Weeks after a lethal drone assault on November 30 killed 5 civilians within the city of Wegel Tena in Ethiopia’s Amhara area about 570km (350 miles) north of the capital, Addis Ababa, a witness remains to be reeling from the trauma.
“It’s extremely difficult to even describe the scene of the aftermath,” mentioned Gebeyehu, who requested use of his first title just for security causes. “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.”
A number of witnesses instructed Al Jazeera {that a} drone fired on an ambulance because it approached the Delanta Major Hospital in Wegel Tena and obliterated it. Hospital employees, together with a health care provider and the ambulance driver, in addition to staff from a close-by development website died immediately.
“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 most recent in an increase in lethal drone exercise within the Amhara area, the place the Ethiopian military, the one operator of armed drones within the Horn of Africa nation, has been engaged in an all-out conflict towards ethnic Amhara rebels.
The insurgent militiamen, generally known as Fano, had been previously allied with the Ethiopian authorities, however the two sides fell out after the previous refused orders to disband in April. As a substitute, in August, they overran a slew of main cities within the area.
In response, the Ethiopian authorities declared a state of emergency and deployed the military to “restore order” and crush the rebels. Regardless of missing a proper command construction and largely counting on volunteers, the Fano fighters are nonetheless actively preventing throughout the Amhara area, the place they’re broadly well-liked.
In August, the Ethiopian Human Rights Fee detailed widespread killings of civilians within the battle, together with in air strikes and shelling. Inside days, hospital officers within the city of Finote Selam mentioned a minimum of 26 individuals had died in a suspected air strike by federal forces.
Regionwide communications outages have made it tough to confirm the mounting reviews. However the United Nations managed to doc two different incidents, together with the killings of seven individuals at a main college within the area’s Wadera district on November 6 and the killing of greater than a dozen individuals at a bus terminal three days later within the city of Wabirr.
The incidents spotlight what UN Human Rights Workplace spokesperson Seif Magango known as the “devastating impact of drone strikes and other violence on the population in the Amhara region”. The BBC has additionally reported that 30 to 40 individuals had been killed in a December 10 strike within the district of Amhara Sayint.
“The drone strikes have increased dramatically in the past few weeks, and almost all the strikes have targeted civilians,” mentioned Tewodrose Tirfe, chairman of the United States-based advocacy group Amhara Affiliation of America. “The uptick in drone strikes is an indication the ground offensive by federal forces has failed and they are losing on the battlefield to the Fano.”
‘Collective punishment’
In 2022, drones had been linked to civilian deaths of a whole bunch of individuals throughout the then-rebel stronghold of Tigray, a area that borders Amhara within the north, and Ethiopia’s largest area, Oromia. Greater than 50 individuals died in a single assault that struck a camp for displaced individuals in Tigray in January.
Tewodrose mentioned his organisation has collected knowledge on about 70 drone strikes that precipitated civilian casualties within the Amhara area since Could. In an in depth interview with an Ethiopian state broadcaster, the top of the military, Discipline Marshall Birhanu Jula, denied that military drones had been concentrating on civilians.
“Of course, when we find gatherings of the extremist fighters, our drones will hit them, but we take great care to avoid civilian casualties. In fact, we’ve previously located targets and decided against firing when we note that they are embedded with civilians,” he mentioned.
Footage Al Jazeera obtained displaying the aftermath of the Wegel Tena drone strike seems to contradict his assertion. It reveals an ambulance ablaze with its roof caved in, according to a direct aerial hit. The footage seems to match pictures of the aftermath circulated days later. Shortly after the pictures surfaced, the city’s web entry was lower off.
“The violence and drone strikes are part of a trend of collective punishment,” mentioned Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes, a lecturer at Curtin College’s Centre for Human Rights Training in Australia. “The government refuses to distinguish between Amhara fighters and civilians as it prefers to demonise Amhara society as a whole. It’s a political ploy to weaponise nationalism against a group it characterises as an enemy.”
Yirga mentioned the battle with Fano might have been averted had the federal government taken steps to deal with grievances of the Amhara individuals with sincerity as an alternative of power.
In the meantime, civil society organisations in Ethiopia are calling on the fighters to finish hostilities and interact in dialogue.
‘Cruel and pointless’
On the federal government’s facet, the battle is portrayed as nearing its finish, rendering dialogue pointless.
“We’ve destroyed their main fighting force,” Birhanu mentioned. “All that’s left are remnants, including bandits and escapees from prison. Some had been detained for murder.”
In the meantime, Mere Wedajo, a Fano army commander, instructed Al Jazeera that the most important roadblock to peace talks was Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
“We aren’t opposed to peace talks in theory as the Amhara are a peace-loving people, but with Abiy, we are talking about someone who can’t honour his own word. He is treasonous. How could the Amhara people trust him?”
As preventing seems to proceed into 2024, the Ethiopian authorities might proceed to resort to its drone arsenal, battle-tested within the nation’s wars which have killed a whole bunch of hundreds of individuals and displaced thousands and thousands since 2019.
The wars have exacerbated a humanitarian catastrophe and drained the financial system. Reviews of a surge in hunger deaths have coincided with the information that the nation is getting ready to a debt default.
However Addis Ababa should be gearing as much as broaden its drone investments.
Final week, a joint Ethiopian-Emirati airshow was held to mark the 88th anniversary of the founding of the Ethiopian air power. The occasion, which was broadcast on state media and held within the metropolis of Bishoftu, the place the air power is predicated, featured international dignitaries, together with Emirati army officers.
Al Jazeera has beforehand documented the United Arab Emirates’s in depth deliveries of armaments, together with drones, to Ethiopia. Open-source researchers have not too long ago found one other uptick in Emirati cargo flights to the air power base in Bishoftu.
Among the many dignitaries current was Haluk Bayraktar, CEO of the Turkish defence agency Baykar, which manufactures the Bayraktar TB2 drone utilized in Ethiopia’s wars.
Baykar, whose drones have been implicated in civilian killings in Ethiopia and past, was awarded a medal from Birhanu for “significant contributions to capacity building of the Ethiopian air force”. The honour and the civilian deaths have angered observers of the nation’s inside crises.
“It is beyond comprehension that a prime minister who was recognized with a Nobel Peace Prize would deploy armed drones to fire live bullets at his own citizens,” mentioned Addisu Lashitew, a nonresident fellow on the Brookings Establishment, a Washington-based suppose tank.
“It is both pointless and cruel. Pointless because you can’t subdue a people with an idea with bullets. Cruel because most of the victims are innocent civilians.”