Axum massacre (28–29 November 2020)

The city that should have been too sacred to break

A child's shoe on a stoop. A wooden cross pushed into the earth and small candles fading in gray November light. For centuries Axum had been a place where stones held stories — stelae rising from the plain, churches claiming relics, the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion anchoring a community that measured itself against history. On the morning of 28 November 2020, those familiar markers were still there. By nightfall the city had been transformed into a scene of bewilderment and grief.

The image is not a single photograph so much as a memory repeated by survivors: ordinary items left where someone had been interrupted, neighbors speaking in hushed tones, bodies that could not be taken to their families for days. The question that haunted Axum afterward was simple and terrible: how did a place so central to identity come to witness killings that many described as deliberate and systematic?

When politics and history collided in a northern city

The violence in Axum did not happen in isolation. It came in the early, chaotic weeks of the Tigray War, which erupted after clashes between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and federal Ethiopian forces in early November 2020. Federal forces, alongside allied regional fighters and troops identified by many witnesses as Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF), moved into Tigray. Communications were cut, humanitarian corridors narrowed, and people fled towns and villages even as combatants crisscrossed the region.

Axum's place on the map amplified the alarm. To Ethiopians and Eritreans it is more than a strategic town — it is a symbol: a UNESCO-recognized site filled with archaeological treasures and a center of religious life. Any violence there would be felt as an attack not only on civilians but on a living heritage. That symbolic weight made the early reports of killings in late November all the more urgent, and all the harder for outside observers to verify while phones went silent and access was restricted.

Two days that neighbors still measure time by

What is now most widely reported — and what later investigations focused on — took place across two days, 28 and 29 November 2020.

Witness accounts gathered by human rights groups and later by a joint Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and UN investigation describe soldiers entering parts of Axum, conducting house-to-house sweeps, detaining people, and then executing some detainees in public places or near residential compounds. People described shootings in the street, bodies left behind, and scenes consistent with summary executions rather than combatant casualties. Some families later recounted finding bodies burned or buildings smoldering.

Multiple discrete killing sites were reported across the town and its outskirts. In the days that followed, with phones intermittently reconnecting and displaced residents beginning to return or to talk to relatives abroad, a pattern emerged: survivors and community leaders told similar stories of door-to-door operations, men taken from homes or off the street, and a reluctance among those remaining to move bodies for fear of further violence. Several witnesses pointed to the presence of non-Ethiopian troops; human rights investigators would later document the presence of forces they described as non-Ethiopian in some of these incidents.

The slow unmasking: evidence, limits, and the first official count

For weeks, reliable documentation was hard to come by. Independent journalists could not freely operate. Aid groups struggled to reach the region. But small pieces of evidence accumulated: satellite imagery showing activity consistent with disturbance, remote interviews with survivors, hospital and burial records collected where possible. Those fragments were stitched together by investigators and NGOs into a clearer, if still incomplete, picture.

In March 2021 a joint investigation by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) visited Axum. Their report recorded credible evidence of unlawful killings in Axum on 28–29 November and documented at least 100 civilian deaths connected to those days based on witness interviews, medical and burial records, and on-site observations. Independent organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, using remote interviews and field investigations to the extent possible, reported evidence consistent with summary executions and described hundreds of civilian deaths in Axum; their methods and resulting estimates differed, and exact numbers remain disputed.

That gap in figures — a lower bound established by the joint report and higher counts suggested by some local groups and NGOs — has come to define public understanding of what happened. Political stakes, restricted access, and destruction or tampering with evidence in some areas have all made a single, universally accepted tally elusive.

The human cost beyond numbers

Numbers matter, but they do not carry the whole story. Survivors speak, repeatedly, of the small, particular losses that numbers cannot capture: fathers and mothers dragged from homes; children who saw neighbors shot; people who could not retrieve the bodies of loved ones for days, sometimes burying them hurriedly or leaving them where they lay. Medical staff who treated the wounded described gunshot trauma and the strain on limited supplies months after the immediate violence.

Axum also felt the economic and cultural ripple effects. Markets that sustained families were disrupted as people fled or feared to travel. Tourism — long a potential source of revenue tied to Axum's ancient monuments and religious sites — stopped. There were accounts of looting, burning, and damage to civilian buildings, and concerns were raised about effects on churches and heritage sites near the incidents. International cultural bodies and human rights organizations urged careful documentation and protection of sites and remains.

Investigations, promises, and the slow machinery of accountability

The joint EHRC–OHCHR report concluded with a call for prompt, impartial, and independent investigations to establish individual criminal responsibility and for reparations for victims. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued their own reports and urged international mechanisms to ensure accountability. Governments and international institutions echoed those calls; some countries later applied targeted measures related to Eritrean military involvement in Tigray.

Yet the path from documentation to justice has been uneven. The Ethiopian government allowed the joint investigation and publicly pledged investigations and prosecutions for abuses in Tigray, including the Axum events. Critics, however, have said follow-up has been limited and not sufficiently transparent. As of the latest public reporting, prosecutions directly tied to the Axum killings were not broadly documented, and many survivors and diaspora groups continued to press for independent criminal investigations and reparations.

Meanwhile, humanitarian access to Tigray remained constrained for months, hampering both relief and forensic work. Local churches and community groups took on much of the immediate care for survivors and the dead: arranging burials where possible, documenting names, and creating memorials in the absence of formal mechanisms.

What we now accept — and what still waits for answers

Today there is broad, if qualified, agreement among credible investigators on several key points. First, credible evidence exists that civilians were deliberately killed in Axum on 28–29 November 2020. That evidence rests on survivor and witness testimony, hospital and burial records, on-site observations by the joint team, and corroborating imagery. Second, multiple investigations and witness reports have implicated Eritrean Defence Forces in many of these incidents and noted the presence of Ethiopian federal or allied regional forces in the area; the joint EHRC–OHCHR report explicitly documented non-Ethiopian troops and attributed credible instances of unlawful killings to those forces while stressing the need for further investigation to establish individual criminal responsibility.

Yet important questions remain unresolved. A definitive, universally accepted death toll has not been established. Full criminal accountability for individuals alleged to have ordered or carried out unlawful killings has not been completed in the public record. And the long work of community recovery — rebuilding livelihoods, restoring damaged properties, and tending to collective trauma — continues under uncertain conditions.

Memory in a damaged city

Months and years after the killings, Axum's recovery has been uneven. Simple rituals of remembrance — wooden crosses, bouquets, candles — have taken on intensified meaning where formal processes of justice and reparation lag. Survivors and relatives compile names, testify to journalists and investigators, and press for recognition that their losses were not incidental to war but, in many cases, deliberate actions against civilians.

The story of Axum is not a closed chapter. It sits at the intersection of ancient history and modern geopolitics, of cultural heritage and human suffering. The joint EHRC–OHCHR report and subsequent NGO investigations created a record that moves the events beyond rumor. But records are not verdicts, and documentation is not reconciliation. For the people of Axum, the most urgent questions remain practical and intimate: who will answer for their dead, who will pay to repair what was destroyed, and how will a city whose identity is tied to continuity find a path forward when so many lives were violently interrupted?

The answer to those questions will be written over years. For now, Axum keeps its memory in small things — a shoe on a stoop, a cross in the dirt, candles that are relit each time someone passes and remembers. Those quiet acts are how a community marks loss when institutions move slowly and history itself is sometimes the only witness left to bear testimony.