Axum

A city in mourning

Eritrean Defence Force units take Axum, hold it for a week, and conduct house-to-house executions in the city’s commercial districts and around its most sacred churches. The federal government denies that Eritrean troops are in Ethiopia for four months.

Filed late February 2021, after the Amnesty International report

Axum is a city of approximately 70,000 people in central Tigray. It contains the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, the most sacred site of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, which by Ethiopian Orthodox tradition houses the Ark of the Covenant brought to Ethiopia by the son of Solomon and Sheba in approximately the tenth century BCE. The city is the historic capital of the Aksumite Empire, a Late Antique trading state whose stelae and royal tombs remain visible across the modern city’s central square. The annual 30 November pilgrimage to the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion gathers tens of thousands of worshippers from across northern Ethiopia and from the broader Orthodox Christian world. Axum is, in any inventory of significant religious and historical sites in Africa, a global cultural heritage location.

On the night of 28–29 November 2020, Axum was the site of the most documented single mass atrocity of the Tigray war’s opening phase. Between 19 and 28 November, Eritrean Defence Force units, operating in coordination with Ethiopian National Defence Forces under cover of the federal “law enforcement operation,” had taken the city in stages, encountering limited military resistance from Tigrayan forces that had withdrawn into rural defensive positions. EDF presence in Axum was established by 22 November, identifiable by camouflage patterns, footwear, vehicle licence plates, Tigrinya dialects, and the ritual Ben Amir facial scars worn by some Eritrean soldiers. Looting of Axum’s commercial districts had been continuous through the period of EDF occupation; civilian deaths from sporadic gunfire and beatings had been documented by survivors.

On the afternoon of 28 November, a small TPLF-aligned militia formation — approximately 50 to 80 men armed with light weapons — attacked an EDF position on Mai Koho mountain, a prominent feature immediately east of the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion. The attackers were repulsed by EDF reinforcements arriving from Adwa, a city 20 kilometres to the west. The militia withdrew with significant casualties. The EDF response, beginning that same afternoon and continuing through the night of 28 November and the morning of 29 November, was a systematic house-to-house execution operation across the central commercial districts of Axum. Houses were entered, male occupants were identified and removed, civilians were shot — by some accounts in their homes, by other accounts after being marched to designated execution sites. By the morning of 29 November, when the operation ended, between 400 and 800 Tigrayan civilians had been killed in the city. [Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: Eritrean troops’ massacre of hundreds of Axum civilians may amount to crime against humanity,” 26 February 2021, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/02/ethiopia-eritrean-troops-massacre-of-hundreds-of-axum-civilians-may-amount-to-crime-against-humanity/]

The variance in casualty estimates reflects the difficulty of conducting investigation during the federal information closure. Amnesty International’s investigation, based on 41 interviews with survivors and witnesses and satellite-imagery analysis of fresh graves at Arba’etu Ensessa church and Abune Aregawi church, documented “many hundreds” of civilian casualties and 240 individual victims by name. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, on the basis of its own visit to Axum from 27 February to 5 March 2021 — four months after the events — confirmed attribution to the EDF and documented a higher casualty count, although the EHRC’s specific figure has been redacted in publicly released versions of its report. Church custodians at Arba’etu Ensessa estimated 450 identified individuals buried at that single church alone. Survivor accounts collected by independent Ethiopian and international journalists placed the total dead between 600 and 800. The figure that has held in subsequent international human-rights documentation is “approximately 600” — comparable to the Mai Kadra figure on the opposite side of the war’s atrocity ledger, and a coincidence that the two foundational atrocities of the war’s first month produced similar approximate casualty figures has been noted by analysts but not adequately explained.

The Axum atrocity’s particular character — conducted by a foreign army inside Ethiopian territory, against a civilian population that included Ethiopian Orthodox priests and worshippers, in a city of global cultural-heritage significance — produced two layers of subsequent political complication.

The first was the federal government’s response to the Eritrean presence. Through November 2020 and into early 2021, the federal government denied that any Eritrean Defence Force units were operating inside Ethiopia. The denial was, by January 2021, in clear conflict with multiple independent sources: refugee accounts crossing into Sudan, satellite imagery showing EDF artillery positions, US State Department intelligence assessments, and the direct visual evidence of EDF licence plates and identifiable units. Abiy himself maintained the denial in parliamentary statements through January, February, and into March 2021. On 23 March 2021 — four months after the Axum killings — Abiy formally acknowledged for the first time that EDF units had been operating in Tigray and announced that a withdrawal was underway. The acknowledgment was conditioned by the federal government’s framing: the EDF, in Abiy’s account, had entered Tigray to defend itself against TPLF aggression (rocket attacks fired from Tigray on Asmara during the early days of the war were cited as the predicate) and had been operating without joint command with the ENDF; the federal government’s responsibility for EDF conduct on Ethiopian territory was, in this framing, indirect rather than direct.

