Burkina Faso, 2022 — military coup
Event Summary
On 24 January 2022 the military overthrew President Roch Marc Christian Kabore of Burkina Faso, ending his rule over a country overwhelmed by a jihadist insurgency. Kabore had been elected in 2015, the first civilian leader after the 2014 popular uprising that ousted longtime ruler Blaise Compaore, and re-elected in 2020, but his government was widely seen as failing to contain armed groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which had killed thousands and displaced well over a million people. Discontent within the army over a lack of equipment and support boiled over into a mutiny on 23 January at barracks around the capital Ouagadougou, sharpened by a November 2021 attack at Inata where gendarmes had reportedly run short of food before being overrun.
On 24 January soldiers detained Kabore, and officers announced on state television that he had been deposed, the constitution suspended, and the government and National Assembly dissolved. The coup was led by Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, who headed a junta called the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration. Crowds gathered in Ouagadougou to celebrate.
Damiba was named interim president and sworn in in February, but his rule proved unpopular and short: he was himself overthrown just eight months later.
Researched Details
Researched
Independent research, added record by record. Hover any label for what it means.
Sources
Editorial Note
How It Unfolded
Hand-coded by Coup Atlas from the sources on this page, using a fixed list of tactics. Only events we have read through carry this coding, so most records do not have it yet.
- Led by
- Military
- How long it took
- 2 days from first move to resolution
- Troop movements in the capital or key cities
- Detention or expulsion of the incumbent leader
- Seizure of broadcasters / coup declaration on state media
Cross-Reference
Datasets agree. At least two of the three reference datasets we check against carry this event, and none of them disagrees about its date or its result.
Identifiers for finding this same event in the other datasets:
- Cline Center id
43901242022- Albrecht/Koehler/Schutz (CAM) id
CAM-439-2022-01-23
How the match is made is described in crossref-report.md.
Outcome and Target
Coup Atlas research identifies the target as: President Roch Marc Christian Kabore, detained by mutinous soldiers and deposed; held for months, later released.
Baseline coding: Incumbent executive removed from power. Recorded leader fate: deposed; placed under house arrest; arrested or jailed. The baseline file does not name individual targets; researched names are kept in a separate layer.
Baseline Dataset Citation
Baseline Source-Document Entries
Wikipedia
The New York Times
This is the citation trail carried by the baseline dataset, grouped by outlet and rejoined from the line-wrapped original. Coup Atlas has not independently re-checked every document; read the original before citing a specific claim. URLs the import damaged beyond safe repair are shown as plain text and listed in citations-report.md. How this list is built →