The Djiboutian massacre Ethiopia won’t acknowledge
Djibouti drones killed eight people on the other side of its border with Ethiopia. Djibouti claimed they were terrorists. Ethiopia said nothing.
Zecharias Zelalem
Djibouti drones killed eight people on the other side of its border with Ethiopia. Djibouti claimed they were terrorists. Ethiopia said nothing. This investigation found that some of the dead were Ethiopians, revealing another episode in Addis’s tendency to let its neighbours kill its citizens with impunity.
On 30 January this year, a drone manned from Djibouti dropped a bomb on a funeral gathering in Siyaru, a remote, semi-arid village near the Ethiopia-Djibouti border. As rescuers rushed in, a second bomb dropped. And then a third.
At least eight people were killed, including three children. Several others were injured. Given the village’s remoteness, the incident might have gone unreported if graphic images of the dead hadn’t spread across Ethiopian social media.
A statement from the Djibouti’s defence ministry said the drone struck rebel fighters from the Front for the Restoration of Unity and Democracy (Frud), a Djiboutian political party with a military wing. It has been fighting for Afar interests in Djibouti since the 1990s. The Afar are a community split by the colonial border separating Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Eritrea.
“Eight terrorists were neutralised on site,” said a Djibouti military statement. “Unfortunately, collateral damage among Djiboutian civilians in the area has been documented.”
International media, including Voice of America, Agence France Presse, and Radio France Internationale reported this version of events.
Now, new findings from an open-source investigation by The Continent reveal a different reality.
The bombs landed inside Ethiopia, not in Djibouti, and civilians – not armed fighters – were killed. That distinction matters. It shows Ethiopia is once again tolerating a foreign military targeting its own citizens, as it did with Eritrea during the Tigray conflict.
A transparent lie
Even before the ink could dry on the Djiboutian military’s statement, The Addis Standard and human rights groups in Djibouti were emphatic that the strike had actually occurred inside Ethiopia’s Afar region. But Alexis Mohamed, an adviser to Djiboutian President Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, rubbished these reports in now-deleted social media posts.
The Continent got to work to figure out what really happened. Over the course of eight months, we collected eyewitness testimonies, interviewed human rights activists in Ethiopia and Djibouti, and examined images and footage from the strike. Our findings align with those of Djiboutian activists, who pinpointed Siyaru in Ethiopia’s Afar region as the site of the strike.
The ammunition residue found on the night of the strike confirms the bomb was manufactured by Roketsan, a state-run weapons manufacturer in Türkiye. Former US army explosives expert Trevor Ball identified them as remnants of the laser guided MAM-L bomb. These explosives are usually paired with drones, which have been linked to massacres across Africa, including a 2022 strike in Oromia, Ethiopia, which killed 80 civilians. That same year, Djibouti’s independence day parade showcased Bayraktar TB2 drones armed with Roketsan rockets.
Our investigation pinpoints the exact strike location: less than 2km into Ethiopian territory. The bombs landed on mountainous terrain 36km southwest of a border crossing on the RN1 highway that connects Ethiopia to Djibouti.
“It was late in the evening, and the men were outside at a funeral,” said Mariam Mohammed Abdullah, 38, a mother of eight. “Suddenly, we heard screams. We ran out of our homes to help. I remember seeing the dead and injured. Then I was hit.”
The victims, Mohammed Abdullah said, were nationals of both Ethiopia and Djibouti, related to each other through Afar family and clan ties.
Mohamed Kadamy, the president of Frud, said no fighters from the group were harmed in the strike. “Our fighters were nowhere near the [January 30] massacre when it happened,” Kadamy told The Continent. “We know the area. It is a neglected region by both Ethiopia and Djibouti and is severely underdeveloped… They targeted long-suffering civilians, not soldiers.”
“It was a massacre of innocent nomads,” said Omar Ali Ewado of the Djiboutian League for Human Rights.
Politics over people
The January drone strike left Afar families grieving not only for lost lives, but for the recognition of that loss – and feeling neglected by all three countries they reside in. Addis Ababa offered no protest against the killing of its own nationals, even as France, which manages Djibouti’s airspace, faced questions in its Parliament.
