Teenagers toyed with guns at a museum exhibit. Young men posed in front of posters of the country’s military leader. Over dinner in restaurants, families watched television monitors showing footage of drone strikes.
The event was billed as a national cultural festival in the West African nation of Burkina Faso. But it often resembled a mobilization campaign in the all-out war against the Islamist terrorists who have gradually occupied the country in recent years.
“The motherland or death,” Alaila Ilboudo, a spoken word artist, shouted onstage to the cheers of crowds at the festival, held in May in Bobo-Dioulasso, the country’s second largest city.
Burkina Faso has long been known for its international film festival and arts scene. But as extremists affiliated with the Islamic State and Al Qaeda have turned a swath of West Africa into the world’s epicenter of terrorism, Burkina Faso has been the hardest hit.
More than 8,000 people were killed last year in a conflict between extremists and the military, according to analysts. That is twice as many as in 2022. In a country of 23 million, nearly three million people have fled their homes, according to humanitarian groups, and 1.4 million children are expected to face hunger this summer, with aid corridors choked off by the extremists.
A recent trip across the country and interviews with civilians and analysts revealed a nation torn apart by escalating violence, perpetrated by both the Islamist fighters and the military in its brutal effort to defeat them.
The country is now led by the world’s youngest state leader, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré, a 36-year-old autocrat who seized power in a coup in 2022. He has enlisted Russian military advisers and drafted about 50,000 civilians to fight with his army, leading to a surge of human rights abuses against local populations. Nevertheless, the United States has provided more than half of the country’s humanitarian aid this year — $150 million.
Captain Traoré has silenced activists, lawyers and journalists through forced conscription, imprisonment and disappearances. “Either you fight or you disappear,” he said in a speech in May to draftees.
The military government has denied accusations of targeting civilians or specific ethnic groups in its campaign against the extremists. It did not respond to several requests for comment.
So far, Captain Traoré is losing the battle against the extremists, who freely roam the countryside and lay siege to dozens of towns and cities. In June, more than 100 soldiers were killed in an attack on a military base in Mansila, in eastern Burkina Faso. The Islamists claimed responsibility.
Only the capital, Ouagadougou, and a handful of other areas remain relatively secure.
‘Enemies from within’
Just to reach the cultural festival, which also showcased athletes, many participants had to put their lives at risk.
Germaine Poubéré, a lean 20-year-old wrestler from Soudougui, a village about 300 miles east, said she had to dodge ambushes by the fighters and talk her way through army checkpoints. Once at the festival, she defeated one adversary after another, only to lose in the final round against the national champion.
Between two contests, Ms. Poubéré recalled how she and her family had fled their village, which was under attack by militants, and how she spent the last year out of school. She has since moved back home, but she sometimes sleeps at school because the extremists still attack roads in her area.
“It requires so much courage,” she said.
At the festival, hundreds of soldiers were deployed to provide protection.
Captain Traoré himself was in town, exhorting people to support their military. He regularly urges citizens to turn in neighbors or others accused of collaborating with extremists.
At night, vigilantes gather outside to patrol the streets.
“There are enemies from within. We are on the front line,” said Rasmané Porgo as he kept watch at a roundabout near the festival.
Mr. Porgo, a father of five, believes Captain Traoré will succeed in stamping out the extremists. “Burkina Faso will be stable” in a few years, he said.
For now, much of the country remains unsafe.
Captain Traoré traveled back from the festival to the capital in an armored, nondescript vehicle squeezed in the middle of a speeding convoy of more than a hundred armored pickups and motorcycles. Heavily armed soldiers stationed along the road scanned the bush and ordered all other traffic off the road before he passed.
‘The terrorist Hydra’
In 2014, a movement led by artists, intellectuals and activists pushed out the president of Burkina Faso, who had clung to power for nearly three decades.
Islamist fighters were raging to the north in Mali, but Burkina Faso had been spared from the violence.
Western countries like France and the United States saw a relative haven of stability, sending weapons, special forces and advisers to Burkina Faso to help contain the extremists.
It was a short-lived era.
Militants crept from Mali into Burkina Faso’s north and began staging attacks in 2015, destabilizing the once-peaceful country.
Since he seized power in 2022, Captain Traoré vowed to eradicate what he calls “the terrorist Hydra,” referring to the extremists who have multiplied across Burkina Faso and neighboring countries.
He initially promised to be only an interim leader for a few months until an election could be held. But in May, religious, military and political leaders named him “Supreme leader of the armed forces” and empowered him to lead the country for five more years.
Captain Traoré has ignored calls by Western and West African partners to respect human rights and to abide by the rule of law in his effort to quell the fighters. He has accused the United States and European countries of threatening Burkina Faso’s sovereignty, and last year ordered French special forces based in the country to leave.
On a trip to St. Petersburg last summer Captain Traoré said that President Vladimir V. Putin felt “like family.”
‘Nowhere is safe’
As Amadou, a schoolteacher in eastern Burkina Faso, reached his classroom one morning earlier this year, he said that he saw pro-government, civilian militia fighters searching for people of his ethnic group, the Fulani. His legs shaking, he escaped on his motorbike, he said.
Many ethnic Fulanis are caught between the Islamist fighters, who often invade their villages and recruit them, and the military and civilian militias, which accuse them of being extremists.
Amadou, like many people approached by The New York Times in Burkina Faso, asked that only his first name be used for fear of his safety. He said that he had fled his village years ago because he and his family had refused to follow orders from Islamist fighters that women fully cover themselves and follow their prayer rules.
But now, pro-government militia fighters routinely round up Fulanis with no explanation, he said. “It feels as if nowhere is safe,” Amadou said. “That at any time I can be detained, or worse, because I’m Fulani.”
Soldiers and civilian militia fighters have committed massacres of civilians accused of cooperating with extremists — killings that have gone unpunished, rights groups say.
Women and children have been killed by soldiers, too, according to Fulani representatives and researchers, who have warned the country is approaching a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
“The targeting of civilians has reached mass killing levels,” said Héni Nsaibia, a senior analyst with the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.
Torn families
As the Islamists move closer to some villages and cities, they are tearing families apart.
Under armed guard, a 44-year-old farmer named Zeinabou fled the besieged city of Djibo in April with six of her children. Djibo had been a refuge for Zeinabou and her family after they ran away from extremists attacking their village in 2018.
But Djibo is no longer safe. Zeinabou said she risked abduction or death just by growing peas or millet in nearby fields. She and her husband eventually decided that she would leave for the capital while he stayed behind in Djibo with his second wife and other children.
Now in a Ouagadougou neighborhood sheltering with more than 1,300 people, Zeinabou said she hopes to find work braiding hair to feed her family. For now, though, they rely on people’s generosity.
She said that she has barely been able to talk to her husband and children back in Djibo. But, she added, “We couldn’t think of another option” but to leave.
