Abidjan – Burkina Faso’s military authorities have freed four critics of the ruling junta who were press-ganged into fighting the Sahel country’s long-running jihadist insurgency for months, sources told AFP on Tuesday.
Since seizing power in a 2022 coup, the Burkinabe junta has used forced conscription to silence or sideline dissenting voices by kidnapping its critics and sending them to the front line to fight Islamist extremists.
Between Thursday and Sunday, four people kidnapped after having criticised the military government have been freed.
Among them was journalist Kalifara Sere, who had not been heard from since his June 2024 kidnapping in the capital Ouagadougou by masked men in civilian clothes, a member of his family told AFP.
Sere has been “effectively free since last weekend”, the relative said, adding that “he is doing well and is taking some time for himself and his family”.
The former top official, who became a well-known commentator on private broadcaster BF1, had questioned the authenticity of images showing junta chief Captain Ibrahim Traore giving blood two days after shells were fired near the presidential palace.
Benoit Bassole, the nephew of former foreign affairs minister Djibril Bassole, was likewise freed over the weekend.
He was abducted in September 2024 after his uncle, who lives in exile in France, was accused of plotting against the junta.
German teacher Marcel Imane, kidnapped at the end of March in the southwestern town of Dissin for having criticised the security situation, was freed on July 10, according to his family.
Civil society figure James Yazid Dembele was also freed on Saturday, after rumours that he had been tortured to death went viral.
He was abducted in January 2024 in Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second-largest city, after accusations he had leaked an audio recording involving the west African country’s spy chief.
A security source confirmed their liberations to AFP following the “end of their conscription”.
Many other journalists and activists who have criticised the junta and Traore remain drafted in the army.
Traore seized power in September 2022, promising to put an end to the spiral of violence that has plagued Burkina Faso for more than a decade.
Yet jihadists, who have pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State group, have continued to commit atrocities across swathes of the desert nation.
More than half of the more than 26,000 civilians and soldiers who have died in the conflict since 2015 were killed in the past three years, according to the conflict monitor ACLED.
