I didn’t know of her until last Friday, when I learned via social media that she had been one of the victims of the Al-Qaida terrorist attack in Ouagadougou. She was in front of the café facing the hotel that was the terrorists’ target, that they raked with machine gun fire, just as the ISIS terrorists did at the cafés and restaurants in Paris’ 10th and 11th arrondissements last November 13th. Massacring people because they happened to be there. It was reported that Leila had survived, been rushed to a hospital in the city, and was out of danger. But yesterday it was announced that she had died. She was 33-years-old, Franco-Moroccan, and an accomplished professional photographer (see here and her website here). She was in Burkina Faso to do photography for Amnesty International. At least five friends and persons with whom I am friendly knew her personally—were friends of hers—and there are no doubt more. This has been all over my social media news feed today. People are shattered by her death and, though I didn’t know her myself, I am quite affected by it myself. What a loss. And a crime. I was already affected by the Ouagadougou attack before learning about Leila—as a terrorist outrage of this nature hits close to home for me—and am now that much more so. And with my sentiments—shared by countless others—reinforced that ISIS, Al-Qaida in all its forms, and others of the ilk (Boko Haram, Somali Al-Shabaab, etc, etc) need to be exterminated. Eradicated from the face of the earth. The New York Times has an obituary of Leila here. Thanks to Ammar Abd Rabbo for the photo of Leila below.
UPDATE: Le Monde’s obituary has more information on Leila, who lived between Paris, Marrakesh, and Beirut. The Amnesty International project that she was in Burkina Faso for was a documentary on violence against women. As fate would have it, she was in Paris last November 13th and in New York City on 9/11. She could have possibly survived had she been tended to in a more advanced medical facility than exists in Burkina Faso.
Arun with a View 
In passing a piece of simple security advice: do not ever stay in the “major international” hotel of a city in Africa. I have been in all the cities that were hit but the hotel I stayed in, for instance in Ouaga, is a couple hundred meters from the one that was hit (and, of course, a bit less nice and expensive). Same in Mali, etc. Unfortunately these days, one must avoid obvious expat places in all these cities, such as the cafe where this poor women was killed.
I haven’t been to Ouaga – just the airport (so saw the city from the air) – but have to Bamako and a dozen or so other west and equatorial African cities (plus Djibouti). I don’t know how you travel on the continent but when I go there I am prise en charge, with the organization sending me (the USG) booking the hotel (and which I don’t know about beforehand; the only city where I insisted on switching hotels was Kinshasa, though not for security reasons, which wasn’t an issue when I was there). In African cities it’s not easy to avoid international hotels if one wants a certain level of comfort and convenience. But even if one stays in a lesser standing hotel, there are the restaurants and cafés frequented by Westerners and expats where one will inevitably find oneself (e.g. the Westgate mall in Nairobi). It’s hard for Westerners to maintain a low profile in public in sub-Saharan Africa. If one visits the parts of the region where jihadists are active, one has to assume the risk.
I guess the USG should get real. It is of course difficult to avoid international hotels all the time – think Kinshasa for instance -, but I do try to and have been, at last count, to some 37 African countries, almost always on a Europaid per diem. These by the way are country-specific and make no sense whatsoever, just like the rest of Europaid: in some places, you live like a king, in others you are out of your own pocket. In any case, most of the time, I can find decent, clean, interesting places a little bit out of the international travel route (wouldn’t you like to stay in one of the places I stayed in Ouaga and strike a conversation with the actors of a locally beloved tv series?). Unfortunately these days when Daesh or Al Quaida offshoots are metastasising in at least half of Africa, one has to make an arbitrage between risk and comfort, a little bit like the risk-reward arbitrage on financial markets. Me, I tend a little bit on the conservative side.