The woman sits on a plastic chair outside the health clinic in Kaya, 100 kilometres north of Ouagadougou, and she will not give her name. She has walked for three days with her four children, the youngest strapped to her back with a faded pagne cloth. She left her village after soldiers came — not the jihadists she had been fleeing for two years, but the soldiers who were supposed to protect her.
"They said we were feeding the terrorists," she says. "They took my husband. They took my brother. They said they would come back for the rest of us."
She does not know if the soldiers were Burkinabè or the foreign ones everyone talks about but no one will name aloud. She does not know if her husband is alive. She has nothing except a plastic bag containing the children's vaccination cards and a mobile phone with no credit. This is how it works here now: you flee one terror and walk into another.
What They Promised
When Captain Ibrahim Traoré seized power in September 2022, he was 34 years old, the second coup leader in eight months. He promised what all coup leaders promise: security, sovereignty, an end to French military presence. By January 2023, the French forces were gone. By April 2023, the Russians had arrived.
The junta calls them "instructors" and "military partners." The United Nations and Human Rights Watch have documented them as operatives of the Wagner Group — now reorganised under the Russian military as the Africa Corps since Yevgeny Prigozhin's death in August 2023. The semantics do not matter to the woman in Kaya. What matters is that men with guns came to her village and her family disappeared.
CIVILIAN CASUALTIES SURGE UNDER JUNTA
According to ACLED data, civilian fatalities in Burkina Faso increased 78% between 2022 and 2025, reaching 8,471 documented civilian deaths in 2024 alone. Of these, Human Rights Watch has attributed at least 1,400 deaths to state security forces and their allies, rather than jihadist groups.
Source: Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), Regional Overview: Africa, March 2025The pattern is consistent across the Sahel. In Mali, where Wagner forces have operated since December 2021, the same trajectory: French withdrawal, Russian arrival, and then the massacres that are called "counterterrorism operations" in official statements. Moura. Hombori. Karma. Names that mean nothing to the international community and everything to the families who lost everyone.
The Official Version
In Ouagadougou, the junta maintains that civilian casualties are the unfortunate but necessary cost of reclaiming territory from the Islamic State Sahel Province and Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin. Captain Traoré, in a televised address in February 2025, declared that 60 percent of national territory had been "liberated." He did not specify how many people had been liberated into displacement camps.
The Russian government denies that its military personnel are conducting combat operations in Burkina Faso. In December 2024, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova told reporters that Russia's presence was limited to "advisory support and training." This is technically possible to believe only if you have never spoken to anyone who has fled the Centre-Nord region.
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At the Kaya displacement site, there are 23,000 people according to the latest UNHCR estimate, though the actual number is certainly higher. The camp was designed for 8,000. There is one functioning latrine for every 200 people. The children have stopped asking about their fathers.
The highest displacement figure in the country's history, more than double the 1.1 million displaced in January 2022 before the military takeover.
What Nobody Is Saying
The uncomfortable truth, the one that diplomats will only acknowledge off the record, is that ECOWAS has effectively surrendered the Sahel. When Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso announced their withdrawal from the regional bloc in January 2024 to form the Alliance of Sahel States, the response was strongly worded communiqués and nothing more.
The threatened military intervention after Niger's July 2023 coup never materialised. Nigeria, which would have to lead any such intervention, cannot secure its own northwest. Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire have border anxieties of their own. The result is a regional security architecture that exists on paper and nowhere else.
ECOWAS STANDBY FORCE REMAINS UNDEPLOYED
Despite a mandate established in 1999 and renewed commitments following the Sahel crisis, the ECOWAS Standby Force has never conducted a major stabilisation operation. The force's 6,500 committed troops exist largely on paper, with only 2,200 personnel certified as deployment-ready according to a February 2025 Institute for Security Studies assessment.
Source: Institute for Security Studies Africa, ECOWAS Security Architecture Assessment, February 2025Meanwhile, France watches from a distance. Operation Barkhane is finished. The Sahel is no longer Paris's problem — or so the Élysée prefers to believe. What Paris does not say is that the jihadi groups France failed to defeat are now stronger than ever, and that the Russian presence France once warned against is now entrenched across three countries.
The People Who Remain
In the market at Dori, in the far north of Burkina Faso, the vendors still set up their stalls on Fridays. They have not fled because they have nowhere to go. They have not fled because fleeing requires resources they do not have. They have not fled because this is their home, and leaving would mean admitting that home no longer exists.
A grain seller named Amadou — he asks that his full name not be used — says the situation is impossible to describe to outsiders. "The jihadists tax us. The soldiers accuse us of paying the jihadists. If we do not pay the jihadists, they kill us. If the soldiers think we have paid the jihadists, they kill us. So we pay everyone and we pray."
He shows his hands — the calluses of forty years of farming millet in soil that yields less every year. His eldest son was recruited by JNIM three years ago; he does not know if the boy is alive. His second son disappeared after a military sweep in 2024. He will not accuse anyone. Accusation requires the luxury of protection.
Estimated active military personnel by foreign deployment
Source: Center for Strategic and International Studies, Africa Program Assessment, February 2025
What Will Happen
The trajectory is clear to anyone willing to look at the data. Armed group attacks have not decreased under the juntas; they have increased. Territorial control claimed by governments is contradicted by the displacement patterns: people do not flee liberated zones. The jihadist groups, far from being defeated, are exploiting the chaos to recruit among communities targeted by state violence.
The World Food Programme warned in March 2025 that 3.4 million people in Burkina Faso face acute food insecurity — the highest level ever recorded. The rainy season is coming, and with it the diseases that thrive in overcrowded camps with inadequate sanitation. The humanitarian response plan for 2025 is 23 percent funded.
In Kaya, the woman with the four children does not know any of these statistics. She knows that she walked for three days. She knows that her husband and brother are gone. She knows that the clinic has no medicine for her youngest child's fever. She knows that she cannot go home.
"They told us the French were the problem," she says. "They told us the new friends would bring peace. I do not see peace. I see only fear, and it comes from every direction."
By the time you read this, the camp at Kaya will have grown by another thousand people. That is how it works here now.