The Forgotten War in Wallaga: Why Atrocities in Western Oromia Remain Uncounted

Excerpt

While the world associates Ethiopia’s mass violence with the Tigray war, a longer and largely uncounted war has devastated western Oromia—especially Wallaga—since 2019. Displacement, repeated massacres, school closures, and the collapse of health services have become a grim norm, yet the true civilian death toll remains unknown. This article explains what we know, what we still do not know, why the suffering has been under-reported, and why an independent investigation by credible human rights bodies is now urgent.

#Ethiopian Empire, #Forgotten War in Wallaga, #Horo Guduru Wallaga, #Naqamtee, #OLF, #OLF-OLA, #Oromia, #PP Regime, #PP Regime Criminality, #Qellem Wallaga, #War in Wallaga

Background

For much of the world, Ethiopia’s recent history of mass violence is summed up in a single phrase: the war in Tigray. That conflict, which raged from late 2020 until a peace agreement in November 2022, is widely estimated to have killed on the order of exceeding 600,000 people, including deaths from direct violence, starvation, and the collapse of health services.

But long before tanks rolled into Tigray, another war was already underway in western Oromia—particularly in Wallaga. That conflict has never formally ended. It has displaced hundreds of thousands of people, shuttered schools and health facilities, and produced repeated massacres. Yet its human cost remains largely invisible, under-reported, and uncounted.

This article sketches what is known, what remains unknown, why wider Oromia has often chosen silence, and—above all—why an independent, professional investigation by organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other credible bodies is urgently needed.

1. A War That Began Long Before Tigray—and Never Stopped

As we conclude 2025 and begin 2026, the war of attrition in Wallaga is entering its eighth year. The current phase of violence in western Oromia dates back to the political transition of 2018. The collapse of the EPRDF precipitated a peace deal between the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and the ruling Oromo Democratic Party (OPDO/ODP). But the disarmament process broke down, and a faction—later widely known as the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA)—continued its armed struggle.

By late 2018, clashes between federal/regional forces and the OLA were already widespread in western Oromia, especially in West Wallaga, East Wallaga, Qellem Wallaga, and Horo Guduru Wallaga. In November 2020, Ethiopia plunged into the far more publicized war in Tigray. For the next two years, international media, diplomats, and humanitarian agencies focused overwhelmingly on the north.

Meanwhile, for communities in Wallaga, the earlier “local insurgency” hardened into a protracted war in which:

• Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF),
• Oromia regional special forces and local militias, and
• Amhara/Fano militias moving across regional borders

all became actors in overlapping cycles of attack, reprisal, and collective punishment. Today, with the Tigray ceasefire in place but no comparable peace agreement in Oromia, the Wallaga conflict continues to generate new displacement, killings, and disappearances. Furthermore, the OLA insurgency has expanded into other parts of Oromia—most notably central and southern Oromia, and more recently eastern Oromia.

2. How Bad Is It? What the Data Do Tell Us

Unlike Tigray, there has been no comprehensive attempt to estimate the total death toll in Wallaga. However, humanitarian and research sources still offer a sense of scale:

• A 2022 UN OCHA access snapshot reported that across western Oromia, 426 health facilities were non-functional due to looting and destruction. In East Wallaga alone, 144 schools were closed (over 62,000 children out of school), and in West Wallaga 184 schools were closed (about 89,000 students).
• The same period saw hundreds of thousands displaced: one conflict-trend study estimated about 740,000 people displaced in 2022 in Wallaga and its borderlands.
• A later UN situation report noted roughly 859,000 displaced people in need of assistance in East and West Wallaga alone.
• A broader overview of conflict in Oromia suggests about 1.8 million people displaced across the region, with western Oromia among the worst affected areas.

These numbers align with what local observers describe as near-total service collapse in many communities: destroyed or abandoned health posts, long-closed schools, and public offices either shut down or functioning only sporadically.

Yet they tell us very little about how many people have been killed. One of the few detailed investigations by Human Rights Watch into a single atrocity in western Oromia documented the massacre of “several hundred” civilians in West Wallaga in June 2022, while security forces failed to protect them.

A separate report by Amnesty International—and subsequent local reporting—documented large-scale killings, including a June 2023 massacre in or near Naqamtee and other attacks in Qellem Wallaga and Horo Guduru.

Taken together, these partial snapshots strongly indicate that thousands of civilians have been killed in western Oromia since 2018. But in the absence of systematic mortality surveys or open access for investigators, no credible total can yet be calculated.

3. The “Silent War”: Why Wallaga and Wider Oromia Are So Under-Reported

Several overlapping factors help explain why atrocities in Wallaga receive far less attention than those in Tigray.

3.1 Access and communications blackouts

International and local monitors consistently report telecom and internet shutdowns in conflict-affected parts of Oromia, including western zones.

