Traoré Picked a Fight With Burkina’s Clerics While His Army Counted Its Own Dead
Al Jazeera reports the Burkinabè leader escalating a public confrontation with Muslim scholars. The only casualty figures from the same period come from an army communiqué, and a separate investigation says the military is stopping civilians leaving besieged towns.
Al Jazeera reported on 22 July that Ibrahim Traoré has sharply escalated a confrontation with influential Muslim scholars in Burkina Faso, declaring that what he calls “radical Islam” has no place in the country and announcing plans to bring back students studying Islamic law in Arab countries. It is the more consequential of two Traoré stories that week and the less covered. The other, carried by Vanguard of Lagos on 22 July under an Abidjan dateline, has him moving to shut down speculation about a power struggle at the top of the government and warning that he intends to remain in place, with the headline quote “I’ll take you down without a second thought.” That is a headline fragment from a Nigerian paper reporting on Ouagadougou from Côte d’Ivoire, two removes from the podium, and the full quote and its setting have not been established.
The military ledger for the same window rests on a single document. The Etat-Major Général des Armées said in a communiqué of 1 July that national forces with VDP auxiliaries “neutralised” more than 400 assailants after simultaneous complex attacks on positions at Gayéri, Solhan and Sebba on 30 June, seizing more than 250 motorbikes and 353 weapons. The figures were carried by Burkina24 and relayed via AllAfrica; there is no independent count. Running against that, The New Humanitarian published an investigation by Philip Kleinfeld on 6 July reporting accusations that the Burkinabè military is preventing civilians from leaving towns besieged by jihadist fighters. The government’s position, as reported in that piece, is that it has retaken significant territory and reduced displacement from a peak of more than two million.
Assessment: A junta fighting an insurgency that recruits on religious grievance does not usually open a public quarrel with its own clerical establishment unless it fears the pulpit more than the bush. That is the calculation to watch, and the recruitment cost of it will not show up in any communiqué. Note also what the two sets of numbers are for. The EMGA’s 400 is a claim about enemies; The New Humanitarian’s reporting concerns civilians the army will not let out. Neither is checkable from outside, but only one has an interest in being counted. Chart the 400 as “claimed by EMGA” or not at all.