Trending 
Burkina Faso’s military leaders have released four individuals who had been critical of the junta and were forced into combat amid the ongoing jihadist conflict in the Sahel nation for several months.
Since taking control in a coup in 2022, the Burkinabe junta has employed forced recruitment to mute or remove dissenting opinions by abducting critics and deploying them to the frontline against Islamist militants.
Between Thursday and Sunday, four people who were kidnapped after voicing their opposition to the military government were set free. Among those released was journalist Kalifara Sere, who had been missing since his abduction in June 2024 in Ouagadougou, where masked individuals in civilian clothing took him, according to a family member.
Sere has been “effectively free since last weekend,” the relative said, noting that “he is doing well and is spending some time with himself and his family.”
Benoît Bassole, the nephew of former Foreign Minister Djibril Bassole, was also released over the weekend. He was taken in September 2024 following allegations against his uncle, who currently resides in exile in France, of conspiring against the junta.
Marcel Imane, a German educator, was abducted at the end of March in the town of Dissin for having criticised the security conditions and was released on July 10, according to his family.
Civil society activist James Yazid Dembele was freed on Saturday, after widespread speculation that he had been tortured to death. He was kidnapped in January 2024 in Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second-largest city, after being accused of leaking a recording involving the country’s intelligence chief.
Numerous other critics, journalists, and activists who have opposed the junta and Traoré remain in military service.
Traore came to power in September 2022, vowing to eliminate the cycle of violence that has afflicted Burkina Faso for over a decade. However, terrorists who have pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group continue to perpetrate atrocities across large areas of the desert nation.
According to the conflict monitor ACLED, over half of the more than 26,000 civilians and soldiers who have lost their lives in the conflict since 2015 were killed in the last three years.
