Burkina Faso’s war without a front line — and the politics that keeps it burning, including the Russians

Wednesday 11 February 2026

Burkina Faso’s conflict is often described as an insurgency. That is accurate but incomplete. What the country has lived through since roughly 2015 is a collapse of everyday authority across large stretches of territory — a struggle over who may tax, trade, punish, protect and speak in public. Armed groups linked to al-Qaeda (especially Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, usually abbreviated to JNIM) and the Islamic State’s Sahel branch have exploited that collapse, but they did not create it alone. They have fed upon long-standing grievances, local disputes over land and status, the aftershocks of regional wars, and — crucially — the state’s own violent improvisations.

By February 2026, Burkina Faso stands at the centre of a wider Sahelian rupture: the military governments of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have left ECOWAS and built their own alliance, the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), increasingly oriented towards security cooperation with Russia. That geopolitical realignment has altered the incentives of the war — in some ways tightening the junta’s grip on power, in other ways narrowing the diplomatic options that might shorten the fighting.

What the war is now

The conflict is no longer confined to a remote “north” or “border belt”. It is a competition for corridors — roads, market towns, river crossings, artisanal mining sites — and for the population’s obedience. The armed groups have shown a persistent ability to isolate provincial centres, disrupt commerce and punish communities judged disloyal. International monitoring of political violence suggests that the Sahel’s militant campaigns have increasingly taken on an “economic warfare” character — an effort to control trade and choke state finances, not merely to win battles. 

The military authorities in Ouagadougou have answered with a doctrine of mobilisation: expanding the army, relying heavily on auxiliary forces, and portraying the conflict as a national liberation struggle against external manipulation. One pillar of that approach is the Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland (VDP), a state-sponsored civilian auxiliary created in 2020 and greatly expanded since the coup era. The VDP is meant to plug the state’s manpower gap, but it has also become one of the conflict’s most dangerous accelerants, because it draws local feuds into a national war, often with limited accountability. 

Deeper causes — why Burkina Faso became so vulnerable

A useful way to understand the conflict is to see four causes that reinforce one another — like a rope whose strands cannot easily be separated.

1. A state that retreated from its own countryside

Many Burkinabè citizens experienced the state not as a provider of services but as an occasional tax collector, a distant magistrate, or a predatory uniform at a checkpoint. Where schooling, policing, land administration, and courts are thin, power becomes personal — held by whoever can enforce a decision today. Insurgent groups enter that vacuum with a simple offer: swift punishment, predictable “rules”, and protection in exchange for obedience. The offer is coercive, but it is legible — and legibility matters in places where official law feels unreachable.

2. Local grievances that militants learned to weaponise

Burkina Faso contains old tensions between herding and farming communities and between groups that feel excluded from patronage networks and those who benefit from them. These are not inherently “ethnic wars”, but insurgents and counter-insurgents alike have repeatedly narrated them in ethnic terms because that is a fast way to mobilise fear. When the state or its auxiliaries treat entire communities as suspect — especially communities associated, fairly or not, with pastoralist livelihoods — armed groups gain recruits and informants.

Human rights reporting has repeatedly warned that state forces and pro-government militias have committed serious abuses during counter-insurgency operations. Each episode of collective punishment does two things at once: it provides armed groups with propaganda, and it persuades frightened civilians that neutrality is impossible.

3. The coup cycle — and the militarisation of legitimacy

Burkina Faso’s coups were justified, in large part, by the previous governments’ failure to protect the population. Yet a junta’s legitimacy depends upon visible security gains — and when those gains do not materialise quickly, the temptation is to escalate, censor, and outsource violence to auxiliaries. That is why the conflict has become politically self-sustaining: the war validates the junta’s exceptional powers, and the junta’s exceptional powers shape a war that is hard to end.

4. A regional war economy

Burkina Faso is not fighting a sealed domestic conflict. Arms, fighters, fuel, and cash move across borders. Militants exploit transhumance routes (seasonal livestock migration), smuggling lanes, and informal taxation of markets. The result is a war financed not only by ideology, but by control of commerce. As analysts have noted, militant violence in the Sahel increasingly connects to pressure on trade and livelihoods — the slow strangling of state-linked economic life. 

