NEWS
Ethiopia: the war the government still calls a “security problem”
21 July 2026
The facts
For more than two years, in Ethiopia's Amhara region, a national army and a militia born to defend its own community have fought each other with the same methods: summary executions, forced disappearances, attacks on hospitals. The government in Addis Ababa still calls it a public-order problem, managed first through a state of emergency and then through a military command answering directly to the prime minister. The conflict broke out in April 2023, when the announced dissolution of regional special forces was read by the ethnic-Amhara Fano militia as a forced disarmament.
Since then, fighting between the Ethiopian National Defence Force (ENDF) and the militia has never stopped. Human Rights Watch, in its World Report published on 4 February 2026, records that throughout 2025 warring parties continued committing war crimes and other serious abuses, including reports of drone strikes harming civilians in Amhara. The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, updating its dossier on 6 May 2026, reports that since 2023 the UN and independent monitors have repeatedly documented extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions, forced displacement, destruction of property and attacks on healthcare. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people still live in formal and informal camps across Amhara and Tigray: in June 2025 some staged a three-day protest outside regional government offices demanding a safe return home — something no one can currently guarantee them.
Legal commentary
The most solid legal framing, given the documentation currently available, is international humanitarian law applicable to non-international armed conflicts: Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions prohibits any party to a conflict, state or non-state, from killing, torturing or cruelly treating those not taking part in hostilities. Ethiopia has signed but not ratified the Rome Statute: the International Criminal Court therefore has no automatic jurisdiction over the country, barring a UN Security Council referral — a structural limit that leaves individual accountability for these events almost entirely to Ethiopia's own domestic justice system. Some advocacy organisations, including the Lemkin Institute, have described the situation in Amhara as an ongoing genocide: we report this as an advocacy position, not an established fact — no international judicial body or UN organ has so far qualified the conflict in those terms.
Implications — the symmetry test
The symmetry test applies directly here: the sources cited attribute violations to both actors on the ground, not to one alone. The Ethiopian government frames its operations as restoring law and order against an irregular militia — a position we report, even as human rights organisations dispute the methods used. Ethiopia appears among the 20 countries on the IRC's 2026 Emergency Watchlist, the annual list of contexts at greatest risk of humanitarian deterioration worldwide — yet it remains at the margins of international coverage, overshadowed by Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine. This site had not written about it at all, until today.
Sources: Human Rights Watch — World Report 2026, Ethiopia chapter · Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect — Ethiopia · IRC — 2026 Emergency Watchlist