Ethiopia's Drone War Is Burying Children While Both Sides Look Away

Fifteen people died on a Friday in a camp for the displaced. Several of them were children. They had fled violence and were living in tents, waiting for help that did not come. Then the drones arrived.

Ask yourself who the people in that camp were. They were mothers who had already lost their homes once and children who had learned to stay quiet when the engines overhead got louder. They were not combatants. They were not a negotiating position. They were Ethiopians, and they died because the men fighting over their country decided their lives were an acceptable cost.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has now said what every hospital worker in northern Ethiopia already knows: the violence is pushing a fragile health system toward collapse. Hospitals are short of doctors, nurses, medicine, and equipment. Ambulances are scarce. In some areas, insecurity is blocking the delivery of basic supplies. When a health system fails, the first people to die are the ones with the least power to demand care, which means pregnant women, newborns, and the chronically ill.

Consider what this means in practice. A woman in labour in a rural clinic has no working ambulance and no surgeon. A child with pneumonia cannot get antibiotics because the road is closed. A patient with diabetes runs out of insulin. None of these deaths will make the evening news. All of them are the direct consequence of a war that has been allowed to grind on.

Tedros is not a neutral observer here. He is Tigrayan. He served as Ethiopia's health minister and foreign minister before leading the WHO, and he has watched the region he comes from suffer through the war that ended with the Pretoria Agreement. That deal was signed on 2 November 2022, under African Union auspices, after a conflict that the Ethiopian government, Tigrayan forces, and Eritrean troops all bear responsibility for. Estimates of the dead in that war run from several hundred thousand upward, and most of them died from hunger, disease, and the collapse of care, not from bullets alone. Four years to the day after that deal was signed, the peace is in ruins, and the same pattern is repeating.

The drones are the new element, and they demand scrutiny. Drone warfare has spread rapidly across the Horn of Africa. During the Tigray war, Ethiopian forces used Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones, and reporting from rights groups and journalists documented strikes on civilian targets. Other platforms, including Chinese-made systems and UAE-supplied aircraft, have appeared in Ethiopia's arsenal. Every one of those sales was approved by someone who could have asked what the buyer would do with the aircraft. Ankara, Beijing, and Abu Dhabi were happy to sell the machines. None of them is paying for the funerals.

The WHO did not name who launched the strikes that hit Jaari 2 camp in Amhara. That is an honest limitation of an organization that reports casualties, not forensic findings. But silence about the perpetrator is not the same as ignorance about the outcome. Amhara has been fighting Fano militias since 2023, and the government has been accused by rights groups of indiscriminate force in that region. Tigrayan armed groups have also been implicated in abuses. Whoever pressed the button, the camp was full of people who had nowhere else to go. Whoever pressed it owes the families of those children an investigation, a name, and a reckoning.

This is where we, as Africans, have to be honest with ourselves. The Ethiopian government has every right to protect its territory from armed groups. No sovereign state has the right to level a camp of displaced civilians and call it counterterrorism. Tigrayan leaders have every right to demand the implementation of the Pretoria Agreement, including the restoration of services and the disarmament process that was promised. They have no right to turn a people into a bargaining chip. Both parties speak the language of sovereignty and self-defence, and both use it to avoid accountability. Ethiopia is not the first African country to be torn apart this way, and it will not be the last unless we refuse to accept it.

What would a better path look like? Ethiopia does not have to look far for proof that it can be done. Botswana built one of the most stable democracies on the continent by insisting on independent courts, transparent public finances, and an army that answers to civilian authority. Mauritius has shown that rule of law and competitive markets can lift a multi-ethnic nation into the middle-income bracket. Senegal, after its 2024 election, demonstrated that a peaceful transfer of power is possible even after a crisis that many expected to end in bloodshed. Ethiopia has the people, the land, and the intellectual capital to build institutions like these. What it lacks is the political will to subordinate guns to law.

The Pretoria Agreement needs to be revived with teeth, not with another communiqué. That means independent monitoring of the ceasefire, a verifiable timetable for disarmament and reintegration, and guaranteed unimpeded humanitarian access to Tigray, Amhara, and every other region where civilians are caught in the crossfire. The African Union, which brokered the original deal, should appoint a standing monitoring mission with the authority to report publicly on violations, including drone strikes. The UN Human Rights Council should commission an independent investigation into the Jaari 2 strike and the earlier attacks on Rama. Member states that sell drones to any party in Ethiopia should be required to disclose the buyers and the end-use conditions, and to suspend sales where civilian harm is credibly documented. Private sector actors, including the aviation and logistics companies that move these systems, should be held to the same standard. Commerce that feeds massacres is not free trade. It is complicity.

Citizens have a role too. Ethiopian civil society, including religious leaders, professional associations, and women's groups, has repeatedly shown the courage to speak across ethnic lines. Their voices must be amplified, funded, and protected. Diaspora Ethiopians should press their representatives in Washington, London, Brussels, and Ottawa to make humanitarian access and accountability conditions for any security cooperation. And every African who believes in the promise of our continent should demand that our governments stop treating mass civilian death as a diplomatic inconvenience.

Here is the question I will leave you with. How many funerals will it take before we stop calling this a "conflict" and start calling it what it is: a government and an armed movement fighting over power while children die in camps and mothers die in clinics without doctors? The answer is not more statements of concern. It is a ceasefire enforced by Africans, an investigation that names names, and a leadership class in Addis Ababa and Mekelle that understands the only legitimate authority is one that protects the people it claims to represent. Demand that. Say it loudly. Then keep saying it until the drones stop.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA