For several months now, Burkina Faso has been facing a covert war one waged through screens and fabricated rumors. On March 1, 2026, a fake, skillfully doctored edition of the RTB newscast circulated on social media, claiming that Ibrahim Traoré had deployed troops to Tehran. Relayed by fake news accounts, this maneuver is part of a disinformation campaign that has been active since late October 2025, methodically targeting the three AES countries.
Denying, downplaying, diverting attention, and pointing to an external enemy: the tactics are well-known and well-documented, and yet they continue to fail in the face of an increasingly informed public.
For that is indeed the new reality. The Burkinabé citizen, who until recently was defenseless against this fabricated content, is now learning to recognize it, verify it, and reject it. Citizen monitoring organizations, active in both Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso, reiterated this point during the confederal forum dedicated to the strategic role of public vigilance in the face of the information war targeting the AES region.
This collective maturity is no accident: it is the result of a political consciousness forged by years of the sovereignty movement and the rejection of “Françafrique” in all its forms.
On the other side, only the stateless those internal agents of treachery continue to lend their voices to foreign agencies, seeking to tarnish the image of the progressive popular revolution and sow doubt within its ranks. Their isolation grows as the people’s discernment sharpens.
But vigilance must never become a static given. The imperialist powers, losing ground on the military and diplomatic fronts, are redoubling their malicious ingenuity on the digital front. Every deepfake that is thwarted gives rise to another, more sophisticated one.
The people of Burkina Faso, true to the spirit of the Revolution, must therefore turn this clarity of vision into a constant reflex a weapon of sovereignty just as much as the rifles that protect Faso’s borders.
