‘Collective punishment’: Ethiopia drone strikes target civilians in Amhara

 Weeks after a deadly drone attack on November 30 killed five civilians in the town of Wegel Tena in Ethiopia's Amhara region about 570km (350 miles) north of the capital, Addis Ababa, a witness is still reeling from the trauma.

"It's extremely difficult to even describe the scene of the aftermath," said Gebeyehu, who requested use of his first name only for safety reasons. "Bodies were burned so badly they had turned to dust. I saw the finger bones of one of the victims still shaped as though it was still clutching a mobile phone."

Several witnesses told Al Jazeera that a drone fired on an ambulance as it approached the Delanta Primary Hospital in Wegel Tena and obliterated it. Hospital staff, including a doctor and the ambulance driver, as well as employees from a nearby construction site died instantly.

"In Wegel Tena, there are still surveillance drones hovering over the sky. Everyone is afraid, so we avoid walking in large groups," Gebeyehu added.

The strike was the latest in a rise in deadly drone activity in the Amhara region, where the Ethiopian army, the only operator of armed drones in the Horn of Africa country, has been engaged in an all-out war against ethnic Amhara rebels.

The rebel militiamen, known as Fano, were formerly allied with the Ethiopian government, but the two sides fell out after the former refused orders to disband in April. Instead, in August, they overran a slew of major towns in the region.

In response, the Ethiopian government declared a state of emergency and deployed the army to "restore order" and crush the rebels. Despite lacking a formal command structure and largely relying on volunteers, the Fano fighters are still actively fighting across the Amhara region, where they are widely popular.

In August, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission detailed widespread killings of civilians in the conflict, including in air strikes and shelling. Within days, hospital officials in the town of Finote Selam said at least 26 people had died in a suspected air strike by federal forces.

Regionwide communications outages have made it difficult to verify the mounting reports. But the United Nations managed to document two other incidents, including the killings of seven people at a primary school in the region's Wadera district on November 6 and the killing of more than a dozen people at a bus terminal three days later in the town of Wabirr.

The incidents highlight what UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Seif Magango referred to as the "devastating impact of drone strikes and other violence on the population in the Amhara region".

A source: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/12/29/collective-punishment-ethiopia-drone-strikes-target-civilians-in-amhara