Burkina Faso: “No one has fired a single shot”, President Ibrahim Traoré insists the war is 100 per cent Burkinabe
The words are simple, direct, and heavy with meaning. In just a few sentences spoken with the conviction of someone who knows what he is talking about, Captain Ibrahim Traoré has just shattered a narrative that his adversaries strive to maintain: that of a Burkina Faso incapable of fighting alone, eternally dependent on one foreign power or another to ensure its own defense.
“We are waging the war ourselves. No one has put in a single cartridge.” The phrase is surgical. It responds without detour to those who seek to discredit the Burkinabe resistance by presenting it as a proxy war, waged with weapons and men from elsewhere.
The reality described by the President of Faso is the polar opposite of that narrative: it is Burkina Faso that is fighting, with its own soldiers, its own VDP, its own resources, and its own determination.
But what gives this statement its particular depth is the pride it implicitly carries for the men and women holding the front line.
To affirm that no one has put in a single cartridge is to pay tribute to every Burkinabe fighter who rises each morning to defend his territory, to every VDP who protects his village with the courage of one who has nowhere to flee, to every soldier whose sacrifice weighs on military statistics but whose name will never appear in international news dispatches.
The final sentence from President Ibrahim Traoré is perhaps the most important of all: “We have a quality human resource. We must believe in ourselves.” A call for confidence addressed simultaneously to the Burkinabe people and to the entire world.
To believe in Burkina Faso is not an act of blind faith. It is to recognize a reality that the figures on the ground are beginning to confirm: this country is fighting, it is holding, and it is moving forward.
Maurice K.ZONGO
