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For years, the landlocked West African nation of Burkina Faso has stood at the epicenter of the Sahel region’s escalating security crisis, a conflict that has shattered communities and pushed millions into displacement. A new, sweeping 316-page investigation from Human Rights Watch (HRW) has uncovered damning new findings: between January 2023 and August 2025, Burkina Faso’s government forces killed more than twice as many civilians as extremist jihadist groups operating in the country, with both sides responsible for systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Three years after Ibrahim Traoré seized power in a military coup in Burkina Faso, a damning new investigation from Human Rights Watch (HRW) has uncovered staggering civilian casualties, including allegations of systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by both state forces and armed jihadist groups. Between January 2023 and August 2025 alone, the rights organization documented 57 separate violent incidents that left 1,837 civilians dead, among them dozens of children. More than two-thirds of these deaths — 1,255 in total — are attributed to the Burkinabé military and its allied civilian militias, while the remaining killings are linked to Islamist insurgent groups active in the region.

The report’s most significant legal finding holds that Traoré and six senior military commanders may bear command responsibility for these grave human rights abuses, and recommends that all seven be formally investigated for their alleged roles. Five top jihadist leaders are also named as potentially culpable for violence against civilian populations. The BBC reached out to Burkinabé junta officials for comment on the new findings; authorities have repeatedly rejected past accusations of indiscriminate civilian killings by their forces.

When Traoré’s junta seized power in September 2022, ousting the interim military leader Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba who had taken power just nine months prior, its core stated justification was a promise to more effectively defeat a decade-long Islamist insurgency linked to al-Qaeda that has seized control of large swathes of Burkina Faso’s territory and destabilized neighboring countries. But the HRW report, which draws on rigorous open-source intelligence analysis — including verified photos, video footage, satellite imagery, and firsthand interviews with hundreds of witnesses and survivors — paints a far grimmer picture: that all parties to the conflict have systematically violated international humanitarian law.

“All sides are responsible for the war crimes of willful killing, attacks on civilians and civilian objects, pillage and looting, and forced displacement,” the report concludes. It specifically accuses the Traoré-led junta of committing “horrific abuses,” failing to hold any perpetrators accountable for civilian deaths, and actively blocking independent reporting to conceal the scale of suffering among trapped populations. Philippe Bolopion, HRW’s executive director, emphasized the gap between the scope of the crisis and global indifference: “The scale of atrocities taking place in Burkina Faso is mind-boggling, as is the lack of global attention to this crisis.”

One of the deadliest single incidents documented by the investigation dates to December 2023, when military forces and allied militias allegedly killed more than 400 civilians in the northern border town of Djibo. A 35-year-old survivor who spoke to researchers described losing her two daughters immediately in the attack, while she and her nine-month-old infant suffered bullet wounds. She recounted a militia fighter telling his comrades, “Make sure no-one is breathing before heading out.” Many survivors described the mass killings as “butchery,” and researchers confirmed that nearly all who lost family or escaped violence carry permanent, severe psychological trauma from their experiences.

The militias that work alongside the Burkinabé military, known as the Volunteers for the Defence of the Fatherland (VDP), are civilian recruits the junta enlisted to bolster counter-insurgency operations. The report also documents allegations that the junta has forced political critics to join the VDP as a form of punishment. Traoré has publicly defended this forced conscription policy, arguing that “individual freedoms [are] not superior to national freedom” and that “a nation is not built on indiscipline and disorder.”

Since the military government took power, counter-insurgency operations have increasingly targeted civilian communities in response to attacks by JNIM, al-Qaeda’s regional affiliate and the largest active jihadist group in the country. For ordinary Burkinabé, this has created an untenable catch-22: civilians told HRW they feel “caught between a rock and a hard place,” threatened with execution by JNIM for suspected collaboration with the state, and targeted by government forces for alleged ties to insurgents. For its part, JNIM has carried out widespread campaigns of violence and intimidation to control local communities, deliberately targeting civilians who refuse to submit to the group’s authority. In one high-profile 2024 attack, JNIM fighters shot dead at least 133 people and injured more than 200 in less than two hours, according to the report.

