Ibrahim Traoré is the president of Burkina Faso, having seized power in a coup in 2022. He was 37 years old as of September 2025.
Traoré is an online sensation, particularly on TikTok, where a mix of authentic and AI-generated deepfake video clips portray him as a pan-Africanist revolutionary standing up to the West. Many of the most popular accounts exhibit signs of inauthentic behaviour, suggesting they may be Russian-backed troll farms. His image appears on T-shirts and flags across neighbouring countries such as Ghana.
At home Traoré is struggling to quell a jihadist insurgency, but abroad he has become a symbol of anti-neocolonialism. He is a close ally of Vladimir Putin.
After seizing power Traoré launched a "total war" against the jihadists. A Human Rights Watch report published in April 2026 concluded that his government's scorched-earth counter-terrorism strategy amounts to war crimes and crimes against humanity. The report documented 57 attacks between 2023 and 2025 with more than 1,800 civilian victims, the majority killed by government forces. In 2022 some 50,000 new recruits joined the Volunteer Defence Forces (VDPs), civilian militias drawn mostly from the Mossi ethnic group, more than doubling the size of the official army.
Traoré has been accused of a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Fulani. In 2023 he met Fulani leaders and called on them to "acknowledge that the epicentre of terrorism is in Fulani localities", warning the alternative would be "a lot of deaths".
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