Burkina Faso’s Council of Ministers adopted a draft law on April 24 that would create a military reserve force of up to 100,000 reservists by the end of 2026. Defence Minister Célestin Simporé presented the initiative as a landmark expansion of citizen participation in national defence — a way to rapidly mobilize ordinary Burkinabè to defend their communities against jihadist insurgencies that have killed thousands and displaced more than two million people.
On the surface, the logic is seductive. More soldiers, more patrols, more eyes on the ground. In a country where the formal military is overstretched and communities live in fear of attacks from armed groups, who could object to a larger defence force?
Human Rights Watch, among others, has objected. And its objections deserve serious attention.
The VDP Problem Already Running
Burkina Faso’s military already depends heavily on tens of thousands of civilian auxiliaries known as the Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland (Volontaires pour la défense de la patrie, VDPs). These are civilians — farmers, traders, young people in rural communities — who are given basic military training and weapons and deployed alongside regular forces or in their own communities as a first line of defence against insurgent attacks.
The VDP programme was designed as a way to extend the reach of an under-resourced army into areas where state presence had effectively collapsed. But Human Rights Watch has documented extensively how VDP units have committed serious abuses: summary executions of suspects, arbitrary detentions, looting, and the forced displacement of minority communities, particularly ethnic Fulani herders who armed groups have targeted for alleged sympathy with jihadist movements.
Human Rights Watch’s April 2026 report, “None Can Run Away,” described war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by all sides in Burkina Faso — including by state forces and VDPs. The picture is of a conflict where the distinctions between combatant and civilian, state actor and militia, have become dangerously blurred.
The Scale Problem
The new reserve proposal would massively expand the model that has already produced these outcomes. The target of 100,000 reservists by the end of 2026 is extraordinarily ambitious — it implies the recruitment, background vetting, training, equipping, and deployment of a force roughly comparable in size to the entire existing formal military, all within eight months.
Military training sufficient to instil basic discipline, rules of engagement, and respect for international humanitarian law takes months at minimum. Compressed training at the scale required by the December 2026 deadline would almost certainly produce forces with insufficient preparation to distinguish between armed combatants and civilians.
Human Rights Watch has noted that the current environment in Burkina Faso — marked by the suspension of civil society organizations providing human rights training and the ongoing rollback of space for independent monitoring — makes effective oversight of a force of this size essentially impossible.
The Blurring Effect
When civilians are recruited into a reserve force, given weapons, and deployed in areas of active conflict, the line between them and the armed groups they are fighting becomes blurred in ways that are dangerous for everyone. Communities that host VDP units are more likely to be targeted by Islamist armed groups, which treat them as legitimate military positions rather than civilian settlements. This is not a hypothetical — HRW documented specific cases in which villages that hosted VDP checkpoints were specifically attacked, resulting in mass civilian casualties.
What Security Actually Requires
None of this means Burkina Faso does not face a serious security crisis. It does. But the answer to a security crisis is not an unconstrained expansion of poorly trained, inadequately supervised armed civilians. That is the answer that produces the next crisis — one of internal abuse, community fragmentation, and the alienation of populations that the state needs as partners rather than targets.
International donors, including those with security assistance programmes in the Sahel, should make clear that the human rights dimensions of Burkina Faso’s defence policy are not separable from the security dimensions — and that support for forces that commit abuses will not be forthcoming.
Source: Human Rights Watch, Reuters, BBC Africa, RFI