In line with its findings, HRW is calling on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to open an immediate preliminary investigation into all alleged crimes committed by all parties to the conflict since September 2022. The organization is also urging international partners and donor countries to impose targeted sanctions on senior Burkinabé officials and suspend all military cooperation with the Traoré government.

Despite his authoritarian rule and the allegations of mass atrocities, 38-year-old Traoré has built a large popular following across the African continent, buoyed by his vocal pan-Africanist politics and sharp criticism of Western neocolonial influence. Like neighboring Mali and Niger, both of which are also controlled by military juntas, Burkina Faso has cut most security cooperation with Western nations — particularly former colonial power France — since Traoré took power, and has turned to Russia for military support. Even with this new partnership, the ongoing insurgency and civilian death toll have continued to rise with no sign of abating.

A sequence of devastating blasts at a Burundian military ammunition storage facility has left at least 13 people dead and 57 others injured, according to official updates from the Burundian army. The incident, which unfolded on Tuesday evening in the Musaga suburb of Bujumbura — the East African nation’s most populous urban center — was triggered by an electrical malfunction, army spokespersons confirmed.

The force of the consecutive explosions was powerful enough to hurl shrapnel and wreckage more than five kilometers (three miles) from the blast site, leaving a wide trail of destruction across surrounding residential areas. Along with the human casualties, the blasts destroyed military infrastructure and equipment, while dozens of civilian homes and private vehicles sustained severe damage.

The affected military logistics depot sits in a heavily populated residential zone, positioned adjacent to both a separate military base and Mpimba Central Prison, one of the city’s main correctional facilities. One inmate at the prison was killed when a blast fragment struck the facility, and multiple other detainees were left injured, according to accounts shared with the BBC. In another residential neighborhood in northeast Bujumbura, Gisandema, a bomb fragment destroyed a private home and killed a domestic worker employed at the property. Local witnesses have shared additional accounts of two civilian fatalities near the depot, including a young woman who was killed by shrapnel as she fled the area with a crowd of other residents.

Thick plumes of dark smoke billowed over the city of more than 1 million residents, triggering widespread panic across local communities. Multiple residents reported that blasts continued intermittently from roughly 18:15 local time (16:15 GMT) through midnight, forcing hundreds of families to abandon their homes to seek safe shelter elsewhere. One resident who spoke to the BBC recalled sustaining a foot injury from falling shattered glass during the incident, while other local residents say they are waiting for official confirmation that the area is safe before they can return to rebuild their daily routines.

Burundian military officials have extended formal condolences to the families of those killed and shared sympathy with people injured in the blasts. They have called on local residents to remain calm, and urged anyone encountering unexploded ordnance to report it immediately to authorities. Burundi’s President Evariste Ndayishimiye also released a public message of condolence via the social platform X, confirming that national authorities are mobilizing to support affected communities.

Early informal accounts from witnesses and security sources had varied on the death toll, with some sources initially reporting higher casualty numbers, before the army released its official, updated count.

Deep in the pre-dawn darkness of Nairobi’s dense informal settlement of Mathare, Agnes Mbesa reaches up to flick on a single bare bulb suspended from her corrugated tin roof. Just a few years ago, the mother of three would have relied on a dim, smoke-choked kerosene lamp to navigate her small home. Today, electricity not only illuminates her living space but powers the small neighborhood shop she runs from her front veranda, transforming her ability to earn a living.

“Before we had power, we had to shut down the shop as soon as dusk fell — it was just too dark to work,” Mbesa explained. “Now customers stop by even late into the evening, and I can bring in extra income that I never could before.”

Hundreds of kilometers away in the lakeside village of Sori, in western Kenya, fisherman Samuel Oketch shares this story of transformation. When a community solar mini-grid was installed to serve his remote settlement, Oketch invested in a electric freezer to store his daily catch. Previously, he was forced to sell all his fish immediately at cut-rate prices to middlemen who controlled cold storage. Today, his catch can be preserved and transported to higher-value markets in larger nearby towns, cutting out exploitative brokers and boosting his household income.

“These small, quiet changes add up to everything,” Oketch said. “Electricity opens up choices we never had before. Now my wife can sell our fish directly, without being ripped off by the brokers who used to hold all the power with their freezers.”

