The OLA refuses to disarm

The deal that wasn’t

The Oromo Liberation Front returns from twenty-seven years of exile, signs an agreement to disarm, and watches most of its fighters refuse

Filed late October 2018, with retrospective additions

The first round of celebrations had been on 22 June, the day the federal government formally delisted the Oromo Liberation Front, Patriotic Ginbot 7, and the Ogaden National Liberation Front as terrorist organisations. The second round was on 15 September, the day the OLF’s chairman Dawud Ibsa returned to Addis Ababa after twenty-seven years of exile. The crowds at Bole International Airport that afternoon — diaspora returnees, Qeerroo organisers, OFC members, and ordinary Addis residents waving the OLF flag in a city where waving that flag had been a criminal offence for two and a half decades — were estimated at three hundred thousand. Dawud, who had left Ethiopia in 1991 as a young EPLF-trained commander and was returning at sixty-five as the figurehead of his organisation, addressed the crowd from the back of an open vehicle. The OLF, he said, had come home to do politics. The era of armed struggle was over.

A week earlier, on 7 August, the OLF and the Ethiopian federal government had signed a peace agreement in Asmara. The brokering had been done in part by Oromia regional officials, with Abiy himself in active contact with Dawud’s circle. The text of the agreement — three pages of provisions, much of it about modalities — committed the OLF to disarm its fighters, transition to peaceful political activity, and accept the federal government as its legitimate negotiating partner. The government, in turn, committed to support a Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programme: ex-combatants would be allowed to return to civilian life, with options for integration into federal or regional security forces, vocational training, or land grants. The agreement included a fifteen-day timeline for disarmament from the moment OLF fighters arrived in Ethiopia. [Wikipedia, “OLA insurgency,” accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLA_insurgency]

It was an ambitious schedule for any DDR programme. The post-1991 Ethiopian transition had taken several years to demobilise the half-million-strong Derg army; the same process had demobilised approximately 22,200 OLF fighters between 1992 and 1994 before falling apart. The fifteen-day target in August 2018 was, on its face, more political signal than operational plan. The signal was that the OLF leadership was committing publicly to the new political dispensation, and that the new government was committing publicly to bring an old armed movement into normal politics.

The signal worked, briefly, for the leaders. It did not work for the fighters in the field.

The OLF was, in late summer 2018, a complicated military organisation distributed across multiple geographies. Its chairman Dawud Ibsa told Ethiopian media on 11 August that the OLF had 1,305 fighters based in Eritrea and approximately 4,000 fighters distributed across western and southern Oromia. The Eritrean-based fighters were the ones over whom the central leadership had direct command. They had been living in OLF training camps in Eritrea since the 1990s, sustained by Eritrean state support; their loyalty to the OLF political leadership was uncomplicated; their willingness to disarm on a Dawud-signed agreement was high. When Dawud and approximately 1,300 of these fighters returned to Addis in September 2018, most of the 1,300 entered the DDR process as planned.

The 4,000 fighters inside Oromia were a different organisation in practice. They had been operating, since the late 1990s, in the highlands and forests of West Wollega, East Wollega, Kellem Wollega, and southern Oromia (Borena, Guji, West Guji, parts of Bale). They had been resupplied irregularly through OLF networks; recruited from Qeerroo and other local Oromo youth movements; commanded by local figures whose connection to the political leadership in Asmara and the diaspora had thinned over the years. The federal-government story about them was that they were the OLF’s military wing under loose central control. The reality was that they had been operating as semi-autonomous units with their own commands, their own local political grievances, and their own assessments of what disarmament would actually mean.