A 2024 asylum research review—drawing on Freedom House—notes that the government repeatedly restricted connectivity in Oromia, making it far harder to document abuses. When phone networks are patchy, the internet is cut, and roads are blocked by checkpoints or active fighting, journalists and humanitarian workers simply cannot move or report safely.

3.2 Multi-sided violence and contested narratives

In Wallaga, atrocities have been attributed to:

• federal and regional forces,
• local militias, and
• Amhara/Fano formations operating across regional borders.

Each side accuses the others of ethnic massacres and collective punishment, and each side denies responsibility when specific incidents are documented.

For example, after a high-profile massacre in Qellem Wallaga, parliament blamed the OLA, while the OLA in turn blamed government-aligned forces. For media outlets and international organizations, such an environment makes verification difficult to the standards required for publication, accountability mechanisms, or legal action.

3.3 Competing crises and political sensitivities

The Tigray war generated massive international engagement, including a formal AU-brokered peace process and intense diplomatic pressure. By contrast, western Oromia has often been framed—by the government and sometimes by donors—as an “internal security” problem, even as the humanitarian footprint has grown.

At the same time, Ethiopia has been managing multiple overlapping crises: violence in Amhara, tensions with Eritrea, climate-driven disasters, and renewed instability in Tigray.

In that crowded field, the slow-burn war in Wallaga frequently remains in the shadows. But silence alone does not explain why the war persists year after year.

To understand that, one must examine why peace itself is politically unacceptable to those in power.

4. The Oromia Peace Deadlock: Power, Not Ideology

The persistence of war in western Oromia is not the result of failed mediation, poor sequencing, or lack of confidence-building measures. It is the product of a deliberate political calculation. For the Prosperity Party (PP) regime, a genuine peace agreement in Oromia is not merely difficult—it is existentially threatening.

From the regime’s perspective, resolving the conflict with the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) through meaningful political compromise would be widely interpreted as surrender. Such an outcome would immediately erode the regime’s fragile claim to represent Oromia and would expose the absence of a genuine Oromo political mandate. In short, peace risks costing the regime its Oromia constituency—and, by extension, its grip on power.

This explains why the war in Oromia has never been treated as a political conflict requiring resolution, but rather as a security problem to be managed indefinitely. The conflict is not ideological from the regime’s side; it is instrumental. War functions as a mechanism of political survival.

The failure of the April and November 2023 talks in Tanzania illustrates this reality clearly. While presented publicly as peace negotiations, the process lacked the essential ingredients of seriousness: mutual recognition, political parity, and a willingness to address core Oromo demands. The talks functioned more as diplomatic theater—designed to project reasonableness to external observers—than as a sincere effort to end hostilities.

This deadlock is also rooted in historical continuity. The Oromo struggle for self-determination did not begin in 2018, nor with the current generation of fighters. It is a struggle that spans more than five decades. Today’s OLA combatants are not an aberration; they are political inheritors of a resistance carried forward by their parents and grandparents. Treating the conflict as a temporary insurgency ignores its deep historical and structural foundations.

Far from seeking compromise with the OLF-OLA to bring lasting peace to Oromia, the regime has instead pursued a strategy of containment and suppression. This includes the use of proxy regional conflicts, cross-regional militia deployments, and selective alliances aimed at weakening Oromo political cohesion. The objective is not resolution, but exhaustion.

In this framework, war becomes politically useful. It justifies militarization, silences dissent under the banner of “law enforcement,” fragments Oromo society, and allows the regime to present itself internationally as a bulwark against instability. Peace, by contrast, would force a reckoning with Oromo political claims that the regime has neither the legitimacy nor the mandate to address.

As long as power retention—not justice, representation, or reconciliation—remains the governing logic, peace in western Oromia and beyond will remain structurally blocked. The deadlock is not a failure of negotiation; it is the success of a strategy designed to ensure that negotiation never truly succeeds.

This political deadlock is not an abstraction. Its consequences are measured daily in destroyed schools, shuttered clinics, prolonged displacement, and the slow unraveling of social life across western Oromia.

5. Beyond Body Counts: Collapse of Social Systems

Even without precise casualty figures, available data show that Wallaga has endured something close to systematic de-development:

• Hundreds of health facilities looted, destroyed, or abandoned across western Oromia—while health workers and medicines struggle to reach many rural communities.
• Long-term closure of schools, especially in East and West Wallaga, leaving tens of thousands of children out of education for consecutive years.
• IDPs pushed back to “return areas” where basic infrastructure is still missing—no functioning clinics, insufficient water, limited livelihood options, and continuing insecurity.

For residents, this is experienced not merely as a series of attacks, but as a prolonged siege: disrupted markets, blocked roads, and a constant vulnerability to drone strikes, raids, or militia incursions.

