This corpus-based study investigates discourses of conflict delivered by political leaders in six West and Central African countries. It focuses on how metaphor and metonymy interact with syntax, lexicalisation and ideologies of glorification in such discourses to handle ‘new’ forms of conflicts. We postulate that such discursive constructions aim at shaping the opinions and (re)actions of recipients with regard to conflicts. The study of ‘local meanings’ in texts (van Dijk 2001: 103-6), such as the lexicon and the structures of propositions, can reveal underlying subjective representations and the personal fragility of political leaders. Adopting a cognitive and critical discourse approach, our goal is, on the one hand, to point out the manipulative and mind-controlling nature of such discourses. On the other hand, it is to uncover underlying meanings and purposes of figurative constructions within the speaker’s strategies and attempts to convince the recipients. Thus, sections 3.2-3.4 examine the interplay between figurative language, sentence structures, lexical collocations and glorification ideology, which are combined not only to background the atrocities of the conflicts, but also to foreground the positive aspects of leaders and the negative ones of adversaries. Going further, section 2.5 proposes a brief socio-cognitive analysis to illustrate how figurative language is used as a foregrounding construction to perform both persuasion and mental manipulation functions in political discourses of conflict. Finally, section 2.6 demonstrates to what extent such discourses are characterised by purposive omissions of the crises’ main causes and solutions from the text.