Post falsely claims to show rebels in Ethiopia’s Oromia region with captured Amhara fighters

A video of the gruesome beheading of a young man in Ethiopia has sparked public outrage. Authorities accuse Fano rebels from the northern Amhara region of committing the murder. A post shared on Facebook after the killing claims to show Fano militants captured by the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), another rebel group operating in the country’s Oromia region. However, this is false: the footage, which AFP Fact Check already previously debunked, features Ethiopian soldiers detained by OLA forces in April 2024.

“OLA has captured Fano fighters,” alleges the post published on Facebook in Afaan Oromoo on November 22, 2024.

Screenshot of the false post, taken on November 28, 2024

Shared more than 290 times, the post contains more than a minute of footage showing soldiers in Ethiopian army uniforms walking in single file. An armed man with dreadlocks can be seen guarding the men.

The OLA, a rebel force (archived here) operating in the Oromia region, took up arms in 2018 after accusing Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of lacking commitment to a genuine democratic transition in the early days of his leadership.

Meanwhile, the Fano militia group in Amhara was a former ally of the Abiy government during the two-year Tigray war which ended in November 2022. However, the rebels turned against the government in July 2023 following the administration’s decision to disarm all regional forces  (archived here).

Gruesome video

A disturbing video surfaced online in November 2024 allegedly showing the beheading of a young man by gunmen in the northern Shoa zone in the Dera district in the Oromia region (archived here).

Dera, a border town between the Oromia and Amhara regions, has become the scene of armed conflict between the government and OLA and Fano rebels. According to the report, 43 civilians were killed on the border in recent months.

The Ethiopian government accused Fano of being behind the murder, something the rebels denied (archived here). The Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), an organisation that renounced its armed struggle in 2018, also attributed the decapitation to Fano militants (archived here).

In the aftermath of the gruesome death, students from various universities protested the ongoing killings of civilians.

However, the footage does not show Fano combatants captured by OLA forces.

Old video 

AFP Fact Check used the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the video.

The results established that the footage was first shared on Facebook on April 4, 2024 (archived here).

The video was originally captioned in Afaan Oromoo and read: “Ethiopian government captive soldiers.”

In May 2024, AFP Fact Check debunked a post claiming that the same clip showed government soldiers captured by Fano rebels.

However, our investigation revealed that the footage featured government troops captured by OLA fighters a month earlier.

Oromia National Media (ONM), an online news outlet affiliated with the OLA, reported at the time that the rebels had launched an attack on the army in the southwestern Shoa zone in Oromia, killing and capturing numerous government troops.

AFP Fact Check compared the original clip with the version published in the wake of the recent beheading.

Once more, we matched an OLA fighter with dreadlocks – a hairstyle typical of the group’s fighters – in both videos.

In addition, the man is seen wearing a sign that denotes OLA fighters: a red and green piece of cloth – the colours of the OLA flag – over his camo print uniform.

AFP Fact Check has previously debunked claims related to the Ethiopian conflict here, here and here.

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