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 12 men in Gasseliki on November 16 [2018]; [...] Three witnesses, all traders, described a very similar operation during which the security forces allegedly executed at least 12 men who had hours earlier been detained in or near the Gasseliki village market on November 16, 2018. One witness said: First came the men in boubous on a few motorcycles, then a few minutes later the soldiers on motorcycles, and then the pickups. Four men in civilian attire were doing the indexing while the soldiers stood guard. I was one of 80 detainees made to walk past them as they stood behind a concrete wall near the water pump. They picked out seven from my group. The soldiers tore their shirts off. I remember their shirts lying on the ground…all the while a drone circled overhead.” A second witness described seeing the bodies in a hamlet not far from Gasseliki. A shopkeeper said, “I know all of them. Some were from Gasseliki, others who had come to market. I counted them from my shop, 12 of them, as the soldiers ordered them onto the truck. The next day I spoke with the men who had found and buried them in a nearby village called Aladjou." [...] 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." ^[+]