The framing was, on the established factual record, false in two specific ways. EDF presence in Tigray had not been a reactive deployment after Tigrayan rocket strikes on Asmara; it had been operationally prepared in coordination with the federal government for months before 4 November, as Mesfin Hagos’s December 2020 account had documented. The EDF was not operating without joint command with the ENDF; Lawfare’s January 2023 reconstruction, based on US intelligence and on ENDF officer testimony, documented “joint planning, joint intelligence, and substantial joint operational coordination” between the two armies through the first six months of the war. The federal government’s acknowledgment of EDF presence, when it finally came in March 2021, was structured to minimise federal-government responsibility for EDF atrocities. The structuring would prove durable: the Pretoria Agreement of November 2022 would similarly fail to address EDF withdrawal directly, and the EDF would continue to operate in northern and western Tigray through 2023 and into 2024.

The second layer of political complication was the eventual formal acknowledgment of EDF atrocities by Abiy himself. This did not occur until February 2026 — more than five years after Axum — and it occurred in the context of Abiy’s escalating dispute with Asmara rather than as a free-standing admission of historical fact. In a parliamentary speech on 5 February 2026, Abiy for the first time stated that “Eritrean troops committed grave atrocities, including the killing of civilians, during the war in northern Ethiopia.” The acknowledgment matched what Amnesty International, the BBC, Human Rights Watch, and the ICHREE had documented since 2021. The timing of the acknowledgment, in the context of the February 2026 federal-Eritrean diplomatic rupture, indicated that the federal government’s willingness to acknowledge past atrocities was a function of contemporary diplomatic utility rather than of any independent commitment to historical accountability.

The pattern of EDF atrocities documented in the first six months of the war extended well beyond Axum. The full inventory, as established by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the joint EHRC-OHCHR investigation, and the ICHREE final report, includes:

Dengelat, 30 November 2020. Approximately 100 civilians killed at Sunday mass at the Maryam Dengelat church, a Marian shrine in central Tigray. EDF units surrounded the church, ordered worshippers to leave, separated men from women, and shot the men in the churchyard. Subsequent killings continued in the village over the following two days. The BBC Africa Eye investigation, broadcast in April 2021, established attribution to specific EDF units. The Eritrean government denied involvement; the denial has not survived investigation. [BBC Africa Eye, “Massacre at the Monastery,” April 2021]

Bora-Maryam, December 2020. Similar pattern to Dengelat — EDF units conducting executions at and around a religious site, with approximately 60–80 civilian deaths documented by HRW and the EHRC.

Adi Hageray, December 2020 – January 2021. EDF units conducted multiple-day operations in this border town, with documented sexual violence at industrial scale and approximately 50 civilian deaths.

Mahbere Dego, January 2021. ENDF units (not EDF, but documented through the same investigative process) executed 39 unarmed Tigrayan men over a cliff in a sequence recorded on a phone video by one of the perpetrators. The video, released through CNN and authenticated by BBC Africa Eye in April 2021, became one of the war’s most consequential pieces of public evidence — establishing federal-government direct responsibility for war crimes in addition to EDF responsibility. The federal government’s response was to attribute the killings to a rogue ENDF unit and to prosecute a small number of low-level soldiers; senior ENDF commanders responsible for the operation in the area were not prosecuted.

Adwa, Wukro, Edaga Hamus, Hawzien, Idaga Hamus, and Adi Daero, November 2020 – April 2021. EDF and ENDF operations in multiple towns producing documented mass killings, sexual violence, looting, and destruction of medical and educational infrastructure.

The systematic sexual violence campaign. The ICHREE final report, the joint EHRC-OHCHR investigation, and Amnesty International’s August 2021 report all documented sexual violence by EDF, ENDF, and Amhara forces against Tigrayan women and girls on a scale the ICHREE characterised as “widespread and systematic” and estimated at approximately 10,000 documented cases — likely a major undercount based on extrapolation from healthcare-provider data. The pattern included gang rape, sexual slavery, mutilation, and use of foreign objects. The ICHREE characterised the pattern as “deliberate use of sexual violence as a method of warfare.” The pattern was documented across multiple geographies, multiple time periods, and multiple military formations, with consistent operational features that the ICHREE found indicative of command-level authorisation or, at minimum, command-level tolerance. [Amnesty International, “I don’t know if they realized I was a person’: Rape and sexual violence in the conflict in Tigray, Ethiopia,” 10 August 2021]

The starvation strategy. The federal blockade of Tigray, established within the first week of the war (telecommunications cut, banking frozen, fuel and food supplies blocked at federal and Amhara checkpoints), produced what the ICHREE characterised as “deliberate starvation as a method of warfare.” Tigray’s pre-war agricultural production had been destroyed by combat, looting, and the EDF’s systematic targeting of seed stocks, oxen, and irrigation infrastructure; the civilian population of approximately seven million depended on imports for the majority of its caloric base; the federal-Amhara blockade produced, by the period from June 2021 onwards, mass malnutrition and famine deaths whose cumulative count the Ghent University post-war analysis estimated between several tens of thousands and several hundred thousand.