The firsthand accounts from Mbesa and Oketch put a human face on a decades-long global push to expand energy access across Africa, where hundreds of millions of people still live without reliable power. Right now, more than 730 million people across the globe lack access to any electricity at all, and nearly 80% of that population lives in Africa. Widespread energy poverty holds back progress across every sector of development: it limits access to modern health care, stifles educational opportunity, blocks digital connectivity, and stunts the creation of small businesses and formal jobs.

To accelerate progress toward universal energy access, major international institutions and philanthropic organizations have announced billions in new financing for renewable energy projects across sub-Saharan Africa, unveiled in coordinated actions this March. The European Investment Bank committed more than $1.15 billion to support a range of projects, including utility-scale hydropower, wind and solar farms, and expansion of both national and community-level power grids.

“This funding represents Europe’s unwavering commitment to deliver cleaner, more affordable, and more reliable energy to hundreds of millions of people across Africa,” said European Investment Bank President Nadia Calviño.

The Rockefeller Foundation followed that announcement with a pledge of an additional $10 million in investment, made public during the Africa Energy Indaba conference in Cape Town, South Africa. The funding will be deployed in partnership with the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet to strengthen national electrification strategies and support policy reforms that expand private and community-led energy solutions across at least 15 African nations.

“African governments are leading the transformation of their own energy sectors, committing to national energy compacts and investing in homegrown solutions that meet their people’s needs,” said William Asiko, senior vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation.

These new investments fold into the broader Mission 300 initiative, led jointly by the World Bank and the African Development Bank. The ambitious campaign set a target to connect 300 million people across sub-Saharan Africa to electricity by 2030, relying on a mix of national grid expansion and decentralized solutions like community mini-grids and household-level off-grid solar systems.

For most of sub-Saharan Africa, national power grids are often overstretched, unreliable, and do not reach many remote and low-income communities. That gap has turned decentralized mini-grids into a fast-growing and effective alternative. These small, community-managed systems, most often powered by solar or hybrid renewable sources, generate and distribute power locally, eliminating the need for costly large-scale transmission infrastructure to reach isolated areas.

Off-grid systems, by contrast, operate independently at the household level, with affordable stand-alone solar kits that give individual families access to power even when they are located far from any centralized infrastructure. These solutions have become critical for closing electricity gaps in the rural and informal settlement communities that are most often left behind by national grid expansion.

To hit the 2030 target, Mission 300 is providing tailored support to countries across the continent: governments in Malawi and Liberia receive technical assistance to refine their national energy plans, expand transmission networks, and improve the reliability and efficiency of power distribution. In Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and Senegal, the initiative provides local currency financing and pooled procurement support to drive down costs and speed up project deployment.

Andrew Herscowitz, CEO of the Mission 300 Accelerator at RF Catalytic Capital, warned that scaling access to meet the 2030 goal will require sustained long-term financing and strengthened local implementation capacity, including improved impact monitoring and better aligned policy support to speed up new connections.

“Energy access is the foundational key that unlocks human potential and broad-based economic development,” Herscowitz noted.

Kenya, one of the early beneficiaries of Mission 300 funding, has already seen dramatic gains under the initiative. Since 2017, the country has received support from the World Bank, African Development Bank and partner organizations for its Last Mile Connectivity program, which targets households located near existing grid infrastructure — particularly those in rural areas and informal urban settlements — as the country works toward universal electricity access by 2030.

The results have been staggering: national rural electricity access jumped from less than 7% in 2010 to roughly 68% in 2023. Across eastern and southern Africa, where only 48% of the total population and just 26% of rural residents currently have access to power, World Bank programs aim to expand access across up to 20 countries over the next seven years through a portfolio of renewable energy projects.

Mbesa, the Mathare shopkeeper, received her grid connection in 2021 through the Last Mile Connectivity Project, which covered the standard $115 connection fee for eligible low-income households and small businesses located near existing transformers. In remote communities like Oketch’s village, which lies far beyond the reach of the national grid, the program has supported the deployment of off-grid solutions including solar mini-grids and stand-alone household systems.

For Mbesa, the tangible impact of that connection is impossible to overstate. The small bulb above her shop has extended her working hours, and the electricity has let her children study after dark instead of stopping when the sun goes down.

