Captain Ibrahim Traoré, the military leader of Burkina Faso, a country in West Africa, has picked a fight with some of the country's most influential Muslim religious leaders. He says "radical Islam" has no place in Burkina Faso and warns that "the battle has begun" against anyone he believes is promoting religious extremism Al Jazeera.

This has been building for months. On June 20, the country's parliament — a lawmaking body appointed by the military government — unanimously passed a new law called the Religious Freedoms Law. The law creates prison sentences and fines for things the government calls religious abuses, such as forcing children to beg for money and failing to show how religious organisations spend their money. The law was passed after at least two well-known imams (Muslim prayer leaders) were arrested for speaking out against it.

One of those imams is Mohamed Ishaq Kindo, described as one of Burkina Faso's most important Sunni Muslim scholars. He was arrested in late May after publicly opposing the draft law. When people gathered at a mosque to demand his release, the government shut down the largest Sunni mosque in Ouagadougou, the capital city, saying it was to keep public order. AFP, a major news agency, reported that about 100 of Imam Kindo's supporters were taken to a military camp for what officials called "civic training" Africanews. According to the Timbuktu Institute, a research group based in Senegal, no one has been told where Imam Kindo is since the protests were stopped.

Another imam, Mahmoud Barro, was detained in mid-April in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso's second-largest city, in similar circumstances. The two arrests, the mosque shutdown, and the transfer of supporters to a military camp are the most forceful steps Traoré has taken against religious leaders since he took power.

Traoré has also targeted religious education in other countries. He announced plans to bring home Burkinabe students who are studying Islamic law in Arab countries. He claims more than 800,000 students are getting religious education abroad without learning practical job skills. He warned that students who refuse to come home could lose their Burkinabe citizenship — meaning they would no longer be recognised as citizens of their own country. In late June, the government issued a rule saying any student who wants to study abroad must first get permission from the Ministry of Higher Education. Traoré has accused foreign powers of using religion to destabilise Burkina Faso, framing the situation as a question of national sovereignty, which is a country's right to govern itself without outside interference.

The Timbuktu Institute says this confrontation has broken an unspoken agreement between Traoré and the Muslim community. That agreement was never written down. It worked like this: religious leaders stayed out of politics and did not openly oppose the military government, and in return the government stayed out of religious affairs. Think of it like neighbours who don't have a written contract but quietly agree to stay off each other's property. The new law, the arrests, and the mosque closure have ended that arrangement.

The broader context here is that Burkina Faso is in its third year under military rule. The country is fighting a violent security crisis: armed groups called jihadists, who use extreme religious beliefs to justify violence, have forced more than two million people to flee their homes. Traoré took power in a September 2022 coup — a sudden takeover of the government by the military — that removed his own predecessor. Since then, his government has moved away from Western countries like France and the United States and built closer ties with Russia and other new partners. His claim that religious extremism is a foreign plot to destabilise the country sounds similar to what military leaders in neighbouring Mali and Niger have said, where they have also treated local religious authority as if it were foreign interference.

A few things make this situation different from the usual tension between a government and religious groups. The new law gives the state real teeth — criminal penalties and financial rules — to control religious organisations in ways it could not before. The people arrested are scholars who criticised the draft law, not people accused of actually breaking it. That raises the possibility that the law is being used to silence critics as much as to fix real problems. Sending 100 supporters to a military camp for "civic training" is an unusual choice — the language suggests the government wants to change their thinking, not simply charge them with a crime. And threatening to take away citizenship from students who refuse to come home from religious studies would be one of the harshest punishments any West African country has proposed against its own people simply for choosing where to study.

What remains uncertain is whether the Muslim community will accept these measures quietly or push back. The Timbuktu Institute believes the old arrangement is gone for good. Traoré's words — "the battle has begun" — make clear he expects a fight, not a compromise. In a country already struggling with multiple armed conflicts, starting a second conflict with its own religious leaders carries risks that go well beyond the people directly involved.