Burkina Army, jihadists’ junta leader, Captain Ibrahim Traore. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Arouna Loure, a vocal critic of Burkina Faso’s ruling military junta, received a conscription order on September 7 last year requesting that the anaesthesiologist start a month of military service four days later.

The order did not specify a date or location for the doctor to report for duty. Days later, on September 13, two armed men intercepted Mr. Loure between operating theatres at a hospital in the capital Ouagadougou, forced him into a vehicle, and drove to a military camp near the northern city of Kaya, he said.

Mr. Loure, 38, had denounced the violence linked to Burkina Faso’s almost a decade-long fight against Islamist insurgents in the West African country.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have accused Burkina Faso’s junta of kidnapping and conscripting some of its critics, citing victims and civil society groups. Reuters could not find any public response by authorities to the reports and the junta did not reply to requests for comment.

Mr. Loure, who was released after three months of forced military service, said he was conscripted at the same time as eight other government critics and activists at the Kaya camp.

“They want to silence us,” he said during a telephone interview in March. “These conscriptions are arbitrary and punitive.”

In the beginning of June, the national order of doctors in Burkina Faso issued a statement saying Mr. Loure had gone missing again. Two civil society sources confirmed the information. He has not reappeared since.

Four victims who spoke after their release said they were snatched from their workplace or the street by armed police or military officials. Their kidnappers were either wearing Burkina Faso Army uniforms or were men in civilian clothing who verbally identified themselves as police or military, they said.

When Mr. Loure arrived at the military camp in Kaya in September, there were five other conscripted activists already there and three more were brought in during his five-week stay at the camp.

Three of the activists spoke to Reuters after they were discharged from the military on condition of anonymity, citing fears of retribution. They said that, before they arrived in Kaya, men in military uniform tortured them for days in an ex-ministerial villa in the Ouaga 2000 neighbourhood of Ouagadougou.

They saw other prisoners during their stay, some with severe injuries. Reuters was not able to confirm independently the details of their accounts.

Tearing up, one activist said soldiers held his nose and mouth under an open faucet and tied plastic bags over his face.

During torture sessions, all were accused of conspiracy against the state and plotting to overthrow the junta.

Once at the Kaya base, they were made to clean toilets, do laundry and wash dishes. Soldiers bullied and fired guns at some of them. They suffered daily humiliation and exhausting sports drills the older conscripts struggled to follow, they said.

“They treated us like animals,” one of them said.

Junta spokesperson Jean-Emmanuel Ouedraogo, Interior Minister Emile Zerbo, State Minister Bassolma Bazie and Army spokesperson Isidore Noël did not respond to several requests for comment on the testimonies.

The abductions are part of junta leader Ibrahim Traore’s efforts to silence critics since he seized power in a September 2022 coup — the second that year — with a promise to restore security, analysts said.

‘Authoritarian drift’

“The regime’s authoritarian drift is clear,” said Mathieu Pellerin, a Sahel expert for the International Crisis Group. He said the government was hardening its stance towards internal critics as its position became more “fragile”.

Burkina Faso’s Army has only made incremental gains despite spending millions of dollars on the war and boosting its ranks with thousands of volunteer auxiliaries known as VDPs, analysts and humanitarian groups said.

Frustrations about authorities’ failure to shield civilians from the insurgency stoked the first military coup that ousted President Roch Kabore in January 2022, and then the toppling of Mr. Traore’s predecessor eight months later.

In Burkina Faso, more than 6,500 civilians have been killed since the start of 2020, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a global source of data on political violence. More than half died under the current government.

Earlier this year, the junta suspended several foreign media outlets for covering a HRW report accusing the Army of extrajudicial killings.

The conscription of junta critics began in March 2023 with Boukare Ouedraogo, the visually-impaired president of a civil society group in Kaya.

Mr. Ouedraogo, 32, had spoken at a press conference that month about feeling let down by Mr. Traore.

Five days later, Mr. Traore visited Kaya, summoned Mr. Ouedraogo and ordered his arrest, said Moussa Sawadogo, a colleague who attended the meeting.

Just after Mr. Ouedraogo’s arrest, in April 2023, the junta issued an emergency decree that grants authorities the right to conscript citizens above the age of 18.

“It marked the start of a trend,” said Ousmane Lankoande of the Balai Citoyen, a prominent citizens movement that played a key role in 2014 protests that ousted president Blaise Compaore, who had ruled Burkina Faso for nearly three decades. “We used to feel so hopeful about the future,” Mr. Lankoande said, describing the mood after the 2014 uprising restored civil liberties. “Today that freedom has been stolen.”