“Electricity changes everything,” she said. “Once you have it, life finally starts moving forward.”

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Facing a persistent national crisis of staggering violent crime rates, South Africa has formally rolled out a one-year military deployment across five high-risk provinces to support overstretched local police forces grappling with organized gang activity and unregulated illicit mining. The deployment, first announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa earlier in 2026, will see 2,200 soldiers deployed to the five of the country’s nine provinces that have been hit hardest by widespread criminal violence. An initial advance contingent of troops was sent to targeted high-gang areas in Gauteng province – home to South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg – back in March, with the main full deployment kicking off across Eastern Cape, Free State, North West and Western Cape starting April 1, 2026, for a 12-month mandate. The core stated goal of the operation is to reestablish public order in communities that have been overwhelmed by persistent lawlessness. But the deployment has already sparked sharp debate over its long-term effectiveness and the appropriateness of using the military for domestic civilian policing.

South Africa’s ongoing crime epidemic has reached alarming levels, with one of the highest intentional homicide rates in the world. The most recent official crime statistics, covering the final quarter of 2025 from October through December, show that an average of 71 people are killed across the country every day. Illicit, unregulated mining and intergenerational gang violence are two of the primary drivers of this bloodshed, particularly in densely populated urban and semi-rural hotspots across the affected provinces.

Interviews with residents of Eldorado Park, a Johannesburg suburb that was part of the initial March deployment and targeted for its chronic gang violence, reveal sharply divided views on the military’s presence. Many locals expressed deep scepticism that the deployment would deliver any lasting change to the dangerous conditions they face daily. Leola Davies, a 74-year-old retired resident, described the suburb as an unlivable “hell-hole”, saying “Sodom and Gomorra have nothing on this place. I stay indoors all day because I just don’t want to be the next victim. Things are getting worse.” Elviena le Roux, a mother of three living in the area, said she fears the military presence will only escalate tensions rather than improve safety, predicting it would “make the violence worse”. Even some residents who welcomed the visible military patrols warned that the current 12-month mandate is not enough to bring permanent change. Ronald Rabie, a 56-year-old father of three, noted that the visible patrols have created a temporary sense of safety for local families, but warned that “Once they leave, things return to chaos – they need to be here permanently.”

This latest deployment marks the third time Ramaphosa has called on the military to assist with domestic security challenges during his presidency. In 2023, more than 3,000 soldiers were deployed for six months to target illicit mining operations across the country. In July 2021, troops were sent into major urban centers to put down deadly widespread rioting that broke out following the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma. Under current South African law, military personnel have very limited authority to arrest civilians, and are required to turn any detained suspects over to police as quickly as possible.

Security analysts and criminologists have raised widespread concerns about the deployment, echoing many residents’ doubts about its long-term impact. Experts point out that the South African military is trained for combat operations, not the community-centered trust-building policing that is required to reduce violent crime over time. The legacy of apartheid also looms large over the deployment: the former white minority apartheid regime regularly used the military to enforce repressive rule over Black South African communities, a history that continues to shape widespread suspicion of uniformed soldiers operating in residential neighborhoods. Guy Lamb, a leading South African criminologist, told the BBC he remains unconvinced the deployment will deliver sustainable improvements in safety. “Soldiers are not designed to engage in policing, but rather to engage in combat and use maximum force,” he explained, warning “There’s danger that they will escalate situations or respond very aggressively in tense situations.”

Lamb pointed to the military’s controversial conduct during the Covid-19 pandemic as a cautionary precedent. At that time, troops were deployed to enforce national lockdown curfews and movement restrictions, and the operation drew widespread international and domestic condemnation after multiple reports emerged of excessive force, unlawful detention, and harassment of ordinary civilians. While national authorities have expressed confidence that the new deployment will reduce crime rates, Lamb argued that without targeted action to address the root causes of violent crime in high-risk communities, any gains will be temporary. “Without a dedicated plan to try and address why crime is so violent in these sort of places, there was a strong likelihood it would flare up again once the soldiers leave,” he said, adding “So we’re likely to see this happening into the foreseeable future, because this plan of addressing what are the root causes of crime in these areas is not in place.”