Burkina Faso’s armed groups seeking to remove Ibrahim Traore fight each other as State loses ground.
BY MUSA MDLULI
Swaziland News,13th November 2026
MBABANE: Armed fighters from two rival groups have fought a series of increasingly deadly battles along Burkina Faso’s northern border with Mali, as the military Ibrahim Traore Government struggles to reassert control over large parts of the country.
Aljazeera reported on Friday that, the clashes between Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM), an al-Qaeda affiliate, and the ISIL affiliate in Sahel Province (ISSP) have intensified since early September, with both groups competing for territory and influence across the borderlands.
But their latest confrontations have produced competing claims of heavy casualties, although the figures released by the ISIL (ISIS) group remain unverified
One of the first major confrontations took place near Kacham, close to the Mali border, in early September. ISSP claimed to have killed more than two hundred (200) JNIM fighters, captured more than thirty (30) others and seized weapons and motorcycles.
The claim has not been independently verified. Heni Nsaibia, of the monitoring group Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), said that, if confirmed, the reported death toll would make it the deadliest battle recorded between the two groups.
The fighting escalated again on October 9 around Ganadaouri, in Burkina Faso’s northern Oudalan province. ISIL’s weekly publication, Al-Naba, subsequently claimed that more than 400 JNIM fighters had been killed.
JNIM has not publicly responded to the claim, and no independent assessment has established the number of casualties.
The scale of the claim came under further scrutiny when ISSP published photographs on November 1 presented as evidence of its victory, showing what it described as the aftermath of the battle.