Mai Kadra

Six hundred dead in a market town

A Tigrayan-aligned militia conducts a systematic ethnic killing of Amhara civilians in the first week of the war. The federal government discovers a frame that will govern the war for the next twelve months.

Filed late November 2020, the third week of the war

Mai Kadra is a market town in the Tahtay Adiabo Woreda of the Western Zone of Tigray Region — territory that, in 2020, was administratively part of Tigray, but that the Amhara political constituency had been demanding be returned to Amhara administration under the historical name “Welkait.” The town’s pre-war population was approximately 45,000, with a significant portion being seasonal labourers from Amhara Region who came south during the sesame and sorghum harvests. The population was ethnically mixed: Tigrayan permanent residents who had lived in the area for generations alongside ethnic Amhara seasonal workers and resident traders, with smaller communities of Wolkait (a contested Amhara-identifying subgroup), Kunama, and other ethnic minorities. The town sat on the Sudan border, roughly 30 kilometres from Humera, and had been a node in cross-border smallholder commerce since the colonial period.

By the evening of 9 November 2020 — the sixth day of what the federal government was characterising as the “law enforcement operation” — Mai Kadra was about to become the location of the war’s first documented mass atrocity. By the morning of 10 November, between 600 and 1,100 ethnic Amhara civilians would be dead. The killings would be conducted by a local Tigrayan-aligned youth militia known as Samri, supported by elements of the Tigray Regional Special Police and TPLF-aligned militia units; the federal government and the Amhara nationalist political constituency would seize on the Mai Kadra killings as the moral framing of the entire war; and the international press, with limited independent access to verify or contextualise the federal account, would adopt the framing through the first weeks of the conflict.

The operational account of what happened at Mai Kadra was first established by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC), the country’s official human-rights body, which sent investigators to the town on 14 November after Ethiopian National Defence Force and Amhara Special Forces units had taken control. The EHRC interviewed approximately 40 survivors, witnesses, and local officials over the following two weeks. Its preliminary report, issued on 24 November, attributed the killings to “Samri” — described as a local youth group operating with support from “Tigray Special Police and TPLF militia” — and documented at least 600 ethnic Amhara civilians killed, with the killings conducted door-to-door across multiple neighbourhoods of the town between approximately 14:00 EAT on 9 November and 06:00 EAT on 10 November. The killings were carried out, in the EHRC’s account, primarily with machetes, axes, and clubs, with some additional use of firearms; victims were identified by identity cards (which in Ethiopia note ethnicity), by rental records (the Amhara seasonal labourers lived in identifiable dormitory clusters), and by interrogation at four roadblocks established at the town’s exits to prevent escape. [EHRC report on Mai Kadra, 24 November 2020]

Amnesty International produced a parallel investigation. On 12 November, Amnesty issued an initial statement reporting “scores, likely hundreds” of civilians killed at Mai Kadra; a more developed report followed on 11 December based on telephone interviews with 41 survivors and witnesses who had crossed into Sudan. Amnesty’s report confirmed the EHRC’s basic operational account: the killings were a coordinated operation by Tigrayan-aligned forces targeting Amhara civilians; they were conducted on the basis of ethnic identification; the methods used were primarily edged weapons and blunt instruments; the duration of the killings was approximately 18 hours. Amnesty did not provide its own casualty figure beyond the “scores, likely hundreds” characterisation, citing the limits of telephone-based investigation; the EHRC’s 600 figure remained the basis of Amnesty’s subsequent advocacy. [Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: Investigation reveals evidence that scores of civilians were killed in massacre in Tigray state,” 12 November 2020, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/11/ethiopia-investigation-reveals-evidence-that-scores-of-civilians-were-killed-in-massacre-in-tigray-state/]

The Ethiopian Human Rights Council, an independent body distinct from the federal EHRC, conducted a separate investigation. Its report, issued in January 2021, documented approximately 1,100 civilians killed at Mai Kadra — substantially above the federal EHRC figure. The Human Rights Council’s higher number was based on a wider sample of witnesses, including refugees who had reached Sudan, and on its review of burial records at three churches in Mai Kadra where mass graves had been identified.

The subsequent joint EHRC–OHCHR investigation, conducted between November 2020 and August 2021 and published on 3 November 2021, confirmed the attribution to Samri, the Tigray Special Police, and allied militia. The joint investigation’s casualty figure was “at least 600” — supporting the original EHRC count rather than the Human Rights Council’s higher figure — and characterised the killings as “war crimes” and “potentially crimes against humanity” under international humanitarian law. The TPLF leadership, in public statements through November and December 2020 by chairman Debretsion Gebremichael and by spokesperson Getachew Reda, denied the killings or attributed them to Amhara provocateurs disguised as Tigrayans; these denials did not survive the EHRC, Amnesty, and Joint Investigation findings.

The political function of the Mai Kadra killings in the broader war became evident within days.

