Andarg Challe, 25, a member of the Fano militia, Amhara, Ethiopia, Jan. 24, 2025 (AP photo).
On Jan. 14, Ethiopia’s federal police shared photos on its Facebook page showing dozens of wooden crates and their contents, comprising the cargo of a truck that was stopped at a checkpoint in Weldiya, in the north of the Amhara region. The crates contained more than 56,000 rounds of ammunition, including 42,000 Kalashnikov cartridges and 800 heavy machine gun cartridges.
According to the police, the vehicle was sent by neighboring Eritrea to equip the Fano, an Amhara nationalist militia that has been waging an insurgency against Ethiopia’s federal army since April 2023, vying for control of the region. The conflict has killed thousands of people and millions more are in need of humanitarian assistance. With few signs that the conflict will abate, concerns are rising about the impact on the country’s next general elections, scheduled for June.
Between 2020 and 2022, the Fano fought alongside the Ethiopian armed forces during the civil war that pitted the federal government against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, which governs the Tigray region. The Fano’s involvement was in part due to historical grievances over the TPLF’s dominant role in Ethiopia’s ethno-regional federal system prior to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s ascent to power in 2018. But the Amhara and Tigray regions also had longstanding territorial disputes over several areas on their border that Amhara has claimed but which had been attributed to and administered by the Tigray region.