Following reports of a foiled coup attempt… Burkina Faso accuses Damiba of orchestrating coup attempt and Ivory Coast of financing it
Burkina Faso’s Minister of Security Mahamadou Sana announced the foiling of a coup attempt, which was scheduled to take place on January 3, 2026, at 23:00, and includes a series of assassinations targeting the civil and military authorities, starting with Captain Ibrahim Traoré… Either by shooting at close range, or by booby-trapping his residence.
SANA added in an interview on the country’s state television on Tuesday evening that the plan, which was foiled for the thousandth time, included the disruption of the drone base in the country, followed by a ground military intervention by external forces.
“The main actor in this scheme is former Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandago Damiba,” he said, the former transitional president who has been in exile in Togo since his ouster in 2022.
“Damiba was given a central task of planning operations, seeking and mobilizing funding, and recruiting civilians and military personnel”, he said.
Burkina Faso’s Minister of Security said that a large part of the sources of funding for this sabotage project come from the Ivory Coast, and that the latest funding operation amounted to 70 million CFA francs (about 106,000 Euros),” announcing that arrests have been carried out and that others are still ongoing.
Burkinabe state television broadcast confessions of a person who presented as a trader and a central element in the scheme, who said he had gone to Ivory Coast to collect the money on instructions from Damiba.
Relations between Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast have been strained since Captain Ibrahim Traoré came to power, with Ouagadougou regularly accusing Abidjan of harboring an operations center to destabilize it, which the Ivorian authorities have consistently denied and its neighbor has demanded evidence of it.
Since Traoré took power following a military coup in September 2022, the Burkinabe authorities have announced the foiling of several coup attempts, the last of which was in April 2025, following which about 10 officers and non-commissioned officers were arrested.