The single most important figure among them was Kumsa Diriba, known by the nom de guerre Jaal Marroo. Marroo had been a student activist at Addis Ababa University, arrested in 2003 for participating in Oromo-protest demonstrations, released, radicalised, and re-organised into the OLF’s military wing in Borena Zone in southern Oromia. He had received military training, risen through the ranks, gone into exile in Uganda after a 2008 federal offensive against the armed OLF, been tracked there by Ethiopian intelligence and briefly imprisoned by the Ugandan government on Addis’s request, and then spent a period in Eritrea. By 2016, he was back inside Oromia, leading an OLF-aligned offensive in the Wollega zones. By 2018, he was the senior military commander of OLF fighters in western Oromia. He was 42 years old. He was charismatic, organisationally rigorous, ideologically committed to the broadest reading of Oromo self-determination, and — critically — institutionally sceptical of the political leadership in Addis. [Jamestown Foundation, “A Profile of Jaal Marroo: The Leader of Ethiopia’s Oromo Liberation Army,” July 2025, https://jamestown.org/a-profile-of-jaal-marroo-the-leader-of-ethiopias-oromo-liberation-army/]

The scepticism had a historical basis. In 1991, the OLF had been one of the partners in the EPRDF-led transitional government, with seats in the council that took over from the Derg. By June 1992, the TPLF-dominated EPRDF had pushed the OLF out of the government and out of the country, in a sequence of moves that included the disarming of OLF fighters in cantonment camps, the killing of some of those fighters, and the political exclusion of OLF cadres from the elections that followed. Twenty-two thousand OLF combatants had laid down their arms in 1991-92. Most of them never participated meaningfully in Ethiopian politics again. The OLF had spent the next twenty-six years in exile, conducting low-level insurgency from Eritrean territory and accumulating institutional memory about what happened the last time it had trusted a federal commitment to political inclusion. [Ethiopia Insight, “Ethiopia’s bungled 2018 deal with Oromo rebels is the cause of current turmoil,” 24 April 2021, https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2021/04/24/ethiopias-bungled-2018-deal-with-oromo-rebels-is-the-cause-of-current-turmoil/]

The 1991 precedent was the central piece of information that the Ethiopian federal government had not adequately reckoned with when it offered the August 2018 deal. Marroo and the OLF military commanders in the field had not forgotten 1991. They wanted three things from the 2018 process: a credible DDR programme with funding, security guarantees, and reintegration pathways; the actual return of OLF political space, including legal recognition of the OLF as a regional administrative force in zones where Qeerroo movements were politically dominant; and reform of the regional security architecture in Oromia, including the demilitarisation of the federal-aligned Oromia Regional Special Forces and Koree Nageenyaa security committees that had been the principal counter-insurgency tool of the EPRDF era. None of these three demands was met. The government’s DDR programme was underfunded and operationally ad-hoc. The OLF was offered electoral participation but not regional administrative authority. The Oromia regional security forces were not reformed; in fact, under Lemma Megersa and then under Shimelis Abdisa, they were expanded and strengthened.

In October 2018, the disarmament process that had been scheduled to take fifteen days entered crisis. Some of the Eritrean-trained returnees had been disarmed; others had not. The fighters in West Wollega and the southern Oromia zones had not been disarmed at all. Federal officials in Addis began publicly accusing the OLF leadership of bad faith. OLF spokespeople in Addis began publicly accusing the government of failing to fund or operate the DDR programme it had committed to. Mediation efforts by Oromo elders, including senior religious figures and Qeerroo elders, attempted to repair the agreement. Marroo and several other senior field commanders, after a falling-out with Dawud’s circle in Addis, severed ties with the OLF political leadership and announced that they would not be disarming. They retained the name Oromo Liberation Army for their formation — emphasising continuity with the original armed wing — and would over the next two years be referred to variously as OLA, OLF–Shene (the federal government’s preferred label), or OLF-OLA (the formation’s own preferred label after 2021). The terminology mattered less than the operational fact: a substantial portion of the OLF’s pre-2018 armed strength had refused to disarm, and was now operating against both the federal government and, in some areas, against the OLF political leadership in Addis. [UK Country Policy on OLA and OLF, December 2022, https://eslemanabay.com/uks-country-policy-on-ola-and-olf-ethiopia/]

The federal response was characteristic of the early Abiy period: high-confidence operational rhetoric, low-rigour operational planning. Federal security officials publicly committed, in interviews and press conferences through October and November 2018, to crushing the OLA “within two weeks.” The ENDF redeployed Northern Command and other units into West Wollega; the Oromia Regional Special Forces conducted sweeps; the federal police arrested OLA suspects and their alleged supporters in large numbers. By Amnesty International’s documentation, between January and September 2019 alone, security forces detained more than 10,000 people across Oromia under suspicion of OLA support. Twenty-five OLA suspects, killed extrajudicially in 2019 in the western Oromia zones, were documented by Amnesty in a May 2020 report. Detention conditions reported by survivors included beatings, electric shock, and sexual violence. [Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: Beyond law enforcement: Human rights violations by Ethiopian security forces in Amhara and Oromia,” 29 May 2020, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/05/ethiopia-mass-detentions-and-extrajudicial-killings/]

