Ibrahim Traoré is the president of Burkina Faso, having seized power in a coup in 2022 in his mid-30s.
Mr 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 he 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 Mr Traoré launched a "total war" against the jihadists. A 2026 Human Rights Watch report 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.
He 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".
A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.