Burkina Faso has long been one of the world’s most overlooked crises. A country of roughly 23 million people, it has been caught in a grinding conflict involving jihadist insurgents, government forces, and community militias that has defied easy solution. Now a major new Human Rights Watch report has laid out in damning detail the scale of the carnage: more than 1,800 civilians killed since the beginning of 2023, with government troops and their allied militias responsible for a significant portion of the bloodshed.
The HRW report, released on April 2nd, covers the period from January 2023 to December 2025. It documents atrocities committed by both the Burkinabè military and the state-backed Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland, a civilian militia programme launched by the government in 2023. The report paints a picture of a conflict in which civilians bear the overwhelming cost — caught between insurgents who target villages deemed insufficiently compliant and security forces that have on multiple occasions rounded up, tortured, and executed villagers based on blunt suspicions of collaboration.
Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, a senior advisor in HRW’s Crisis, Conflict and Arms Division, put it plainly in a broadcast interview: None can run away from this conflict. Civilians are being killed by all sides, often in operations that have no meaningful distinction from outright massacres. The report documents at least 14 incidents in which groups of more than 20 civilians were killed in single operations — many carried out by the VDPs with apparent military complicity.
The conflict’s roots are complex. Burkina Faso’s insurgency began in the north and east, spillover from jihadist campaigns in Mali and Niger. Armed groups linked to both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have expanded their footprint across the Sahel, seizing territory, imposing sharia law in rural areas, and making once-peaceful communities into war zones. The Burkinabè military, underfunded and undermanned, has struggled to respond — and the government of Captain Ibrahim Traoré, who seized power in 2022, has repeatedly turned to citizen militias as a force multiplier.
The consequences have been severe. The VDP programme has armed thousands of civilians, many of them with little training and significant incentive to settle local scores under the cover of counterinsurgency operations. HRW documented cases in which VDP members burned villages, targeted ethnic groups perceived to have jihadist sympathies, and executed men and boys in front of their families.
International attention on Burkina Faso remains limited. The country does not generate the media headlines of wars in Ukraine or Gaza, and its humanitarian crisis — now affecting more than six million people in need of assistance — is routinely overshadowed by higher-profile global conflicts. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that more than two million people have been internally displaced, many of them living in overcrowded displacement camps with inadequate food, water, and medical care.
France, which withdrew its counterterror forces from the Sahel in recent years, has been largely absent from any meaningful engagement. Russia, which has expanded its influence across the region through security arrangements, has found willing partners in Ouagadougou. The result is a country that is, in the words of one aid worker, dying quietly, one village at a time.
The April 2026 elections — Traoré has promised a return to civilian rule — are approaching. But with jihadist control expanding and civilian casualties mounting, it is unclear what a vote would change for the millions of Burkinabè who simply want to survive.