Two strikes, one pattern
On Friday morning, people in Rama, a town in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, gathered around a truck that had been hit by a drone the night before. Grain — sorghum belonging to local traders — lay scattered on the ground, and residents came to collect what they could. Then a second drone struck the crowd.
At least 12 civilians were killed instantly, according to a local source who contacted the Addis Standard. A resident who spoke to Agence France-Presse put the toll at 13; a medical source at a nearby hospital confirmed 11 deaths and said two more victims had been reported. Several others were seriously injured, and with no transport available to move them to hospitals, the situation was described as critical.
One resident told AFP the attack was “heartbreaking” — an earlier strike on armed fighters had not come as a surprise, they said, but this one hit civilians, including young people, gathering food.
Less than a day earlier, and some 500 kilometres to the south, a displacement camp came under attack. The Jari 2 camp in South Wollo, in Ethiopia’s Amhara region, is home to more than 1,700 people who fled earlier violence. On Thursday, it was struck at least five times, at intervals of roughly 15 minutes, while residents were inside their shelters, according to the Addis Standard.
Reuters, citing two sources involved in the rescue operation, reported at least 15 people killed, many of them children. The Addis Standard put the toll at 16, with 22 injured; a local official told Reuters that 36 injured people were receiving medical treatment. A community representative involved in the burials told Reuters: “There were around five explosions. Then … we started collecting bodies.” Thirteen victims were buried by that community effort, and two more of the injured later died at a hospital in the nearby town of Hayk.
Among the dead at Jari 2, the Addis Standard reported, were three pregnant women, an eight-year-old girl, and students returning from school. Fifteen victims were reportedly buried together in a single grave because there were not enough individual burial spaces. Survivors are now sheltering in a school, according to a Hayk resident helping them.
Who is fighting, and who is being blamed
Ethiopia is a federal state in the Horn of Africa, and its government in Addis Ababa has been fighting armed groups across three regions — Tigray in the north, Amhara in the centre-north, and Oromia in the centre-south. The latest escalation began in September, when an alliance of rebels from the northern Tigray region launched an offensive against the government. Government troops have since driven the alliance back, retaking the Tigray regional capital earlier this month and advancing toward the border with Eritrea.
The Addis Standard describes the October drone strikes as the work of the federal army, part of an increased deployment of unmanned aircraft across all three regions. Reuters, reporting on the Jari 2 camp strike, was more cautious: it said it was not clear who was behind that attack, though members of the Amhara Fano National Movement — a militia that is part of the rebel alliance — had been nearby, and there had been no fighting in the area when the strikes hit. A spokesperson for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.
The two strikes are not isolated. In Tigray alone this month, strikes in Medebay Terer killed seven civilians, including an eight-year-old girl, and another strike in Hintalo district killed several people, including a two-year-old child, according to the Addis Standard. In western Oromia, two local government employees were killed in a drone strike on October 23.
Why this matters beyond Ethiopia
These strikes matter for more than the villages they hit. Ethiopia is Africa’s second-most populous country, and its wars have a habit of spilling across borders: hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians have already fled into neighbouring Sudan and Kenya, and the fighting now sits on Eritrea’s doorstep. Addis Ababa accuses Eritrea of sending troops to support the rebellion; Eritrea’s capital, Asmara, denies it and says the accusation amounts to a “declaration of war.” Experts have warned that a full Ethiopia–Eritrea war could drag in other regional powers and deepen a crisis in a region already strained by the war in Sudan and the conflict around the Red Sea.
There is also a pattern here that extends beyond Ethiopia’s borders: drones, once the preserve of the world’s richest militaries, are now the weapon of choice in internal wars — cheap, deniable, and devastatingly imprecise when used over populated areas. When a second strike hits the people gathering to salvage grain from the first strike’s wreckage, the distinction between targeting fighters and punishing civilians becomes very hard to sustain. That is the question these two strikes pose, and it is one that governments and arms suppliers well beyond Ethiopia will have to answer.
