“Gunfire and explosions” are probably the two last things you’d want to hear on the streets of a city that just survived an attempted coup, but that’s what people are hearing in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou. It appears as though the effort to persuade Burkina Faso’s presidential guard to disarm has shifted from talking to fighting:
Witnesses reported gunfire and explosions in Burkina Faso’s capital late Tuesday afternoon as the army pressed soldiers who were behind a recent failed coup to disarm.
The fighting began a few hours after army troops surrounded the camp of the presidential guard, the RSP, in Ouagadougou.
Even the leader of the failed coup, RSP (Régiment de la Sécurité Présidentielle) commander Gilbert Diendéré, has gone on the radio calling for the RSP (which has legally been disbanded) to disarm, but VOA reports that they’re refusing to give up their weapons until they receive “guarantees of safety for themselves and their families.”
The state of Burkina Faso’s military is not really my specialty, but if you’re wondering what the deal is with this RSP unit, as far as I know it was basically former President Blaise Compaoré’s private militia/security force, and was instrumental in his rise to power in the 1980s (ostensibly as his “bodyguard” but in reality torturing and killing his opponents), after which it gained its official name and role. Compaoré kept the RSP separate from the regular army (so that it wouldn’t go along with any attempted army coups) and treated it as an elite military unit — the best weapons and training, and better pay than the regular army. It’s considerably smaller than the main army (and much smaller than Burkina Faso’s total security forces, which includes police), but as it’s better armed and better trained than those other units it could put up quite a fight.
I’m not sure whether the RSP has gotten any systematic training from the US, but it’s likely that at least some portion of its officer corps has. A few years before he quit his previous job as Deputy Commander of the RSP to take his current job as the country’s interim Prime Minister, Lt. Col. Isaac Zida received counter-terrorism training in the US and attended a US-sponsored intelligence course in Botswana. It’s highly unlikely that he was the only officer in the RSP to receive such training, particularly given that Burkina Faso shares a long border with Mali (where several Al-Qaeda offshoots, like MUJWA and Ansar Dine, operate) and is one country west of Nigeria (where of course Boko Haram is still very active).
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The Foreign Exchanges Companion 
Quite a few Burkinabé military officers have received training from the US, including top officers on both sides of the current conflict. Zida, as you point out, the temporarily-ousted transitional Prime Minister, Diendéré, the coup leader (or at least public face of the coup plotters), and many lower-ranking guys. Also, the equipment the regular army was using in its maneuvers this week was supplied by western military aid, mostly France but also the US. We don’t train them to do bad things, they already know how to do bad things. The point of US training is to show them how a military works successfully under the control of its civilian government leaders. And to train in specific skills useful for the defense of their own country, like operating those weapons they used to regain control of the rebel camp.
I wasn’t suggesting that “we train them to do bad things,” which sounds extraordinarily infantilizing to me.