The two weeks did not produce the promised result. By spring 2019, the OLA had retreated into the deep forest country of Wollega and was operating from semi-permanent base areas. The federal counter-insurgency was producing detentions, casualties, and displacement — by various estimates, between 200,000 and 600,000 internally displaced persons in Wollega and southern Oromia by the end of 2019 — but it was not closing the insurgency. In April 2019, after a federal-government attempt to broker a renewed mediation with Marroo’s faction failed, the OLA formally announced that it had established its own High Command and was operationally and politically separate from the OLF. In May 2019, the OLF political leadership in Addis publicly dissociated itself from the OLA and stated that it would pursue peaceful politics only.

Two structural points about what had just occurred are worth setting down clearly, because they explain the eight years of war that followed.

First, the 2018 agreement was not, in the meaningful sense, a peace agreement. It was a returnee programme for the OLF political leadership combined with an aspirational DDR framework that the government did not adequately fund or implement. The agreement’s signatories on the OLF side did not, in practice, have command authority over the OLF fighters in the field. The agreement’s signatories on the government side did not, in practice, have a DDR programme to deliver. Both sides signed in good faith on paper; both sides delivered something different in practice. The Crisis Group’s later assessment — that the agreement collapsed because it had been “disingenuous from the outset” on both sides, in the limited sense that neither signatory was operationally bound by the document they had signed — was harsh but not inaccurate.

Second, the federal government’s response to the collapse compounded the underlying problem. The promise to “crush” the OLA in two weeks was political theatre; the operational means available — the ENDF, the Oromia Regional Special Forces, the federal police, supplemented by informal Gaachana Sirna (“regime guardian”) militias — were not configured for the kind of counter-insurgency that western Oromia required. The result was a campaign that produced mass detentions and civilian casualties without significant degradation of the OLA’s military capacity. By 2020, the OLA had recovered from its initial losses and was conducting operations across multiple Wollega zones simultaneously.

Third, and most consequential, the failure of the August 2018 agreement created a precedent that would shape every subsequent federal-armed-opposition negotiation in the Abiy era. The Pretoria Agreement of November 2022 — which ended the open phase of the Tigray war by signing a deal with the TPLF political leadership while leaving the Eritrean Defence Force, the Amhara regional forces, and the Fano militias outside the framework — would replicate the same architectural error. The April and November 2023 Dar es Salaam talks with the OLA would fail on a similar logic. The December 2024 splinter deal with the Senay Negasa faction would represent an evolution: the federal government, having failed to settle with the main armed opposition, would settle with a fragment of it and present the fragment’s surrender as a national peace. By 2026, this pattern — bilateral agreement with one faction, exclusion of others, continued war — would be the operational standard of Ethiopian federal politics. The pattern began in October 2018.

The OLF that returned to Addis in September 2018 still exists, as a registered political party, with limited representation in regional and federal politics. The OLA that refused to disarm still exists, as an armed insurgent organisation operating across western and southern Oromia, with thousands of fighters and de facto control over substantial rural territory. The Ethiopia of October 2018 had hoped that the first organisation would absorb the second. The Ethiopia of June 2026 has eight years of evidence that the absorption did not occur, that the structural conditions producing the second organisation have not been addressed, and that the federal government’s policy toolkit — military force combined with co-optation of splinter factions — has not produced an exit.

The deal that wasn’t, in August 2018, is the structure that the federal government is still operating inside in 2026.