The Axum killings of 28–29 November 2020 were, in this larger frame, the first major documented instance of a pattern of conduct by the Eritrean Defence Force and its federal-Ethiopian partner that would extend across the territory of Tigray for at least the duration of the open-conflict phase of the war and, in significant respects, beyond it. The pattern was not, in any meaningful sense, opportunistic or incidental to the war; it was, on the cumulative documentation, organised, sustained, and targeted at the Tigrayan civilian population as a population. The ICHREE’s October 2023 final report characterised the cumulative pattern as “potentially constituting genocide” — language that the Commission did not deploy lightly and that has not been retracted in subsequent academic and policy discussions of the war.

What the Axum killings demonstrated, in the third week of the war, was that the federal-Eritrean coalition that had organised the “law enforcement operation” was conducting an armed campaign against a civilian population, not against a criminal organisation. The euphemism Abiy had deployed on 4 November had been falsified within three weeks. The international response to the falsification — through the remainder of November, through December, and into early 2021 — was, in retrospect, inadequate to the scale and character of what was occurring. By the time the Amnesty International report on Axum was published on 26 February 2021, providing global-press-grade documentation of EDF responsibility, three months had elapsed since the killings. By the time Abiy acknowledged EDF presence in Tigray on 23 March 2021, four months had elapsed. By the time the joint EHRC-OHCHR investigation was published in November 2021, a year had elapsed. By the time the ICHREE final report was published in October 2023, the cumulative damage to the Tigrayan civilian population had been done.

The retrospective question — how the international community could have responded more effectively in real time to constrain the federal-Eritrean conduct of the war in November and December 2020 — does not admit an easy answer. The information closure was severe; the operational pace of the war was rapid; the federal-government framing was effective in displacing international attention from the federal-Eritrean conduct toward the TPLF-aligned conduct at Mai Kadra. What can be said with confidence is that the early-war framing the federal government had constructed worked, for the international community, far better than it should have, and the cost of that working was paid by the civilian population of Axum, of Dengelat, of Mahbere Dego, and of the dozens of other towns whose names entered the war’s atrocity record over the following two years.

The Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, on 29 November 2020, was the site of an annual pilgrimage that had been celebrated for over a thousand years. The pilgrimage was not held in 2020. It was not held in 2021. It was not held in 2022. By the time the pilgrimage resumed in November 2023, after the Pretoria Agreement had cessated open hostilities, the city around the church had been comprehensively damaged, the Tigrayan population that had constituted the worshippers had been substantially reduced by the war’s casualties, and the EDF — whose troops had killed several hundred civilians around the church three years earlier — was still operating in northern Tigray under a Pretoria framework that had not addressed its presence. The continuity of religious observance at Ethiopia’s most sacred site had survived two thousand years of political turbulence. The Abiy-Isaias war of 2020–2022 had been the first interruption of that continuity in living memory.

The fact had not, by mid-2026, been seriously addressed by either the federal government or the broader Ethiopian political community. It is among the substantial unaddressed facts of the post-war period.

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Sources for Article 10

1. Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: Eritrean troops’ massacre of hundreds of Axum civilians may amount to crime against humanity,” 26 February 2021 — https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/02/ethiopia-eritrean-troops-massacre-of-hundreds-of-axum-civilians-may-amount-to-crime-against-humanity/
2. Wikipedia, “Axum massacre,” accessed June 2026
3. Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, Report on visit to Axum, March 2021
4. Joint EHRC-OHCHR investigation report on alleged violations by all parties to the conflict in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia, 3 November 2021 — https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2021/11/ethiopia-eritrean-troops-extreme-brutal-violence-against-women-and-girls-tigray-must
5. BBC Africa Eye, “Massacre at the Monastery” (Dengelat investigation), April 2021
6. CNN, “Investigation: New evidence of war crimes in Ethiopia’s Tigray,” April 2021 (Mahbere Dego video authentication)
7. Amnesty International, “‘I don’t know if they realized I was a person’: Rape and sexual violence in the conflict in Tigray, Ethiopia,” 10 August 2021
8. OHCHR / Human Rights Council A/HRC/54/55 (ICHREE final report), 14 September 2023 — https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/chreetiopia/A_HRC_54_55_AUV.pdf
9. Lawfare, “Ethiopia’s Tigray Conflict: Alleged Atrocities, Law of War Violations and Regional Implications,” 18 January 2023 — https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/ethiopias-tigray-conflict-alleged-atrocities-law-war-violations-and-regional-implications
10. Mesfin Hagos, “What is wrong with Eritrea’s involvement in Ethiopia’s war?”, African Arguments, 4 December 2020
11. Human Rights Watch, “‘I Always Remember That Day’: Access to Services for Survivors of Gender-Based Violence in Ethiopia’s Tigray Region,” 9 November 2021
12. Ghent University retrospective casualty analysis on Tigray War, 2022–2023

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End of expanded article for Dispatch 10. One article, approximately 2,800 words.