In December 2024 – just weeks before the massacre – Djiboutian intelligence officials met their Ethiopian counterparts in Addis Ababa. A joint task force was set up to tackle “cross-border anti-peace activities”, which rights groups say meant giving Djibouti access to Ethiopian airspace to target Frud militants.
Since then, Djibouti has launched three drone strikes inside Ethiopia: one with no casualties, another in December that killed two Afar pastoralists, and the latest – the Siyaru drone strike.
Sultan Ahmed Alimirah, the traditional leader of the Afar, is the only high-ranking Ethiopian to condemn the killing of civilians. He described the Siyaru strike as a “deliberate and calculated massacre against defenceless, indigenous Afars”.
Despite their Afar roots, Ethiopian Defence Minister Aisha Mohammed Mussa and Awol Arba, the Afar regional president, have remained silent.
The tacit approval of the strikes in Afar echoes the dynamic of the 2020-21 war in Tigray when the Ethiopian government allowed Eritrea to enter its territory to fight an old enemy of Asmara: the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
This pattern of foreign powers being allowed to operate inside Ethiopian borders raises questions about sovereignty, accountability, and whose lives the states choose to protect.
It’s not only the regional actors who chose silence on the Siyaru strike.
France controls the surveillance of Djiboutian airspace, putting it in position to shed more light on what happened on 30 January.
But Paris offered no insight, triggering demands for more scrutiny of the Djibouti-France defence agreement when officials attempted to fast-track its ratification by the French parliament. Despite initial opposition, the French senate eventually ratified it in June.
The renewable agreement has allowed France to keep a permanent military base in Djibouti since the latter’s independence in 1977. Djibouti, which is located at a strategic trade gateway in the Gulf of Aden, also hosts United States, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, and other military bases.
The Continent asked ministers and officials in the Ethiopian, Djiboutian, and French governments to comment on the findings of this investigation but received no response. We also asked the officials of the named Türkiye arms companies for comment but they too did not respond.
In Siyaru, the geopolitical machinations of heavily militarised Djibouti feel distant. But the terror of their actions and omissions is intimate and suffocating.
“We just want to raise our children and care for our cattle without being bombed,” Abdullah told The Continent. “Now even when vultures fly past, children panic and flee because they think it’s a drone. As a result the goats they are herding get lost. Even adults no longer sleep properly at night. We live in fear.”
GEOLOCATING A MASSACRE
To confirm the strike location, The Continent combined testimony, video evidence, and satellite analysis.
Four Siyaru residents described nearby landmarks: Mount Dîdâlelé in Djibouti, Mount Mousa Ali at the Ethiopia-Eritrea-Djibouti border, and smaller peaks in between. Phone footage filmed the day after the attack showed families collecting a body for burial and a grieving father recounting the loss of his two sons. Four eyewitnesses and three other people familiar with the area confirmed the video was recorded at the massacre site.
Eyewitnesses said the strike occurred between a school and the foot of a mountain. Using commercial satellite imagery, The Continent canvassed the terrain for matching structures and dirt roads. By stitching frames from the 25-second video, we reconstructed the layout: a dirt track leading to a low structure, with a distinctive mountain ridge in the background.
Topography tool PeakVisor helped to identify those ridges. Analysis showed a strong match with mountains “east of Mount Dîdâlelé” in Ethiopian territory. Multiple peaks visible in the video – including Mount Sasakle, 8km inside Djibouti – aligned with the skyline from the Siyaru side of the border.
Taken together, this evidence allowed The Continent to geolocate the site at 11°58’55.72”N, 42°3’13.33”E – 1.5km inside Ethiopia, and 8km from where Djiboutian officials say the strike occurred. This is where relatives were filmed recovering remains the next day.
The findings contradict Djibouti’s claim that the strike took place on its soil and show the drone attack happened within Ethiopia’s borders. Ethiopia’s government, however, is continuing to look away.
Dear God, ones heart sinks knowing how much weaponry (money, effort, hatred, indifference) is aimed at ordinary people by other more powerful people believing in their extraordinaroness. It is saddening, awful, to read that children now fear even the sight of birds. It is impressive that such rigorous investigation has taken place to reveal facts of this violence and given voice and presence to named people and places.