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Sources for Article 3A

1. Wikipedia, “OLA insurgency,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLA_insurgency
2. Wikipedia, “Oromo Liberation Army,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oromo_Liberation_Army
3. Jamestown Foundation, “A Profile of Jaal Marroo: The Leader of Ethiopia’s Oromo Liberation Army,” July 2025 — https://jamestown.org/a-profile-of-jaal-marroo-the-leader-of-ethiopias-oromo-liberation-army/
4. Ethiopia Insight, “Ethiopia’s bungled 2018 deal with Oromo rebels is the cause of current turmoil,” 24 April 2021 — https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2021/04/24/ethiopias-bungled-2018-deal-with-oromo-rebels-is-the-cause-of-current-turmoil/
5. The Journal of Oromo Studies, “Invisible Conflict and Displacements: The Crisis in Oromia National Regional State in Ethiopia,” January 2026 — https://jros.scholasticahq.com/article/154297-invisible-conflict-and-displacements-the-crisis-in-oromia-national-regional-state-in-ethiopia
6. Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: Beyond law enforcement: Human rights violations by Ethiopian security forces in Amhara and Oromia,” 29 May 2020 — https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/05/ethiopia-mass-detentions-and-extrajudicial-killings/
7. UK Country Policy and Information Note, “Ethiopia: Oromos, the Oromo Liberation Front and the Oromo Liberation Army,” December 2022 — https://eslemanabay.com/uks-country-policy-on-ola-and-olf-ethiopia/
8. Rift Valley Institute, “Ethiopia Conflict Trend Analysis: Western Oromia,” 2022 — https://riftvalley.net/publication/conflict-trend-analysis-western-oromia/
9. Grokipedia, “OLA insurgency,” accessed June 2026 — https://grokipedia.com/page/OLA_insurgency
10. The Reporter Ethiopia, “OLF and Ethiopian government sign peace agreement,” 11 August 2018

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The long Oromia war

Eight years of an insurgency the federal government promised to defeat in two weeks

Filed June 2026, retrospective

The eight years between the August 2018 OLF–OLA split and June 2026 have produced one of the longest active insurgencies in the Horn of Africa and one of the least internationally covered. The OLA does not produce a press operation comparable to the Tigrayan diaspora media; it does not, like the Tigrayan resistance, command the attention of major Western capitals; it does not, like the Amhara insurgency, produce regular casualty figures from third-party monitors. The result is that the Oromia war runs at a steady tempo of low-grade attritional violence — drone strikes here, ambushes there, detentions in mass, displacements in larger mass — that has produced more cumulative casualties than the Tigray war and is structurally less likely to end.

The trajectory of the insurgency over its eight years can be marked by six inflection points.

The first inflection, March 2021. By March 2021, the Tigray war was four months old, the bulk of the ENDF Northern Command was either lost (defected to the TDF) or redeployed (into Tigray), and the federal counter-insurgency forces in Oromia had been substantially thinned by the Tigray deployment. The OLA, which had been reduced to small rural pockets in West Wollega by the federal pressure of 2019–2020, used the security vacuum to expand. By mid-2021 it controlled rural areas in all four Wollega zones (West, East, Kellem, Horo Guduru), in parts of West Shewa, in Borena Zone in the south, in West Guji, and was operating semi-openly in towns including Nekemte, Dembi Dolo, and Gimbi. The federal government, by its own subsequent admission, had stopped trying to defeat the OLA militarily during this period and was now containing it. In February 2022 Abiy publicly acknowledged “the difficulty in suppressing the OLA, citing its strong public support.” The acknowledgment was, in operational terms, an admission of strategic failure. [Wikipedia, “Oromo Liberation Army,” accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oromo_Liberation_Army]

The second inflection, 6 May 2021. The Ethiopian House of Peoples’ Representatives formally designated the OLA a terrorist organisation, simultaneously with its designation of the TPLF. The designation criminalised material and political support to the OLA, expanded the legal architecture for the federal counter-insurgency, and aligned Ethiopia’s domestic law with the federal political characterisation of the conflict. International support for the designation was modest; no Western government has formally replicated the terrorist label, and the OLA has not been sanctioned by the UN, US, or EU. The designation’s principal effect has been to widen the legal grounds for federal action against Oromo political activists, journalists, and Qeerroo organisers — who under the new legal framework could be charged with material support to a terrorist organisation for any expressive activity that could be characterised as sympathetic.