The federal government, beginning with Abiy’s parliamentary statements of 17 November 2020 and continuing through the federal information ministry’s communications throughout late November, characterised Mai Kadra as the war’s central atrocity. The framing established three propositions: that the war was an inter-ethnic conflict between Tigrayans and Amharas; that Tigrayan forces had initiated the violence with a mass killing of Amhara civilians; and that the federal-Amhara-Eritrean coalition was therefore acting in defence of vulnerable Amhara populations against TPLF aggression. The framing was, in its narrow factual elements, partially true: a mass killing of Amhara civilians had occurred, it had been conducted by Tigrayan-aligned forces, and the federal-Amhara coalition was operationally responding to it. The framing was, in its broader political work, substantially misleading.

The misleading element was the framing’s implicit treatment of Mai Kadra as the representative atrocity of the war rather than as one atrocity in a war full of them. By the time Abiy was citing Mai Kadra in his late-November parliamentary statements, Eritrean Defence Force units had already entered Tigray and were conducting their own systematic operations against Tigrayan civilians. The 19 November to 4 December EDF operations in Axum, Dengelat, Bora-Maryam, and other northern Tigrayan towns would produce civilian casualty figures comparable to or exceeding Mai Kadra. The cumulative pattern of EDF action in Tigray through the first six months of the war would, by ICHREE documentation, produce documented mass killings, deliberate starvation, sexual violence against thousands of Tigrayan women and girls, and systematic destruction of infrastructure. Mai Kadra was, by the end of November 2020, one of multiple ongoing atrocity sites. The federal government’s selection of it as the war’s defining frame was a political choice — defensible on the basis that Mai Kadra was the first documented mass atrocity and that establishing TPLF responsibility for war crimes was a legitimate federal interest — but it was also operationally convenient, because the moral weight of the Mai Kadra story neutralised the federal-Amhara-Eritrean coalition’s culpability for the atrocities its own forces were committing in the same weeks.

The Mai Kadra framing held in international press coverage for approximately three months. Through November and December 2020, major outlets — Reuters, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, Al Jazeera, the BBC, CNN — reported Mai Kadra prominently and EDF atrocities sparsely. The federal information closure, which had blocked telecommunications, internet, and journalist access to Tigray, restricted the flow of evidence about events on the federal side of the line; the federal government’s willingness to facilitate access to Mai Kadra (where ENDF and Amhara forces had taken control after 10 November) ensured that this particular set of facts entered the international record while comparable facts about EDF and ENDF conduct remained constrained. The CNN-published video of the January 2021 Mahbere Dego massacre (39 Tigrayan men executed by ENDF over a cliff, recorded on a phone by one of the perpetrators), the February 2021 Amnesty report on Axum, and the BBC Africa Eye investigation of Dengelat (broadcast in April 2021) were the documents that broke the Mai Kadra-centred framing and brought the federal-Amhara-Eritrean conduct into comparable international visibility. The framing’s collapse, by spring 2021, did not retroactively reduce the international press’s earlier reliance on the federal framing; the early months of the war had been reported through a frame the federal government had constructed, and the operational damage of that framing — to the international community’s capacity to constrain the conduct of the war in real time — could not be undone.

Three additional features of the Mai Kadra killings warrant explicit discussion, because they recur throughout the war’s pattern of communal violence.

The role of identity documents in ethnic identification. Ethiopian identity cards include a field for ethnicity, a legacy of the 1995 ethnic-federal constitutional architecture that defined political representation on the basis of ethnic membership. In contexts of communal violence, identity cards become the instrument of identification at roadblocks, in house searches, and in detention sorting. At Mai Kadra, witnesses to the EHRC and Amnesty investigators consistently described being asked to produce identity cards at the four roadblocks the Samri militia had established at the town’s exits; those whose cards identified them as Amhara were detained and subsequently killed. The same pattern would recur in EDF operations in Axum, in Amhara-aligned operations against Tigrayans in Western Tigray after November 2020, and in the inter-communal violence around Hachalu Hundessa’s killing. The constitutional architecture that had been designed in 1995 to protect ethnic minorities was, by the operational conditions of the 2020 war, functioning as the technical infrastructure for ethnic targeting. No serious federal-government policy effort, before or after Mai Kadra, addressed this structural condition.

The role of pre-existing tensions over Welkait. The Western Tigray zone, including Mai Kadra and the surrounding districts, had been at the centre of the Amhara nationalist political demand for the return of “lost” Amhara territories since the 1991 ethnic-federal reorganisation that had placed the area under Tigray administration. Amhara political voices, particularly the harder nationalist currents around figures like Asaminew Tsige, had argued for years that the Welkait region was historically and demographically Amhara and that its administration under Tigray was an artificial product of TPLF political design. The seasonal labour flow of Amhara workers into Mai Kadra was, in this Amhara nationalist reading, an Amhara return to ancestral land that the TPLF had stolen. The Tigrayan-aligned reading was different: the labour flow was a contemporary economic pattern that did not establish historical sovereignty claims, and the Amhara nationalist demands were a pretext for territorial expansion. The Mai Kadra killings, in this reading, were the local Tigrayan-aligned response to a perceived demographic threat from incoming Amhara populations. The killing did not occur because of the Welkait dispute, but it cannot be understood without the dispute as its political context. The post-war federal-Amhara coalition’s administration of Western Tigray, including the ethnic expulsion of Tigrayan residents from the contested zone through 2021 and 2022, would replicate the same political logic in the opposite direction.

