For months, terrified residents of Djibo, a town in the West African nation, kept discovering corpses of men who had been shot, blindfolded and bound. They blame the military.

Extremists and vigilantes are killing civilians in the West African nation of Burkina Faso, but so are soldiers, sowing fear and suspicion in a country that had once prided itself on its strong social fabric. We traveled to the country’s volatile far north to investigate the abuses.