ADF STAFF
Military drones hummed through October’s midday sky over the central Ethiopian town of Mehalganat in the volatile Amhara region before destroying several buildings at a health clinic compound.
Residents said the attack by government forces killed eight people, including a 9-year-old child, a 70-year-old man and the clinic’s pharmacist. The aerial assault lasted for four days.
“When the drone came, it sounded like a vulture,” an eyewitness told the BBC anonymously out of fear of repercussions. “It dropped something explosive, and we found seven bodies together.”
Drone strikes, artillery shelling, extrajudicial killings and arbitrary arrests have become commonplace in cities, towns and villages of the Amhara region.
The Amhara Association of America has documented 24 drone and airstrikes in 17 separate incidents between September 25 and October 16, killing 87 people and injured 37.
Fighting in Ethiopia’s second-largest region has intensified since the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) launched an offensive in late September. The ethnic Amhara militia, known as Fano, is committed to armed insurrection.
“We believe we are months away from removing [the federal government] from power,” Asres Mare Damtie, a Fano leader in Amhara’s Gojam district, told The Economist magazine for an October 27 article.
Experts doubt that the decentralized militia has such a capacity, as it has failed to control any major cities, but they acknowledge that Fano controls much of the vast rural landscape of Amhara.
Damtie, who posts frequently on social media, has called Fano’s struggle “a fight for survival” of the Amhara people.
“The enemy force attacked Achefer with several mortars and anti-tank missiles,” he wrote on Facebook about an October 30 battle. “The invading army, which used its air force to its full potential, destroyed rural villages with random jet strikes.
“Loyal to the people, impervious to jet and drone strikes, we have raised a fearless generation.”
In many ways, the end of one internal military conflict in Ethiopia brought about the beginning of another similar civil war.
The Amhara were key supporters of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in his government’s two-year war on the Tigray People’s Liberation Forces. They also had hoped to keep control of disputed territory that they and Tigrayans have long claimed.
But Abiy signed the Pretoria Peace Agreement with the Tigray region in November 2022 without Amhara participation, leading to widespread feelings of betrayal.
Political researcher Farouk Hussein Abu Deif said the crisis in the Amhara region brings broader implications in the Horn of Africa, as Eritrean troops remain present on both sides of the Tigray region’s northern border.
“[This] comes as a new challenge to the Ahmed government, with heightened fears of a recurrence of the Tigray war scenario in Amhara possibly resulting in a severe humanitarian crisis, economic challenges and strained Ethiopian relations with a number of regional powers including Eritrea and Somalia,” he wrote in the November 14 edition of Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly.
“Ethiopia fears cooperation between the Fano militias and Eritrea, with the militias threatening Ethiopia’s territorial stability, sovereignty and unity.”
As it did in the Tigray conflict, Abiy’s government has responded to another internal threat with devastating military force.
“The Ethiopian armed forces’ brutal killings of civilians in Amhara undercut government claims that it’s trying to bring law and order to the region,” Laetitia Bader, deputy Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement earlier this year.
“Since fighting began between federal forces and the Fano militia, civilians are once again bearing the brunt of an abusive army operating with impunity.”
After a November 5 drone strike in the Achefer district, a resident of Durbete told the Addis Standard newspaper that the ENDF attacks have created a living nightmare.
“We live in constant fear, bracing ourselves for whatever may happen,” he said. “No one knows what each day will bring, and the frequent clashes have left the community in a state of high anxiety.”