The mediating role of Samri and similar youth militias. The Mai Kadra killings were not conducted by the TPLF’s formal military structure (the Tigray Defence Forces, which would be reconstituted as a unified formation only after the federal advance into Tigray) or by the Tigray Regional Special Forces (the regional security formation that operated under formal regional government authority). They were conducted by Samri, a local Tigrayan youth militia that operated with TPLF political support but outside formal command structure. This pattern — atrocity conduct by youth militias mobilised on ethnic-political grounds, with political support from but plausible-deniability separation from the formal armed forces — would recur throughout the war. Eritrean Defence Force conduct at Axum and Dengelat would involve regular EDF formations rather than militia; but the parallel Amhara-aligned conduct in Western Tigray would be carried out by Fano-aligned militias and irregular Amhara Special Forces units; the Gaachana Sirna federally-backed militia would conduct similar operations in Western Oromia. The structural feature is the use of irregular formations for atrocity conduct, providing political deniability for the formal command structures that organise and benefit from the conduct.

The legal accountability for Mai Kadra has been, in the five and a half years since the killings, partial and constrained. The federal government’s investigations have produced a small number of convictions of low-level Samri figures who could be identified by survivors. The senior TPLF political and military figures whose authorisation or political support enabled the killings have not been prosecuted, because the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement implicitly conditioned the cessation of hostilities on a transitional-justice process that has not, in 2026, delivered any significant accountability for any major war-crime incident on any side. The Tigrayan political and intellectual community has, by 2025–2026, partially acknowledged the Mai Kadra killings as an atrocity; the broader Ethiopian political community has, partially, acknowledged the EDF and ENDF atrocities at Axum and elsewhere. Neither acknowledgment has produced prosecution of senior figures. The transitional-justice failure across the board is, in 2026, the operational reality of post-war Ethiopian politics.

What the Mai Kadra killings demonstrated — what the war’s full pattern of atrocity would, by the time of the ICHREE final report in October 2023, fully document — was that the Ethiopian constitutional order had collapsed under the operational conditions of the federal-regional confrontation, and that the resulting violence was operating along the same ethnic-federalist coordinates the constitutional order had been designed to manage. The 1995 constitution had been designed, in significant part, to prevent the kind of ethnic violence that had occurred at Mai Kadra by providing institutional channels for ethnic political claims. The collapse of those institutional channels, between March 2018 and November 2020, had produced the conditions under which the violence the constitution was designed to prevent had become the operational pattern of the war.

By the end of November 2020, the operational record of the war was substantially established. Mai Kadra on 9–10 November had been the first documented mass atrocity. Axum on 28–29 November would be the second. Dengelat on 30 November would be the third. The pattern would continue throughout the open-conflict phase of the war and into the post-Pretoria period. The federal government’s selection of Mai Kadra as the moral framing of the war would constrain the international response to the broader pattern through the first three months. The factual record would eventually overwhelm the framing. The civilian casualties — Amhara at Mai Kadra, Tigrayan at Axum, Tigrayan at Dengelat, Tigrayan in the systematic sexual violence pattern documented by Amnesty and HRW through 2021 and 2022, all of them civilian populations of an Ethiopian state whose constitutional institutions were no longer functioning — would, in the cumulative count, run into the hundreds of thousands.

Mai Kadra was the first instalment. By the end of November 2020, it was already clear it would not be the last.

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Sources for Article 9

1. Wikipedia, “Mai Kadra massacre,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mai_Kadra_massacre
2. Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: Investigation reveals evidence that scores of civilians were killed in massacre in Tigray state,” 12 November 2020 — https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/11/ethiopia-investigation-reveals-evidence-that-scores-of-civilians-were-killed-in-massacre-in-tigray-state/
3. Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, Preliminary report on Mai Kadra killings, 24 November 2020
4. Ethiopian Human Rights Council, Report on Mai Kadra, January 2021
5. EHRC and OHCHR joint investigation report on alleged violations by all parties to the conflict in the Tigray Region, 3 November 2021 — https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2021/11/ethiopia-eritrean-troops-extreme-brutal-violence-against-women-and-girls-tigray-must
6. 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
7. Reuters, “Special Report: Ethiopian massacre witnesses describe ethnic targeting at Mai Kadra,” December 2020
8. BBC News, “Ethiopia’s Tigray crisis: The story of Mai Kadra,” February 2021

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End of expanded article for Dispatch 9. One article, approximately 2,800 words.