هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
On June 26, eight ambassadors stood at the Koulouba Palace in Ouagadougou to present their credentials to Burkina Faso’s transitional president, Capt. Ibrahim Traore. Among them was Simon Seroussi , the “Israeli” ambassador. On the same day, Burkina Faso announced a complete severing of its diplomatic and military ties with France.
That coincidence neatly captures what became of the project of a man who raised the banner of African liberation: He slammed the door on the old colonizer amid enormous media fanfare, while quietly throwing it wide open to the occupying state. The first scene was filmed and celebrated across media platforms promoting Traore as a nationalist anti-colonial leader, while the second passed almost unnoticed in a collective diplomatic protocol.
The next chapters came quickly. On July 17, from the city of Ouahigouya, Traore declared in French — the language of the colonizer he claims to oppose — that the state is secular and that no religious law, including Islamic law, the faith of the majority of the population, stands above the Constitution, and that anyone who does not accept this is free to leave the country.
He did not stop there. He threatened to bring back more than 800 Burkinabe students studying Islamic sciences in Arab countries and to strip those who refused to return of their citizenship. Two days after those controversial remarks, he opened a broader front by speaking of more than 1,000 years of Arab enslavement of Africans, citing the fact that the last slave market did not close until 1962.
While many Arab media platforms sharply criticized Capt. Traore’s remarks, Al Arab newspaper, which is linked to the UAE came out openly in his defense, arguing in a report that he “was not wrong when he considered the nation above religion,” and placing the blame on preachers arriving from Arab countries “after being steeped in hard-line fatwas.” This was not an isolated position, but part of a consistent line adopted by Abu Dhabi under the pretext of combating extremism.
Dismantling the religious sphere and arresting preachers
The Ouahigouya speech did not come out of nowhere. It was preceded last June by the transitional parliament’s passage of a 110-article law on religious freedoms regulating preaching, religious education and mosque construction, while tightening financial oversight of religious organizations. Weeks earlier, prominent imam Mohamed Ishaq Kindo was arrested after criticizing the draft law.
Demonstrations then broke out demanding his release, and the military government responded by closing the largest mosque in the capital and transferring about 100 of his supporters to a military camp under the pretext of subjecting them to civic training. Imam Mahmoud Barro had been arrested before him in Bobo-Dioulasso, and researchers in Dakar reported that Kindo’s whereabouts had not been disclosed since the protests were suppressed.
Confronting the scholars, Traore felt no hesitation in saying, “If this is your Islam, we will fight it” — effectively placing himself outside the Muslim community — and describing the protesters as “a small minority of extremists.” The irony is that all this is unfolding in a country where armed groups control about 40 percent of the territory, and where the number of displaced people and refugees has surpassed 2.3 million, roughly one-tenth of the population, according to an extensive report by Human Rights Watch issued in April 2026.
It is the same country where the organization documented that the army led and took part in the Solenzo massacre in March 2025, in which more than 130 Fulani civilians were killed by pro-government militias.
This pattern is repeated in many countries ruled by military regimes: When the state fails to win the security battle against armed groups, it shifts to an easier symbolic battle, redefining extremism to include the organized social component rather than the groups carrying weapons. It is a battle with guaranteed results because its opponent is unarmed.
This chapter cannot be read in isolation from what came before it: the dissolution of political parties by decree in January 2026, the dissolution or suspension of 929 associations and civil society organizations, and the dissolution of the student union. The mosque was not an exception in the project of dismantling the public sphere; it was simply the last space not yet domesticated.
And when Traore declared in April 2025 that his country “is not in a democracy, but in a popular progressive revolution,” he was providing the theoretical framework for all of the above.
The Emirati imprint
On May 20, 2025, the plane carrying Sheikh Shakhboot bin Nahyan Al Nahyan, the UAE minister of state for foreign affairs, landed in Burkina Faso as part of a whirlwind tour lasting less than 24 hours and covering the capitals of the Alliance of Sahel States : Bamako, then Ouagadougou, then Niamey. No new agreements were announced during the Burkinabe stop.
The official statement was limited to discussing economic cooperation and energizing bilateral relations. Less than two months later, the same minister received his Burkinabe counterpart in Abu Dhabi and took part in an investment forum organized by Ouagadougou in the Emirati capital.
But the substance of the relationship is not found in diplomatic statements alone; it is also visible in economic and customs figures. According to the United Nations trade database, Burkina Faso’s exports to the UAE in 2024 reached about $1.48 billion, of which $1.44 billion was gold alone, an increase of more than 160 percent in a single year.
In the broader context, the Swiss organization “Swissaid” documented that the UAE imported 1,392 tons of gold in 2024, including 748 tons from Africa, and that about 2,569 tons of African gold entered the country between 2012 and 2022 without corresponding export declarations, with a value approaching $115 billion.
This relationship reflects the pattern researchers have identified in Abu Dhabi’s repositioning in the Sahel after the coups. It moved from financing the G5 Sahel Joint Force contributing 30 million euros in 2017 to deeper involvement in gold supply chains and filling the vacuum left by the French withdrawal, thereby providing political legitimacy and media cover for military regimes in Sahel states.
The turn toward Tel Aviv
Although there is no direct evidence of an Emirati role in facilitating the relationship between Burkina Faso and Tel Aviv, the UAE’s economic and diplomatic presence in Ouagadougou is documented in figures and official statements.
Africa Intelligence revealed that the request to accredit Simon Seroussi as “Israel’s” ambassador to Burkina Faso had remained pending since the summer of 2025 before being approved away from the spotlight in mid-February 2026. That means the understanding over Seroussi’s accreditation may have been reached after the tour carried out by the UAE minister of state for foreign affairs.
