When the sun rises over Burkina Faso’s remote villages, families wake to a terror that comes from two directions at once. A landmark report by Human Rights Watch has laid bare what analysts have long suspected: both government security forces and jihadist insurgent groups are responsible for systematic civilian killings that have claimed the lives of more than 1,800 people since 2023.
The 72-page document details how armed Islamists affiliated with JNIM (Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin) and other factions have conducted systematic attacks on communities that refuse to submit to their rule — burning granaries, executing local leaders, and using sexual violence as a weapon of terror. Simultaneously, counter-insurgency units of the Burkinabè army, many operating with near-total impunity, have rounded up suspects, summarily executed villagers accused of harbouring militants, and in some cases, incinerated entire settlements accused of colluding with the enemy.
A Crisis the World Is Not Watching
Burkina Faso has suffered a military coup, a fragile transitional government, and now a grinding conflict that has displaced over two million people — equivalent to roughly one in ten citizens. The crisis has been overshadowed by more media-friendly conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, yet the body count rivals some of the world’s most notorious wars.
The Children Who Did Not Choose This War
Among the most haunting passages in the HRW report are testimonies from children who survived attacks. One boy recounted how men in military uniforms dragged his father from their home in Soum Province in the middle of the night. The father was taken to a military outpost and never returned. The family received no notification, no death certificate, no explanation. The boy now lives with his grandmother in a displacement camp outside Ouagadougou.
Human Rights Watch has called on the transitional government of Captain Ibrahim Traoré to immediately establish an independent mechanism to investigate alleged abuses by security forces. For the 1,800 families who have already lost loved ones, accountability may be a distant hope. For the millions still trapped between the hammer of extremism and the anvil of military abuse, survival is the only agenda that matters today.