On August 26, the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (ECHR) said militants had killed more than 150 people in an attack in a troubled area in western Ethiopia.
“Residents of the area and others told the commission that the militants had killed more than 150 people,” the independent but state commission said in a statement.
The commission said the militants were affiliated with the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), an armed group accused of violence in western and southern Ethiopia.
The killings prompted residents, mostly women and children, to flee to nearby areas and “retaliatory attacks on ethnic targets” that killed more than 60 people in the following days, the commission said.
The OLA, numbering around a few thousand, has split from the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), an opposition party that has lived in exile for many years but received permission to return to Ethiopia after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office in 2018.
The Abiya government has blamed the OLA for a number of recent massacres of the Amhara ethnic group, the second largest group in the country, although militants have denied responsibility in southern Ethiopia.
