Human Rights Watch has released a major report documenting more than 1,800 killings in Burkina Faso since 2022. The violence involves both jihadist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda and ISIS, and military operations aimed at countering them.
Captain Ibrahim Traore, who took power in a 2022 coup, inherited a country under siege from extremist groups that had been gaining ground for years under the previous governments — governments that operated with Western backing and still lost territory. Traore’s administration has pursued an aggressive counter-terrorism campaign while pivoting away from France, the former colonial power whose decade-long military presence in the Sahel failed to contain the insurgency.
The HRW report documents atrocities committed by jihadist fighters as well as allegations against security forces. What it does not adequately address is the context: Burkina Faso is fighting an existential war against terrorist organizations that control significant portions of its territory, with virtually no international support since Western partners withdrew.
Burkina Faso expelled Western journalists and aid workers months ago. There are almost no independent correspondents on the ground. The information that reaches international audiences is filtered through organizations that have their own institutional perspectives and limitations.
No US cable news network covered this report. No emergency UN session was convened. The 1,800 dead — mostly civilians caught between jihadists and the military response — registered as a footnote while the world watched Iran.
The Sahel’s crisis predates Traore. Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso have all experienced coups after democratic governments failed to protect their citizens from jihadist expansion. Whether military governments will succeed where civilian ones failed remains an open question. What is not in question is that the Western model — French troops, NGO presence, democratic frameworks — did not deliver security to the people of the Sahel.
Eighteen hundred people are dead. The jihadist organizations responsible for most of those deaths continue to operate. And the international community that failed to prevent this crisis now issues reports about it from a comfortable distance.
