Since August 2023, the sky over Ethiopia's Amhara region has become a weapon — not over the front line, but over ordinary life. Over a market on a Saturday morning. Over a funeral. Over a school assembly, a bus queue, a farmer in his own field. The strike comes from a clear sky, without warning and without shelter, and by the time the sound arrives the dead are already being counted.
By the time this investigation was written, our Drone Strike Monitor had documented one hundred and forty-seven such strikes on civilian areas of the region — each one dated, located, and tied to a source. Together they have killed one thousand one hundred and ninety-two civilians and injured three hundred and three more.
These figures are not contested in their direction, and every serious count points the same way. A March 2024 United Nations Human Rights Council report recorded roughly one hundred drone strikes in the months after the August 2023 state of emergency, and at least four hundred and seventy-nine civilians killed by drones between August 2023 and January 2024 alone. The Amhara Association of America, documenting incident by incident, counted nine hundred and eighty-five civilian casualties by November 2024. The European Council on Foreign Relations put the toll at no fewer than four hundred and forty-nine killed since 2023. The UN human rights office has, on the record, called the result "disproportionate." Different methods, different windows — and they converge.
01 · The tollA list that should not exist.
The pattern is one the people of Amhara have learned to read: a clear morning, a gathering, and then the strike. The government's standing justification is that it targets Fano combatants. The dead, again and again, are farmers, worshippers, teachers and children.
The list below is partial. It records only strikes independently corroborated by the United Nations, international monitors, or established media — a reading sample of the dataset, not the dataset itself.
A strike lasts a second. What it removes does not come back: the harvest that will not be eaten, the teacher who will not return to the classroom, the village that buries its dead at the market gate and does not go back to market.
"Disproportionate levels of civilian casualties." How the UN human rights office described Ethiopia's drone strikes on Amhara
02 · The weaponBought abroad, flown at home.
The drones are not Ethiopian. Since early 2021, models made in Turkey, China and Iran have appeared at Ethiopian airfields — their deliveries, the European Council on Foreign Relations found, largely facilitated by Emirati intermediaries. Open-source investigators at PAX and Bellingcat have tracked the fleet from satellite imagery: the Turkish Bayraktar TB2 and Akıncı, the Chinese Wing Loong I and II, the Iranian Mohajer-6, with a Russian Orion reported added in 2025.
The suppliers cannot claim ignorance. In August 2024, minutes from Turkey's own parliament acknowledged that Bayraktar drones it had licensed were used in strikes causing mass civilian casualties. The weapon that struck the Finote Selam market and the Bezo school was built, licensed and delivered by states that present themselves as guarantors of the international order. And there is a second supply chain — money. The structural argument that runs through the diplomatic correspondence held by our partner associations is simple: financing that frees a government's resources cannot be treated as separate from how that government wages war. The European Council on Foreign Relations documented one concrete instance — the €33 million the EU committed in 2022 to rebuild education in war-affected areas was rendered ineffective in Amhara by strikes on the very schools it was meant to restore.
03 · The lawRules that exist on paper.
International humanitarian law rests on a principle older than the drone: distinction. An attack must separate combatants from civilians, and must never be expected to cause civilian harm out of proportion to its military aim. A strike on a marketplace, a funeral or a school assembly does not meet that test. When the UN human rights office calls the result "disproportionate," it is not reaching for a figure of speech — it is naming a violation.
The protections are specific, and Ethiopia is bound by them. UN Security Council Resolution 2601 demands the protection of schools in armed conflict; the Safe Schools Declaration, which Ethiopia has signed, commits it to keeping schools out of the fighting. Neither has been enforced. The strikes continue — under internet shutdowns, with the press kept out and survivors too frightened to speak — precisely because the evidence stays scattered, untranslated, and slow to reach the desks where decisions are made.
04 · The film Drone Over Amhara.
This investigation is the written companion to the documentary Drone Over Amhara, produced by the Amhara Advocacy Group in Europe. The film draws on the same body of sources and adds what an article cannot carry: the faces, the places, and the silence that follows a strike.
05 · What this meansCounting what no one filmed.
A drone strike rarely produces the single photograph that moves the world. It happens where cameras cannot reach, in a region where the network is cut on the day it matters most. That is exactly why a dataset matters more than an image: it turns a hundred scattered, deniable mornings into one structure that cannot be waved away.
The evidence is not missing. One hundred and forty-seven strikes are dated, located and sourced. The supply chain is named. The legal obligations are signed and on the record. The only question left is the one this work was built to force: whether the institutions that already hold this evidence — the suppliers, the funders, the signatory states — will finally act on it.