Insurgency in Burkina Faso: Timeline & Latest Developments

Burkina Faso’s insurgency did not begin on its own soil. It grew directly out of the jihadist current that had already taken root in northern and central Mali earlier in the 2010s, spilling south across a largely unpoliced border into Burkina Faso’s Sahel and Est regions from 2015 onward. The two conflicts remain closely linked today: the same two armed movements, the al-Qaeda-linked JNIM and the Islamic State Sahel Province (formerly known as ISGS), operate across both countries, and both states are now run by military juntas that removed elected or transitional governments citing the same justification, failure to stop the violence. But the two wars are not identical, and this page follows Burkina Faso’s own trajectory specifically; Mali’s parallel and earlier-starting conflict, including its 2012 and 2020-2021 coups and the distinct Tuareg-separatist history behind it, is tracked on this site’s separate Mali war page.

The first years of Burkina Faso’s insurgency, from the August 2015 gendarmerie attack near the Malian border through the emergence of the homegrown Ansarul Islam movement and its later absorption into JNIM, followed a pattern common across the region: rural, cross-border raids gradually pushing toward population centers, culminating in a January 2016 attack on Ouagadougou itself. By 2018, JNIM’s assault on the French Embassy and army headquarters in the capital confirmed the group’s arrival as the country’s dominant jihadist actor, and by 2019 the violence had taken on an additional, harder-to-untangle dimension: communal killings, like the January 2019 Yirgou massacre of Fulani residents by Mossi self-defense fighters, that ran alongside, and were partly provoked by, the jihadist campaign itself. Rather than resolving that dynamic, the state formalized it in January 2020, arming and expanding a civilian auxiliary militia, the VDP, that would go on to feature in some of the conflict’s gravest documented human-rights findings.

By late 2021, mounting military losses, including a November attack on the Inata gendarmerie that killed 53 people amid reports of an unsupplied, hungry garrison, had eroded confidence in the elected government of President Roch Marc Christian Kaboré. Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba removed him in a January 2022 coup, promising a harder line against the insurgency. Eight months later, facing the same complaint from within the ranks, that the counterinsurgency was failing, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré removed Damiba in turn. Traoré, still in power as of this writing, has run Burkina Faso since September 30, 2022 under a “total war” posture that has expanded the VDP militia to tens of thousands of members, pursued closer military ties with Russia, and progressively closed the country’s political space, culminating in the February 2026 dissolution of every political party.

Traoré’s foreign-policy pivot has been as consequential as his domestic one. He ended Burkina Faso’s military accord with France in January 2023, completing the French withdrawal with a February 18 flag-lowering ceremony, and by that July was addressing the Russia-Africa Summit in St. Petersburg with explicitly anti-colonial rhetoric. Russian Africa Corps personnel, the successor to the Wagner Group, began arriving in January 2024, and Burkina Faso joined Mali and Niger first in a mutual-defense pact and then, from July 2024, in the full Alliance of Sahel States confederation, formally leaving the West African regional bloc ECOWAS in January 2025. Independent researchers have not found this realignment to have improved the underlying security picture; if anything, the period since has included some of the war’s deadliest single incidents, including the August 2024 Barsalogho massacre, the deadliest attack in Burkinabe history by every credible estimate.

What distinguishes this insurgency from a simple government-versus-jihadist narrative is the documentation now attached to abuses on both sides. Human Rights Watch’s most comprehensive accounting, a 316-page report published in April 2026 covering January 2023 through August 2025, documented at least 1,800 civilian deaths and found Burkinabe government forces and allied VDP militia responsible for more than twice as many, at least 1,255 across 33 incidents, as JNIM, tied to at least 582 deaths across 24 incidents. That finding does not erase the scale of jihadist violence: HRW has separately documented JNIM and Islamic State Sahel Province massacres, abductions and the group’s own siege of towns like Djibo, blockaded since February 2022. It does mean that any account treating the Burkinabe state purely as a victim, or the insurgents as the war’s only perpetrators of mass civilian harm, is incomplete. Both the government’s own casualty claims and the more independently corroborated HRW findings appear in the timeline below, flagged accordingly, because that gap between claim and verification is itself a defining feature of how this war is fought and reported.

As of mid-2026, roughly 2.1 million people remain internally displaced inside Burkina Faso, JNIM continues to hold territory across large stretches of the country’s north, west and east, and neither side shows signs of a negotiated end to the fighting. Traoré’s government, now backed by Russia and folded into the Alliance of Sahel States rather than ECOWAS or its former Western partners, has staked its legitimacy on eventually winning the war it took power promising to win; more than three and a half years later, that outcome remains open.