According to Human Rights Watch: "Human Rights Watch documented nine incidents that followed a similar modus operandi: dozens of security force members, travelling on both motorcycles and vehicles, mounted large operations on local market days. After surrounding scores of people who were conducting business at the market, the security force members detained up to 14 men and allegedly executed them, according to witnesses who found their bodies hours later, usually along the side of a road. Witnesses to these incidents described members of the security forces being accompanied by a few men in civilian dress whose faces were completely covered and who ‘indexed’ or identified, the men who were detained and later allegedly executed. The operations described by the witnesses occurred in the administrative communes of Arbinda, Tongomayel, Koutougou and, in one case, Baraboulé, and were: the alleged execution [...] of 9 men in Belharo (also known as Belhouro) on February 13, 2019. [...] Three witnesses described an operation in Belharo (also called Belhouro) village, some seven kilometers north of Arbinda, on February 13, 2019 during which nine men detained on a market day were found dead hours later in a field several kilometers away. A witness at the market that day said: I approached the market to buy grain for my animals when suddenly a man ran towards me saying, “don’t go to the market; it’s surrounded by the military!” I saw they were detaining people. Men in uniform and a few in civilian attire, their faces totally covered, started coming towards me, but first they stopped another trader, ordering him to walk to the market. I thought they would run after me but fortunately, for me, they were distracted by the other man. I hid, in great fear, in a nearby house until they left. In the convoy were many motorcycles and three big military trucks. Human Rights Watch obtained photographs of graves where the nine victims were allegedly buried.65 The victims, aged 24 to 72 years-old, included several men from the same extended family. A witness who helped find and later buried the dead said: We found Hamadoun Boyi Dicko, 72-years-old, separated from the others, under a tree with both knees and his forehead on the ground; it seemed like he’d asked to pray before being shot. Four others were a few meters away, lying face down, and two of them were clinging to each other; the hand of one clutching the shirt of his brother. Others were in a ditch 50 meters away. We buried the old man separately, and the eight others in two common graves." [...] Witnesses to all but one of the incidents described above said the alleged perpetrators were dressed in dark yellow and brown camouflage uniforms which, as noted, is worn by members of both the gendarmerie and army. “It can be confusing; the gendarmerie and the army use the same uniform in some theaters of operation,” one security force officer noted." However, on the basis of interviews with the witnesses, security sources, and community leaders representing the major ethnic groups present in Soum Province, Human Rights Watch believes the majority of incidents described above were perpetrated by a detachment of gendarmes who, in August 2018, had been deployed to the town of Arbinda to respond to the growing number of armed Islamist attacks, including many of those which targeted civilians and are described above." ^[+]