Old photo of conflict in Ethiopia’s Ataye falsely linked to recent protests

The post was published on Facebook on April 10, 2023, and has since been shared 70 times.

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Screenshot showing the false post, taken on April 13, 2023

Written in Amharic, the post translates to: “Abiy’s army is destroying Ataye. This is why they want to dismantle the Amhara special forces. Locals are reporting that OLF, a group that works closely with Abiy is attacking Ataye town and its neighbourhood using heavy artillery. They want to disband the special forces to destroy Amhara”.

Abiy Ahmed is Ethiopia’s prime minister.

The Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) is an opposition party with strong support from the Oromo ethnic group in Ethiopia. It has an outlawed militia arm (archived here), the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA).

The same claim was also shared here in a separate Facebook post.

Amhara protests

In recent weeks, protests (archived here) have been reported in Ethiopia’s Amhara region after the federal government began disarming and reassigning members of special forces under the regional authority to the federal army or police.

These special forces were established outside of legal frameworks by some regional states and have been operational for more than a decade. A 2021 report by the IPI Global Observatory (archived here) linked the special forces to insecurity in the country.

Aid organisation Catholic Relief Services said that two of its staff were shot and killed (archived here) during the protests by unidentified gunmen in the region on March 9.

On April 13, AFP reported that interviews with local authorities and residents revealed that calm was slowly returning to the protest-hit Amhara region.

Though the situation in Amhara is currently difficult to assess because the region is closed to the press, reportedly for security reasons, the image shared in the posts is not related to the 2023 protests in Amhara.

Old photo

Using a reverse image search, AFP Fact Check found that the photo (archived here) has been online for at least two years. It was published in an article on an Ethiopian news site in March 2021.

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Screenshot showing the article in which the photo was published in 2021

The article, written in Amharic, addresses insecurity at the time in the towns of Ataye, Shawa Robit and Kamise.

“Even though fighting in many areas in Amhara regional state has slowed in the past days, the aforementioned areas are still affected by insecurity issues,” reads the 2021 article.

It further says that an organised attack was carried out in Ataye against ethnic Amhara people by OLF and government forces.

In early 2021, ethnic violence (archived here) that resulted in the deaths of at least 300 people was reported in Amhara regional state between the Oromo and Amhara communities – the country’s two largest ethnic groups.