Burkina Faso junta leader warns AES armies ready to fight and ‘teach’ ECOWAS ‘lesson’

“They taught us a lesson, but they will also learn,” Burkina Faso’s junta leader, Captain Ibrahim Traoré, has warned the regional bloc ECOWAS of a possible armed conflict amid escalating tensions, stressing that the united armies of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) are prepared to take on the ECOWAS forces that had been touted to be on standby.
The confrontation between the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) on the one side and the coup-hit Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso on the other may have just escalated. There are reportedly thousands of recorded deaths as a result of the back-and-forth between the two sides, which the Burkina Faso’s junta leader blames squarely on ECOWAS. According to a tweet by the journalist Sy Marcus Herve Traore, Captain Traoré’s grievances were expounded during his recent speech, in which he accused ECOWAS, and particularly its head, Nigeria’s president Bola Ahmed Tinubu, of being responsible for the the deaths of thousands of Nigerians.
“We are waiting for that standby force (ECOWAS). Thousands of Nigerians died on their hospital beds because of a lack of electricity or lack of medicine,” Traoré said. “It is a crime! They are responsible for these sanctions, they are responsible for these deaths.” He also noted that this, however, has not taken away the fighting spirit of the Nigerian people. “Do you think there are weak men who are in Niger? There are fighters over there. The Nigerian army is warlike. They have been fighting for years.” The three junta-led West African states have recently decided to form their own confederation (AES) that preceded their decision to leave the West African bloc. At this point, he also warned that Nigerian army is not “an army of parade or a peacekeeping army” but is ready, united with the other two AES armies, “to take on the ECOWAS forces”.