---

Outside powers cannot “solve” Burkina Faso. They can however change the war’s incentives — for the junta, for insurgents, and for neighbouring states.

Pressures that could shorten the conflict

1. Conditional engagement that rewards civilian protection, not slogans

   
   

   Western governments have often swung between two unhelpful extremes: either security partnership with few strings, or disengagement followed by moral outrage. A more effective approach would be conditional engagement — targeted assistance (humanitarian, economic, technical) tied to demonstrable reductions in abuses, access for aid, and restoration of basic administration. The aim is not to “punish” the state into collapse, but to make legitimacy cheaper than brutality.

   
   

2. Regional economic pragmatism to prevent isolation spirals

   
   

   The formal exit of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger from ECOWAS in January 2025, and the consolidation of the AES thereafter, has changed regional bargaining. If trade barriers harden, sanctions multiply and borders become political weapons, the countryside gets poorer — and poor districts are easier for insurgents to dominate. ECOWAS and coastal neighbours can apply pressure while still protecting cross-border commerce and civilian mobility, depriving militants of the grievances that come from economic strangulation.

   
   

3. A credible accountability horizon

   
   

   One reason the war persists is that armed actors believe there will be no consequences. The joint announcement by Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger of withdrawal from the International Criminal Court points in the opposite direction — towards impunity as a political project. External actors who care about shortening the conflict should treat accountability not as a lecture, but as a tool: support domestic investigations, protect witnesses, and condition certain forms of cooperation on clear procedures. If commanders believe that massacres create legal risk rather than political advantage, behaviour changes.

   
   

4. Humanitarian access as a strategic priority

   
   

   In sieged or isolated zones, starvation and medical collapse are not side-effects; they are part of the coercion. Sustained diplomatic pressure for humanitarian corridors, deconfliction arrangements, and locally negotiated access can save lives and reduce the fear that pushes communities into militant dependency.

Pressures that could prolong the conflict

1. Security assistance that strengthens coercion without strengthening governance

   
   

   Russia has publicly committed support for the AES states’ joint force and broader security cooperation. If external assistance focuses on equipment, training and political messaging while ignoring governance and civilian harm, it can prolong the conflict by enabling operations that generate more enemies than they eliminate. It may also harden the junta’s belief that time is on its side.

   
   

2. Information warfare and the manufacture of “foreign plots”

   
   

   When military governments frame domestic dissent and humanitarian criticism as foreign sabotage, compromise becomes treason by definition. The conflict then becomes useful — a permanent justification for censorship and emergency rule. Recent regional patterns of repression and shrinking civic space, documented by rights organisations and reported in international media, are part of this wider authoritarian drift. 

   
   

3. Over-broad sanctions and diplomatic abandonment

   
   

   Blanket isolation can be emotionally satisfying but strategically perverse. It weakens moderates, strengthens hardliners and collapses civilian livelihoods — leaving the armed groups as the only reliable “employers” in some districts. Disengagement also reduces external visibility, making abuses easier to deny and harder to document.

   
   

4. Militia expansion without command responsibility

   
   

   The VDP model offers the state manpower, but it also increases the risk of reprisal cycles — militia attack, militant retaliation, then state escalation. Reports of killings of civilians attributed to state forces and allied militias, followed by retaliatory massacres by insurgents, illustrate how quickly this spiral forms. 

The hard truth — and the narrow path out

Burkina Faso is unlikely to see a decisive military victory soon. The more realistic objective is to shrink the war — to make violence rarer, local, and politically negotiable rather than national, permanent and existential. That requires a strategy the junta has so far struggled to embody: security operations disciplined by law; auxiliaries tightly controlled or demobilised; local governance rebuilt in ways that feel fair; and a regional diplomacy that prizes practical stability over ideological theatre.

External actors can help, but only if they resist their own temptations — the temptation to treat Burkina Faso as a chessboard in a struggle with Russia, the temptation to substitute moral denunciation for practical leverage, and the temptation to imagine that counter-terrorism is purely a question of firepower. In the Sahel, the gun is never merely a gun — it is also a tax receipt, a court judgment, and a claim to dignity. Until the state can offer those things without fear, the war will remain a method of rule for all sides.