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 14 men in Taouremba on October 16 [2018] [...] Three witnesses described an operation in Taouremba village on October 16, 2018 during which 14 men were detained and later found executed. They said 13 men were put into security forces vehicles after being “indexed” by men in civilian dress while a fourteenth victim, who suffered from a mental disability, was shot and killed on the spot after he was, apparently, perceived to be uncooperative. Two of the witnesses participated in the burials. One of the witnesses, a trader, said: Around 10 a.m. the soldiers descended on the market area, in three pickups, a larger vehicle, and some 20 motorcycles. The operation lasted several hours. They were in dark yellow camouflage; a few were in civilian dress with only their eyes and mouth showing. They encircled the market, searched houses and shops, but I didn’t see them confiscating any weapons. They detained over 100 of us; they ordered us to walk – 20-by-20 – past the men in civilian dress, who decided who would live and who would die. Among those indexed was Moussa T, a former village councilor who I later found executed. I was in the third wave. My heart raced. A drone, making a zzzz sound, circled above. I heard one of them saying, “we will kill you, Peuhls.” We heard gunfire minutes after they left. All those I saw when we went in search of the bodies later that day had been shot in the head. I could only recognize them by their clothing. A second witness said: After taking our identification cards, they ordered us, group-by-group, to walk by the men in civilian dress who didn’t talk except to point and say, ‘you, out’ in Mooré. Before the judgement, one man was overcome by panic. He kept standing up, then sitting down, again and again. Seeing this one of the soldiers threatened to shoot him right there. Another intervened but in the end, that man was among those indexed and killed. While the drone circled slowly above, a soldier ordered us to “look up and say a prayer.” They took away five from my group, ripping their turbans to bind their eyes and hands and ordering them into the truck. The men were so frightened, the soldiers had to lift, indeed throw, them in. They mocked us, “uh huh you thought you were going to the market today.” Minutes after they left we heard gunfire and we said, “Oh God, our people are dead.” A witness who helped bury the dead said: “Some minutes later we heard heavy gunfire; I shook at the intensity of it. Later that day, we found their bodies riddled with bullets. Four were killed near the animal market, three killed a kilometer down the road, six killed 10 kilometers away in Winde Jomrri.” Villagers speculated the bodies were executed by group as a strategy to extract information from those that were still alive, but Human Rights Watch is not in a position to confirm this observation. Another trader said, “They came from and returned to Arbinda…we know this because our family members called to tell us they’d seen a convoy coming down the road from Arbinda, and again called to say it had returned to their base there.” [...] 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." ^[+]