterrorism campaign based out of Chad. The United States also maintained a military presence in the country, with approximately 75 personnel deployed including roughly 60 providing security assistance in the form of training and advisory support.
The broader regional backdrop was one of spreading instability. Mali to the northwest had been convulsed by a Tuareg rebellion and subsequent jihadist takeover of its northern regions since 2012, and the conflict had attracted fighters and ideology from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, known as AQIM. Nigeria and the Lake Chad Basin were grappling with the Boko Haram insurgency. Into this environment, groups like AQIM and its affiliate Al-Mourabitoun had been probing for soft targets across the Sahel.
January 15, 2016 began ominously even before the main attack. Earlier in the day, around 14:00 local time, approximately 20 heavily armed unidentified individuals attacked a gendarmerie post in the village of Tin Abao near the Malian border. That same evening, an Australian couple, initially misidentified as Austrian, were kidnapped in northern Burkina Faso near the border with Mali in the Baraboulé area near the village of Djibo. The evening would end with far greater violence.
At approximately 19:30, six or seven turbaned gunmen arrived in four-wheel drive vehicles and set ten vehicles on fire before attacking the Cappuccino restaurant on Avenue Kwame Nkrumah in the heart of Ouagadougou. The restaurant had approximately 100 guests at the time, many of them foreigners and business travelers who frequented the upscale establishment. The attackers then moved to the adjacent 147-room, four-star Splendid Hotel. A dinner event organized by ASECNA, the regional air navigation authority, was underway in the hotel with around 200 attendees. In what indicated careful prior planning, some of the perpetrators had arrived at the hotel earlier in the day posing as guests, taking up positions before their accomplices struck after nightfall.
Among the victims were two former Swiss members of parliament, Jean-Noël Rey and Georgie Lamon, who were killed at the restaurant during the attack. Survivors, including a Slovenian social anthropologist and a French architect, later reported that the attackers appeared to deliberately target white people, selecting and shooting them while sparing others. In the chaos that followed, about ten ambulances ferried the wounded to the city's hospitals through the night.
By 01:00 the following morning, government commandos launched a counter-assault to free an unknown number of hostages trapped inside the hotel, using explosives to breach the building as a fire burned in the lobby. Security forces continued operations through the night as the siege extended to the nearby YIBI hotel, where another attacker was killed. By morning, the government had released a total of 176 hostages and declared the siege over. Three perpetrators were killed at the main attack site, and additional attackers were neutralized at the YIBI hotel. The final death toll stood at at least 30 killed and 56 wounded. Air France and Turkish Airlines flights that had been diverted to Niamey, Niger due to the proximity of Ouagadougou Airport to the attack site were eventually allowed to resume normal operations.
Responsibility for the attack was claimed jointly by Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Al-Mourabitoun, an AQIM splinter group. The Ouagadougou attacks confirmed what security analysts had long feared: that the jihadist violence spreading across the Sahel had crossed another threshold, striking not just remote border regions but the capital cities of relatively stable countries. For Burkina Faso's newly elected president Roch Marc Christian Kaboré, who had taken office after the November 2015 elections, the attack was an early and brutal reminder of the security challenges his administration would face. The country would experience further terrorist attacks in the years that followed, with violence gradually intensifying until Burkina Faso became one of the most severely affected nations in the global jihadist insurgency across the Sahel.