The third inflection, 11 August 2021. The OLA announced a formal military alliance with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. The alliance was operationally constrained — the OLA and the TDF were fighting on different fronts a thousand kilometres apart, with no continuous lines of communication — but politically substantial. The OLA joined, in November 2021, the United Front of Ethiopian Federalist and Confederalist Forces, an opposition coalition that included the TPLF, the Agew Democratic Movement, the Benishangul People’s Liberation Movement, the Gambella Peoples’ Liberation Movement, the Global Kimant People’s Right and Justice Movement, the Sidama National Liberation Front, the Somali State Resistance, and others. The Front was characterised by the federal government as a foreign-backed conspiracy aimed at dismantling the Ethiopian state; in fact, it represented the convergence of an array of regional and ethnic-federalist forces who shared opposition to the centralising project of the Prosperity Party. The Front did not produce a unified military campaign — the OLA-TDF link-up in southern Amhara during the November 2021 TDF push toward Addis was tactical and brief — but it did demonstrate that the OLA was now operating in a national-political register, not merely a regional one. By late October 2021, OLA forces had taken Kamisee in the Oromia Zone of Amhara Region, at the same time as the TDF was taking Kombolcha 50 kilometres to the north.

The fourth inflection, 18 June 2022 — the Tole / Gimbi massacre. Between approximately 7am and 3pm on 18 June 2022, armed men attacked five villages in Tole Kebele of Gimbi Woreda in West Wollega Zone — Gutin, Chekorsa, Silsaw, Begene, and Tole village itself — and killed several hundred ethnic Amhara civilians. The death toll is contested. Amnesty International confirmed “more than 400” killed; Human Rights Watch documented approximately 400; the Amhara Association of America’s name-by-name list reached 554; Associated Press reports counted at least 230 bodies in the immediate aftermath; some local reports placed the total above 500. Victims were predominantly women, children, and elderly — many of whom had been resettled from Wollo Province during the Derg era. The killings included executions at the Silsaw mosque, immolations in homes at Gutin Sefer and Silsaw, and looting and destruction of approximately 480 civilian structures across five villages, confirmed by Planet Labs satellite imagery analysed by Human Rights Watch. Government security forces stationed in the area had reportedly withdrawn from Tole on 17 June without explanation; calls to district and zonal authorities at 7am on 18 June received the response that “the road was closed”; ENDF and Oromia regional forces arrived hours after the attackers had left. [Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: Authorities must investigate massacre of ethnic Amhara in Tole,” 5 July 2022, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/07/ethiopia-authorities-must-investigate-massacre-of-ethnic-amhara-in-tole/; Human Rights Watch, “Ethiopia: Civilians in Western Oromia Left Unprotected,” 31 August 2022, https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/08/31/ethiopia-civilians-western-oromia-left-unprotected; Wikipedia, “Gimbi massacre,” accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbi_massacre]

Witnesses interviewed by Amnesty, HRW, AP, NPR, and Al Jazeera described the attackers as speaking Afaan Oromo, wearing a mix of civilian clothes and Oromia Special Forces uniforms, and including individuals with the long hairstyle characteristic of OLA fighters. The federal and Oromia regional governments attributed the attack to the OLA. The OLA leadership — through spokesperson Odaa Tarbii — denied responsibility, attributing the attack to a federally-backed militia (Gaachana Sirna) wearing wigs to impersonate OLA fighters. The denial was implausible in light of the witness evidence but not impossible to reconcile with a more complex truth: in West Wollega, by 2022, multiple armed groups operated, including OLA units under Marroo’s command, a rogue OLA faction under one Fekade Abdisa (whom the Wall Street Journal would later identify as operating outside Marroo’s command), the Gaachana Sirna federally-backed militia, Amhara Fano militias raiding from the neighbouring Amhara Region, and federal and regional security forces. Identifying the responsible party for any particular incident, even with eyewitness testimony, was operationally difficult. What was not disputed: roughly 400 to 550 Amhara civilians were killed at Tole; the federal government failed to protect them; no senior actor — whether under the Marroo command, the federally-backed militia hypothesis, or the rogue-faction hypothesis — has been brought to justice.