Seroussi is a French-born diplomat who joined the Israeli Foreign Ministry in 2018 and serves as “Israel’s” ambassador to Ivory Coast.
For those who see this as a routine protocol matter, history offers the answer: Burkina Faso established relations with “Israel” in 1961, then severed them in 1973 in solidarity with Egypt during the October War, before coolly resuming them in 1993. In other words, the rupture came at the height of the liberation moment, and the resumption came at the height of dependency. To reactivate diplomatic representation in June 2026, at the very height of documented accusations of crimes against humanity in Gaza, is a political choice, not a mere coincidence.
It is worth noting that Burkina Faso has not yet joined the Abraham Accords track and still recognizes the State of Palestine. It also voted in favor of the U.N. General Assembly resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in December 2024. But the recent steps of receiving and accrediting the occupation’s ambassador amount to a gradual, silent normalization that came at the very moment when someone raising the banner of liberation was supposed to do exactly the opposite. It is therefore not unlikely that the step of receiving the ambassador and attacking preachers are preparatory moves paving the way for entry into the Abraham Accords.
The United Nations does not refer to “Israel” in the Palestinian territories as a normal state. In its resolutions and documents since 1967, it has used a specific term: “the occupying Power” a term that includes the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, meaning all the territories it occupied in the June 1967 war. This is not a political description adopted by one side and not another, but the settled official term in the literature of the international organization, the Security Council and the Human Rights Council.
Here the contradiction explodes in the face of Ibrahim Traore, who builds his entire legitimacy on the narrative that colonialism is a crime, that sovereignty is indivisible and that oppressed peoples are brothers in destiny. To support that narrative, he invokes what he claims are “1,000 years of historical enslavement,” holds entire nations accountable for it, and threatens his own students with the loss of their citizenship because they studied in their capitals.
Yet when faced with the only case in the world today in which the International Court of Justice has explicitly declared an ongoing occupation unlawful, he chooses to receive its ambassador in his palace and accept his credentials with a smile.
A leader cannot coherently put history on trial for what happened 1,000 years ago “if it is proven true,” then grant diplomatic recognition to an ongoing occupation in his own time, documented by an international judicial ruling and condemned by a General Assembly resolution. This is not political pragmatism, as his defenders like to call it.
It is moral selectivity that empties liberation discourse of its substance and turns it from a cross-border value-based project into nothing more than a tool of domestic mobilization.
To measure the distance, it is enough to return to the man whose symbolism Traore invokes in every speech. Thomas Sankara stood before the U.N. General Assembly in 1984 to defend the Palestinian people, saying: “I speak in indignation as I think of the Palestinians, whom this more ‘inhuman’ humanity has replaced with another people, a people who themselves were yesterday slowly martyred. I think of the valiant Palestinian people, of the families scattered and torn apart, wandering throughout the world in search of shelter.”
Selective sovereignty
At the heart of the matter is that sovereignty in the new Burkinabe discourse has become a selective tool, brandished against one party and folded away before another. It is raised in the face of Paris because that produces immediate popular legitimacy, and folded before Abu Dhabi because gold needs a market, before Tel Aviv because security technology needs a supplier, and before Moscow because power needs protection.
This last point is no detail. About 100 members of Russia’s “Africa Corps” arrived in Ouagadougou in January 2024 to protect Traore personally, without producing any meaningful shift in the security equation, according to researchers. In other words, what happened was not the expulsion of foreign tutelage, but the replacement of one tutelage with another except that the new tutelage is subject to no parliamentary, media or human rights scrutiny.
The picture is completed by the digital dimension. Journalistic investigations have tracked a wave of fake AI-generated videos showing global celebrities praising Traore as a national hero and defender of African identity (Pan-African Hero) in order to attract support for him beyond the Francophone sphere. Researchers described those videos as a systematic manufacture of a personality cult, and some attributed part of them to organized disinformation networks.
Ultimately, Traore’s two moves — accrediting “Israeli” ambassador Simon Seroussi last June and launching his campaign against what he calls “extremist Islam” a few weeks later — should not be read as two neighboring events on the calendar, but as two faces of a single repositioning.
The term the man carefully chose to describe his domestic opponents is not a Burkinabe term, nor does it emerge from his local experience with armed groups. It is the central term in Emirati discourse for more than a decade: the term that expands the definition of “extremism” until it encompasses political, social and missionary Islam in its entirety, transforming it from an Islamic current into a security threat that must be eradicated.
When an African president adopts this lexicon verbatim, closes mosques, arrests imams, summons Sharia students from specific capitals and threatens to strip them of their citizenship, he is not merely importing a language. He is importing with it the network that produces that language, funds its dissemination and rewards those who adopt it. That this happens at the same moment a channel of representation is opened with Tel Aviv is what turns the timing from coincidence into a pattern.
From here, we can see that the essence of the sudden rapprochement with Tel Aviv is primarily security-related, not economic or symbolic. The economic logic does not explain it, because “Israel” is not a major investor in the Sahel and no trade package was announced alongside the accreditation. Burkinabe gold already finds its way to Dubai without the need for a third intermediary.
The symbolic logic works against it, not for it, since it costs Traore considerable popular capital in a majority-Muslim country and on a continent where the Palestinian cause remains part of the liberationist conscience. That leaves only what Tel Aviv actually possesses and what Ouagadougou urgently needs: surveillance and wiretapping technologies, targeting systems and drones, and training in “counterterrorism” in its expanded sense one that does not greatly distinguish between an armed fighter in the bush and a preacher in a mosque all aimed at entrenching military rule for decades to come.
When the state has lost about 40 percent of its territory and relies on 100 foreign personnel to protect its president, the search for an additional security supplier becomes a priority overriding all calculations of rhetoric and liberation slogans.