Execution video from 2021 filmed in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, not in Amhara
- Published on May 21, 2025 at 12:45
- 4 min read
- By Tolera FIKRU GEMTA, AFP Ethiopia
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The 19-second clip posted on Facebook on May 15, 2025, is accompanied by text in Amharic that reads: “Do not ask me why I must support Fano. Do not ask me why I hated the prosperity party and soldiers in military uniform.”
The Prosperity Party governs Ethiopia.
The video, which has been shared more than 470 times, also contains a text overlay in Amharic which translates to: “Amharas are being massacred. Please share this video with all.”
The harrowing footage shows people wearing military uniforms rounding up and shooting an unarmed group in civilian clothes in a dry, hilly area.
A similar post was also shared on Facebook.
Amhara conflict
After the Ethiopian federal government decided to disarm all local paramilitary groups in April 2023, the Fano militia – who were former allies during the Tigray war – turned against the state and a fresh conflict began in the Amhara region (archived here).
AFP reported in March 2025 that the fighting has caused a humanitarian crisis: several million children are out of school and many hospitals are no longer functioning (archived here).
In the same month, federal forces said they had killed nearly 300 Fano fighters, while reports indicated that the government had lost control of much of the rural areas in the region.
Last year, Amnesty International reported that the Ethiopian army had carried out extrajudicial executions of civilians in Amhara (archived here).
However, the footage circulating on Facebook is unrelated to current events in the region.
Mahbere Dego massacre
AFP Fact Check used the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the video.
The results established that a longer version of the clip, just over 90 seconds in length, was published on a gore site on June 17, 2021.
Content warning
The English caption reads: “Ethiopia: Soldiers Executing Civilians (Longer version)”, adding that “it happened in Tigray, Ethiopia, where people say they are living a genocide”.
A week later, Bellingcat, an independent organisation known for its digital investigative reporting on armed conflicts, published a report about this specific footage, which had been circulating on social media at the time, and concluded it was similar to other videos it verified of a massacre by Ethiopian soldiers in Mahbere Dego in the Tigray region sometime in January 2021 (archived here).
Bellingcat’s report included screenshots from the footage, which we matched to the video in the Facebook posts falsely claiming the events depicted were filmed recently in Amhara.
Content warning
CNN also aired part of the video a few days after Bellingcat published its findings. “New video of Ethiopia massacre shows soldiers documenting executions,” the CNN caption reads (archived here).
Months earlier, in April 2021, Belligcat ran an in-depth report on the Mahbere Dego massacre based on similar footage it believed was filmed in the same place and at the same time (archived here).
BBC Africa Eye also published a similar investigative report about the massacre in the same month (archived here).
The war in Tigray, pitting the Ethiopian military against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), cost more than 600,000 lives before a peace agreement was signed in Pretoria, South Africa, in November 2022 (archived here).
Both sides were accused of atrocities (here and here) against civilians (archived here and here).
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