The political effect of the Tole massacre was to harden the Amhara political constituency against the federal government and to deepen the alienation between Amhara and Oromo communities at the village level. The massacre would be invoked, eighteen months later, as one of the framing events of the Fano insurgency that began in April 2023.

The fifth inflection, the Dar es Salaam talks of 2023. In April 2023, the OLA and the federal government agreed to direct peace talks under IGAD mediation in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Kenya and Norway joined as facilitators. The talks ended on 3 May without agreement, with both sides citing the other’s intransigence on disarmament and political representation. A second round in November 2023, in the same city, ended on 21 November similarly without agreement. Redwan Hussein, Abiy’s national security advisor and the federal government’s lead negotiator at Pretoria the previous year, blamed “OLA intransigence.” The OLA accused the federal government of being interested in co-opting individual commanders rather than addressing structural questions of federal-regional power-sharing, security-sector reform, and regional administrative autonomy. The substantive distance between the two positions was probably reconcilable; the political distance was not, because reconciliation would have required the federal government to concede the principle of negotiated political autonomy that the Prosperity Party project was structurally designed to deny.

The sixth inflection, 1 December 2024. In Addis Ababa, the Oromia Regional Government and a splinter faction of the OLA led by Jaal Senay Negasa signed a peace agreement. Negasa had been a senior commander under Marroo, leading the OLA’s Central Command (the Wollega and Shewa zones, in distinction from Marroo’s Western Command in deep Wollega and Gemechu Aboye’s Southern Command in Borena and Guji). Negasa had broken with Marroo earlier in 2024 over operational and political differences — the precise content of which remained obscure even to relatively well-sourced observers. The federal government’s framing of the December 1 agreement was that it represented a major breakthrough: a senior OLA commander, with an estimated 800–1,500 fighters under his direct command, was bringing his faction into the political process. The main OLA leadership under Marroo immediately rejected the agreement, characterising Negasa as having been “expelled” from the OLA prior to the deal and the deal itself as a federal co-optation effort rather than a peace settlement. The Negasa faction’s fighters were reintegrated into the Oromia regional security forces over the following six months. Operations by the main OLA continued. The federal government had succeeded in further fragmenting the OLA. It had not succeeded in ending the war. [Wikipedia, “OLA peace process,” accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLA_peace_process; The Reporter Ethiopia, “Oromia Says Peace Talks With OLA In Progress,” 30 November 2024]

The state of play in June 2026 is the residue of these six inflection points. The OLA, under Marroo, operates as the principal armed opposition to the federal government across at least eight zones of Oromia, with intermittent presence in a further six. Its territorial control is uneven — sustained in deep Wollega forest country, episodic in town areas, contested everywhere in between — but its operational tempo is steady. The Belgian Commissariat-General for Refugees’ May 2025 assessment, summarising open-source data, recorded approximately 750 OLA-attributed attacks per year in Oromia in 2023 and 2024, declining slightly in 2025 under federal counter-insurgency pressure but not below an average of 50 per month. Federal forces are conducting drone campaigns over the Wollega zones at a rate of approximately two confirmed strikes per week through 2025 and early 2026. Civilian casualties from drone strikes and ground operations average between 80 and 150 per month, depending on the operational period. Internal displacement in Oromia, according to OCHA’s December 2025 update, stood at approximately 1.2 million — more than the displaced population of Tigray Region. [CGVS, “Veiligheidssituatie in Oromia,” May 2025; OCHA Ethiopia Humanitarian Update, December 2025]

The November 2024 Wuchale ambush — in which an OLA unit attacked an Oromia regional police convoy near Wuchale district in North Shewa Zone of Oromia, killing at least 45 police officers and federal militia — is the most documented single incident of recent OLA offensive capacity. Inter-ethnic clashes between OLA units and Fano units along the Oromia-Amhara border, particularly in East Wollega, West Wollega, Horo Guduru, and North Shewa, continue to produce displacement of both Oromo and Amhara civilians; the Addis Standard’s August 2024 reporting documented “entire districts becoming ‘uninhabitable’ for Oromo residents” in North Shewa Zone of Oromia due to Fano raids. The two insurgencies — Fano in Amhara, OLA in Oromia — are not allied, but they are interactively producing a regional security collapse along the Oromia-Amhara border that the federal government cannot stabilise.

