Burkina Faso's Junta Lost the Sahel and Civilians Pay the Price

Two terrorist armies are now fighting over the villages of northern Burkina Faso. Ask the farmers of Oudalan what that means. They are not choosing between the sides. They are choosing which set of gunmen will take their sons, tax their harvests, and decide who gets to travel to market. And somewhere in Ouagadougou, a military government that seized power promising to crush terror is watching its enemies bleed each other, and calling it a window of opportunity.

We have seen this script before. A junta takes power in the name of security, cancels the timetable for democracy, and then discovers that the guns it was supposed to point outward are being pointed at its own people. Burkina Faso is living that script right now, and the cost is measured in graves, not press conferences.

Start with the battlefield. Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin, the al-Qaeda affiliate known as JNIM, and the Islamic State's Sahel Province, ISSP, have fought a series of escalating battles along the border with Mali since early September. In one clash near Kacham, ISSP claimed to have killed more than 200 JNIM fighters and captured over 30 more. On October 9, around Ganadaouri in Oudalan province, the Islamic State's weekly publication Al-Naba claimed more than 400 JNIM dead. Then ISSP released photographs on November 1 as proof. The regional outlet i-Sahel counted at least 120 bodies in them, and could not verify even that. The gap between 400 claimed dead and 120 visible bodies tells you everything about how much these numbers are worth. But the rivalry behind them is not in dispute. According to the conflict monitor ACLED, the two groups have fought roughly 320 armed confrontations since 2019 and left more than 2,200 fighters dead.

Those are the numbers for the jihadists. Now look at the people. Between January 1 and November 28, 2025, ACLED recorded more than 10,000 deaths from political violence across Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. Ten thousand human beings, across three countries, in a single year. The United Nations estimates that 4.5 million people in Burkina Faso will need humanitarian assistance in 2026. The last consolidated official count of internally displaced people, published in March 2023, stood at about 2.1 million. That is the most recent official figure we have. Anyone who believes the real number has fallen since then has not spoken to a displaced family living under a tree.

The state's own record is equally damning. In February 2026, JNIM launched more than 30 attacks against the army and the state-backed Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland, the VDP. ACLED counted over 120 soldiers, forest guards and militiamen killed in that offensive alone. JNIM now holds extensive territory in the north, north-central, west and east of the country, according to the International Crisis Group. A state that cannot protect its own garrisons cannot claim to be protecting its citizens.

And the violence is not staying put. ACLED has tracked the rivalry's spread into Niger's Tillaberi and Dosso regions and into Nigeria's Kebbi State. Security analysts warn that JNIM has established at least one training camp in Mali's Sikasso Region, close to the Ivorian border, and that its grip on Burkina's Est Region helped it expand into Togo and Benin during 2025. JNIM also claimed its first official attack in Nigeria's Kwara State in October 2025. The coastal states of West Africa, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and Togo among them, are now staring at a jihadist frontier that moves one border at a time.

Now ask the question the junta would rather you didn't. How did it come to this?

Burkina Faso has been ruled by soldiers for most of the last four years. Captain Ibrahim Traoré seized power in September 2022, after Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Damiba had himself seized power months earlier, promising to restore order. Order did not come. The junta dissolved the country's electoral commission, suspended political parties and extended the transition far beyond the timetable it had originally promised, into the late 2020s. Journalists have been conscripted, arrested or forced into exile. Human rights groups have documented abuses by the VDP militias, including killings of Fulani civilians accused of collaborating with jihadists. When you hunt people by ethnicity and call it security, you do not defeat terrorism. You recruit for it.

And who fills the vacuum? Russian personnel, first through the Wagner Group and later through the Kremlin-controlled Africa Corps, have been deployed in the Sahel alongside the junta's blessing. Moscow sells regime survival and calls it sovereignty. The Sahel's juntas buy guns and call it independence. Neither gives a single farmer in Oudalan a school, a clinic, a functioning court or a safe road to market. We are told that Russia offers an alternative to Western hypocrisy. Look at the results and tell us what alternative looks like.

Here is what must happen, and it is not complicated.

The African Union should enforce its own rules. Burkina Faso's junta must present a binding, dated timetable for free and fair elections, with an independent electoral commission restored and political parties allowed to compete. A transition that cannot name its end date is not a transition. It is a dictatorship with a press office.

Security policy must change its target. Ghana and Senegal have shown that a democracy can maintain security by building trust between citizens and the state rather than by burning villages. Community policing, professionalised and accountable armed forces, and strict prosecution of militia abuses against civilians are the only strategy that has ever split terrorist groups from the populations they depend on. Every civilian massacred by a state-backed militia hands the jihadists a recruiting poster.

The private sector and civil society have a role too. Free markets need security to function, and security needs courts that cannot be bought. Botswana and Mauritius built prosperity on stable institutions, independent judiciaries and a commitment to property rights. Burkina's farmers need exactly that: secure land, reliable markets and a state that answers its own courts. Local chambers of commerce, journalists and human rights organisations must document abuses from every side, so that no regime can hide behind propaganda or foreign protection.

And the West? Western governments that lectured the Sahel about democracy while funding its militaries must now demand that aid be tied to measurable steps back toward civilian rule. China, Turkey and the Gulf states, all racing for mines, drones and influence in the same region, should be asked a simple question: do your deals strengthen the people of Burkina Faso, or only the men who hold their guns?

So here is our demand, and it belongs to every African who has ever been told that democracy is a luxury we cannot afford.

Burkina Faso's junta does not get to hide behind a jihadist civil war. Its generals took power to end the chaos. Instead, they have presided over a country where two terrorist armies fight over villages, where 4.5 million people need help just to survive, and where the state cannot hold its own garrisons. Demand a dated election timetable. Demand the release of journalists and the restoration of party politics. Demand that the African Union suspend cooperation with any government that refuses to hand power back to the people. Call your parliamentarians. Share the verified numbers, not the propaganda. Refuse to accept that an African child in Oudalan deserves less protection than an African child in Accra.

The jihadists are killing each other because nobody has offered the Sahel anything better than the gun. We can. We must. Because the farmers of Burkina Faso have been waiting long enough.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA