ABIDJAN: Suspected militants attacked a frontier post on Ivory Coast's border with Burkina Faso overnight, and around 10 people were killed, security sources said Thursday.

The attack "targeted an Ivorian frontier post at Kafolo," where an anti-militant operation took place a few days earlier, one Ivorian source said, in an account confirmed by a Burkinabe source.

An Ivorian source said there were 12 dead -- 11 soldiers and a gendarme -- while six people were injured and two were listed as missing.

Other sources put the toll at nine or about 10 but had no further immediate details.

It is the first militant attack on Ivorian soil since March 2016, when a raid on the southeastern beach resort of Grand-Bassam left 19 people dead.

Security analysts have long worried that a militant revolt in the Sahel that began in Mali in 2012 is spreading towards coastal states on the Gulf of Guinea.

Ivory Coast shares a 550-kilometre (340-mile) border with Burkina Faso, where militant violence has claimed nearly 1,000 lives and forced 860,000 people from their homes over the past five years.