What is striking, taken at the eight-year horizon, is what has not happened. The OLA has not dissolved; it has not defeated the federal government; it has not been defeated by the federal government; it has not produced a political settlement; it has not been internationally sanctioned. The federal government has not regained operational control of substantial parts of rural Oromia; it has not produced a credible DDR programme; it has not addressed the structural drivers of the original 2018 disagreement; it has not absorbed Oromo nationalism into the Prosperity Party project. Both sides have been substantially constrained by the limits of their own coercive capacity. Both sides have been substantially incentivised, by those limits, to continue rather than to settle.

The Oromia war is, in this respect, the model conflict of the late Abiy era. It is unwinnable for either side; it is unbearable for the population trapped between them; it produces no exit short of a federal-level political restructuring that the federal government has no apparent intention of undertaking. The pattern is the pattern of Amhara, of Benishangul, of Gambella, and to a lesser extent of Somali Region: a federal state that cannot, by itself, deliver security or political settlement to its constituent regions, and a constellation of regional armed movements that cannot, by themselves, defeat or replace the federal state. The result is grinding attrition under a constitutional framework that no one is prepared to renegotiate.

The OLF chairman who returned to Bole International Airport in September 2018, to a crowd of three hundred thousand, said that day that the armed struggle was over. By any operational definition, in June 2026, the armed struggle continues.

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Sources for Article 3B

1. Wikipedia, “Oromo Liberation Army,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oromo_Liberation_Army
2. Wikipedia, “OLA insurgency,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLA_insurgency
3. Wikipedia, “OLA peace process,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLA_peace_process
4. Wikipedia, “Gimbi massacre,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimbi_massacre
5. Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: Authorities must investigate massacre of ethnic Amhara in Tole,” 5 July 2022 — https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/07/ethiopia-authorities-must-investigate-massacre-of-ethnic-amhara-in-tole/
6. Human Rights Watch, “Ethiopia: Civilians in Western Oromia Left Unprotected,” 31 August 2022 — https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/08/31/ethiopia-civilians-western-oromia-left-unprotected
7. Amhara Association of America, “An Interim Report on the June 18th, 2022 Amhara Massacre in Tole Kebele,” July 2022 — https://www.amharaamerica.org/post/june-18th-2022-amhara-massacre-in-the-tole-kebele-west-wollega-by-olf
8. Ethiopia Insight, “Amhara civilians were massacred in Tole, but questions remain,” 8 July 2022 — https://www.ethiopia-insight.com/2022/07/08/amhara-civilians-were-massacred-in-tole-but-questions-remain/
9. NPR / Associated Press, “More than 200 killed in attack in Ethiopia, witnesses say,” 19 June 2022 — https://www.npr.org/2022/06/19/1106157864/ethiopia-attack-amhara
10. Borkena, “Gimbi Ethiopia: Over 200 massacred in Oromo region,” 19 June 2022 — https://borkena.com/2022/06/19/gimbi-ethiopia-over-200-massacred-in-oromo-region-of-ethiopia-over-200/
11. Jamestown Foundation, “A Profile of Jaal Marroo: The Leader of Ethiopia’s Oromo Liberation Army,” July 2025 — https://jamestown.org/a-profile-of-jaal-marroo-the-leader-of-ethiopias-oromo-liberation-army/
12. Rift Valley Institute, “Ethiopia Conflict Trend Analysis: Western Oromia,” 2022 — https://riftvalley.net/publication/conflict-trend-analysis-western-oromia/
13. CGVS Belgium, “Veiligheidssituatie in Oromia,” May 2025 — https://www.cgrs.be/en/country-information/veiligheidssituatie-oromia-0
14. Reporter Ethiopia, “Oromia Says Peace Talks With OLA In Progress,” 30 November 2024 — https://www.thereporterethiopia.com/42783/
15. Wikipedia, “Persecution of Amhara people,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Amhara_people
16. Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: Beyond law enforcement,” 29 May 2020 — https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/05/ethiopia-mass-detentions-and-extrajudicial-killings/

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End of expanded articles for Dispatch 3. Two articles, approximately 5,400 words.