A woman who survived the massacre of hundreds of villagers in central Burkina Faso described the horror of searching through bodies to find her brothers, in an interview following the attack claimed by an Al Qaeda-linked group earlier this week.

“We went out with carts to collect the bodies of my older brothers,” said the woman, 38, who escaped with her toddler. “We spent a long time going through bodies piled up under trees.”

The attack outside the town of Barsalogho was one of the deadliest in nearly a decade of Islamist violence in the West African country. A group of victims’ relatives said at least 400 people were killed when jihadists opened fire on civilians digging defensive trenches on the orders of the military.