6. Oromo Silence

Elites and activists from across Oromia have— for various reasons—often refrained from speaking out against the unfair treatment of Wallaga, whether by OPDO/ODP/PP or by external actors. Yet silence can be misconstrued as consent.

As the Oromo proverb goes, “yoo abbaan iyyate ollaan namaaf birmata,” roughly meaning, “neighbors tend to respond only when the sufferer speaks out.” For this reason, Oromo activists must take a leading role in documenting and publicizing the suffering—and in ensuring that those responsible are ultimately held accountable.

Oromo activists across the world should recognize that atrocities severely affecting Wallaga are gradually extending beyond its borders. Over time, they are reaching communities across Oromia. The time to act is now.

7. Why Wallaga Necessitates an Independent Investigation

Given the scale of displacement, the documented patterns of massacres and blockades, and the duration of the conflict, western and central Oromia—including Wallaga and western Shawa—clearly meet the threshold for serious, sustained international scrutiny. Several factors make an independent, professional investigation particularly urgent:

6.1 Absence of reliable casualty data

We know the Tigray war likely killed on the order of hundreds of thousands. For Wallaga, we do not even have a disciplined range. That vacuum invites both denial and wild speculation.

7.2 Credible allegations against all major actors

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have already documented grave abuses by both armed opposition groups and state/security forces in western Oromia, including large-scale killings of civilians and patterns of collective punishment.

7.3 Structural collapse of essential services

The destruction of health and education systems, systematic displacement, and restrictions on aid access mean that harm extends far beyond direct killings—and may amount to crimes against humanity if shown to be widespread and systematic.

7.4 Information blackouts and risk of future atrocities

Where a war is poorly documented and under-reported, it is easier for perpetrators—state or non-state—to assume they can act with impunity, raising the risk of escalation and further atrocities.

8. What an Independent Investigation Should Look Like

Given the highly polarized domestic environment, any credible investigation into atrocities in Wallaga must be:

• Independent of the Ethiopian government and all armed groups.
• Professionally staffed with investigators experienced in complex, multi-actor conflicts.
• Mandated to examine violations by all sides—not only government forces or only insurgents.
• Grounded in rigorous methodology, combining on-the-ground interviews (where possible) with remote tools such as satellite imagery, open-source verification, and anonymized testimony.

The OLA has long called for such an investigation. In practice, this likely means:

• A joint or parallel investigation by organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which have already conducted case-specific research in Wallaga;
• Complementary work by other independent bodies (for example, regional human rights mechanisms or university-based research centers) focusing on mortality estimates, displacement patterns, and the long-term impact on health and education; and
• Where feasible, cooperation with the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and local civil society groups—provided their independence and security can be assured.

Importantly, such an investigation should not start from a predetermined legal label (e.g., genocide, ethnic cleansing), but from evidence: who was killed, where, when, how, and by whom; who was displaced; which communities lost access to services; and how state policy and insurgent strategy contributed. Only once the facts are thoroughly established can lawyers and policymakers responsibly debate whether crimes in Wallaga meet specific legal thresholds under international law.

Conclusion

The contrast between Tigray and Wallaga is stark. In Tigray, the world (belatedly) recognizes a catastrophic war with a staggering death toll. In Wallaga, a longer and still unresolved conflict has produced mass displacement, service collapse, and repeated massacres—but without any clear accounting of the dead.

The question—“If the war in Wallaga is worse than Tigray, as attested by the Ethiopian PM, Abiy Ahmed on 29.10.2025, how many people have been killed?”—currently has only one honest answer: we do not know. That uncertainty is not a sign that the suffering is less; it is a sign that no one has been allowed to count properly.

Breaking that silence will require exactly what has been missing so far: independent, professional investigations by organizations with the credibility, methods, and distance needed to document abuses by all sides—and to give survivors a record that cannot simply be dismissed as propaganda.

Until that happens, the people of Wallaga will continue to endure a war that, for the outside world, barely exists.

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References

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15. El País. (2023, Jan. 27). Ethiopia’s Forgotten War Is the Deadliest of the 21st Century, With Around 600,000 Civilian Deaths. (On Tigray war death-toll estimates.)
16. Tigray War Project, Ghent University. (2023). Updated Assessment of Civilian Starvation Deaths During the Tigray War. (Summarizes estimated range of 300,000–600,000 civilian deaths.)
17. “MM Abiy waraanni Wallagatti gaggeeffame kan Tigrayi caala jechuun maal fura?”, October 30, 2025, BBC Afaan Oromo Programme.
18. Yadessa Guma, Amhara Fano, Don't Dare Invading Wallaga: Risking Strong Enmity Between the Amhara and Oromo Nations, 23 December 2024, OROMIA TODAY.

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