To understand why the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church keeps appearing in the casualty reports of this war, you have to understand what it is to the Amhara. Not one institution among many, but the keeper of the language, the calendar, the Ge'ez script and the collective memory of a people. Its priests are teachers; its churches are archives. To strike the church is to strike the thing that makes a people legible to itself.
And the church has been struck — its priests killed, its congregations ambushed, its thousand-year-old sanctuaries shaken by shellfire. The incidents are scattered across regions and perpetrators: armed groups in Oromia, government forces near Lalibela, gunmen at rural monasteries. What links them is the target.
These accounts are drawn from international media, United Nations human-rights submissions, and the formal statements of the church's own Holy Synod. The perpetrators differ from case to case and each is named where it is known; what is not in dispute is the pattern.
01 · The faithfulKilled at prayer.
The dead are priests in their vestments, deacons carrying the tabot, mourners at a graveside, families in their homes. Across 2023 and 2024 the killings of Orthodox clergy became frequent enough that the Holy Synod issued repeated public condemnations — a church, in effect, counting its own dead.
The list below is partial, and deliberately conservative: it records only incidents reported by established media or international monitors.
A priest does not return. A congregation does not gather the next Sunday in the same way. The fear outlasts the funeral, and it is meant to.
"The vibrations are affecting the churches." A deacon in Lalibela to Reuters, as government forces fired heavy weapons beside the rock-hewn churches, 2023
02 · The holy placesA sanctuary is not a shield.
Lalibela, in the North Wollo zone of Amhara, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site: eleven churches carved downward into solid rock in the 12th and 13th centuries, still in daily use. During the fighting of 2023 the town changed hands more than once, and a deacon told Reuters that government forces fired heavy weapons near the churches eleven times in a single day, sending damaging shockwaves through the subterranean stone. Drone shrapnel had already been recorded in the town in an earlier phase of the war.
Lalibela is the most famous case, not the only one. Rural monasteries and parish churches across the region have been caught in — and at times singled out by — the violence, their manuscripts and treasures at risk in a way that, once lost, cannot be restored. Heritage, like a life, does not come back.
03 · The patternAn identity, not only a religion.
Amhara advocacy organisations, and at times the church itself, describe these attacks as part of a deliberate effort to erase a people through its faith. Whether or not one accepts that framing, the underlying record is not seriously contested: clergy killed, worshippers ambushed at burials and feast days, and holy sites left in the line of fire. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church's Holy Synod has condemned the killings on the record; United Nations human-rights bodies have logged the broader deterioration; and a substantial share of the documented incidents cluster precisely where Amhara Orthodox communities live.
This is also true beyond the Orthodox: in Gondar, Muslim worshippers were ambushed at a burial and mosques set alight. The faith attacked is not always the same one — but the logic of attacking people through their place of worship is.
04 · The film Ethiopian Orthodox Church Under Attack.
This investigation is the written companion to the documentary Ethiopian Orthodox Church Under Attack, produced by the Amhara Advocacy Group in Europe. The film carries the testimony of clergy and congregations that an article can only summarise.
05 · What this meansThe keeper of a memory.
When a church is shelled or a priest is killed, two things are lost at once: a life, and a thread connecting a people to its own past. A manuscript burned at a monastery is not replaced; a feast interrupted by gunfire is remembered as fear. This is why the targeting of the church cannot be filed away as collateral to a military campaign — it reaches the identity the campaign is fought over.
The record here is partial because the documentation is hard, the access is cut, and the survivors are afraid. But partial is not absent. The incidents are dated, located and attributed. The church has counted its dead in public. The task now is to make sure that count is heard where it can compel a response.