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Hours after the United States and Israel confirmed attacks on Iran on February 28, 2026, social media became a beehive of activities with newsrooms, governments and ordinary platform users reacting to the incident with its global, subregional and national implications.
FactSpace West Africa’s tracking of reactions by governments in the region showed that two countries – Ghana and Nigeria – had formally reacted through foreign ministry statements, while the regional bloc, ECOWAS via its current president Sierra Leone president (Julius Maada Bio), had also issued a statement calling for restraint and diplomacy.
We surfaced a post that claimed the Burkina Faso government had formally responded to the development. The post, by La Depeche Africaine X handle, had been widely interacted with grossing over 500,000 views, 417 comments, 2,600 reposts and 9,900 likes with 555 bookmarks.
The post claimed that Burkina Faso had ordered the closure of the US Embassy in Ouagadougou and labeled the presidents of Israel and the US as terrorists. It contained an alleged RTB (Radio, Television Burkina) news clip where the host announces government’s position.
The caption of the post read: “Burkina announces the closure of the United States embassy and labels Israel (@netanyahu) and Washington (@Trump_Fact_News) as terrorist states. With the dispatch to Tehran of two infantry battalions.”
Fig. 1 – A screenshot of the La Depeche Africaine post
Has the Ibrahim Traore-led junta commented on the tensions in the Middle East and is the video in the post authentic?
Fact-check
FactSpace West Africa ran checks on the specific claims made in the post and separately investigated the video attached.
On the supposed closure of the American Embassy, we sent an email to the US Embassy in Ouagadougou but got an auto reply. We further contacted a colleague fact-checker with Fasocheck, Ange Levi Jordan, with the claims. He replied: “That’s false. RTB has even denied it. It’s an AI.”
He directed us to the RTB disclaimer on Facebook, which labelled the video as a deepfake which was not authored by them. “A video, falsified using AI, hijacks and manipulates authentic images from an RTB television news broadcast by making one of our journalists say remarks she never made,” the statement said.
“… this Deepfake has usurped our channel’s image and the features of one of its presenters to spread unfounded information concerning the conflict in Iran. This sequence was never produced or broadcast on our airwaves,” it added.
Fig. 2 – A screenshot of the RTB disclaimer
We also ran the video through Google SynthID platform but it returned a result: “Not made with Google AI.” The Google Gemini platform, however, returned the following result: “The video you provided is highly likely to be manipulated, and the news content it presents is not true.”
On possible instances of AI manipulation, Gemini stated: “This video shows several “telltale” signs of a deepfake,” before highlighting Lip-Sync Issues, Synthetic Audio and Contextual Patterns in the viral video.
Verdict:
The claims about Burkina Faso criticising the US and Israel is False and the video attached to the post is a deepfake.
Following the US‑Israel attacks on Iran in late February 2026, a viral post on X claimed that Burkina Faso had closed the US embassy in Ouagadougou, labeled the US and Israeli presidents as “terrorist states”, and deployed infantry battalions to Tehran. The post included a video presented as a broadcast from Burkina Faso’s state television RTB. FactSpace West Africa found the claim false: RTB issued a disclaimer stating that “A video, falsified using AI, hijacks and manipulates authentic images from an RTB television news broadcast by making one of our journalists say remarks she never made.” Google’s Gemini platform confirmed the video showed “telltale signs of a deepfake”, including lip‑sync issues and synthetic audio. The US embassy in Ouagadougou remained open, and Burkina Faso’s government had issued no such declaration.