Sixty Orthodox Christians were killed in two attacks six days apart in Ethiopia’s Oromia region, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church’s Holy Synod said on Monday. Fourteen died on October 20 in Gora Silingo, a village in Angada Kebele, Merti district. Forty-six died on October 24 across three villages — Tereta, Chole and Birbo — in Shirka district. Both districts sit in the Arsi Zone of central Oromia, the Holy Synod’s statement said. More than 20 people were hospitalised with severe injuries and 20 homes were burned.
The Oromia regional government’s own count for the second attack differs: its Communication Bureau put the Shirka toll at 48 dead and 31 wounded, not the church’s 46 and 20-plus, in reporting carried by allAfrica. A gap of two bodies and ten wounded between a church diocese’s count and a government bureau’s count is not unusual in a region where neither side runs an independent tally, and it is the kind of discrepancy that matters less for what happened than for who is reporting it.
Oromia is Ethiopia’s largest regional state, home to roughly 40 million people, and it has had an active insurgency since 2018, when the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) — a group the government calls Shene — splintered from the political movement that had helped bring Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to power. Arsi Zone, where both October attacks happened, has been the specific flashpoint: the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (EHRCO), a domestic monitor, reported in July that at least 454 civilians and four local militia members had been killed in East Arsi between September 2021 and June 2026, according to the council’s 158th special statement as covered by Borkena.
Merti and Sherka (the same district as October’s Shirka, spelled differently by different outlets) each account for roughly 116-117 deaths over the five-year period EHRCO tracked, more than a quarter of the regional total each, followed by Jeju at 101. The same two districts are exactly where October’s new killings happened. EHRCO also recorded more than 14,000 people displaced over the same period, concentrated in Jeju (6,216) and Sherka (3,746), and said armed groups had abducted hundreds of residents for ransom across five districts, with some captives’ whereabouts still unknown.
Who gets blamed, and by whom
Responsibility for the October attacks is disputed between exactly the two parties with the most reason to assign it elsewhere. Reuters reported that the Oromia regional government and a source linked to a rebel alliance fighting the government traded blame: the regional government said the alliance staged the killings to ignite religious conflict, without producing evidence; the rebel-linked source said the regional government carried out the killings itself, citing conversations with two local residents, also without independent verification. In allAfrica’s account of the Shirka attack specifically, the regional Communication Bureau head, Hailu Adugna, attributed it to a group he called “Tsimdo,” saying it was suffering battlefield losses and trying to divert government attention and widen the conflict — the same explanation officials have given before when blaming attacks on what they call OLF/Shene.
The OLA did not respond to Reuters’ request for comment and has previously denied targeting civilians. The group is one of seven that announced an alliance on September 20, calling itself the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, aimed at removing Abiy’s government. The coalition pairs the OLA with former enemies from the 2020-2022 Tigray war — the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and the Amhara Fano militias — along with the Ogaden National Liberation Front and others, Al Jazeera reported at the time. The statement accused Abiy’s government of imposing “dictatorial rule” and said the groups would build a transitional government under a shared charter. Analysts who spoke to Al Jazeera described the pact as more political than military for now: it has not produced one army capable of marching on Addis Ababa, but it has put several of Ethiopia’s separate conflicts inside a single political, and potentially military, calculation. A TPLF official, asked whether the pact amounted to a declaration of war, answered: “We are at war now, aren’t we?”
A resident whose 75-year-old father died in one of the attacks told reporters, in an account carried by Yahoo News, “We were completely unprepared and had no prior knowledge. They surrounded us from all four directions.” A church official said security forces reached the scene but could not stop the assault once it was under way — a detail that, if accurate, sits awkwardly with both the government’s claim that it was blindsided by outside agitators and the rebel-linked source’s claim that government forces did the killing themselves, since neither account explains troops arriving too late to stop an attack they are accused of either missing entirely or carrying out.
October’s killings are not isolated even within 2026. Mahibere Kidusan, the church-affiliated outlet covering the East Arsi Diocese, reported that six Orthodox Christians were killed and 55 abducted in attacks across Arsi district between October 12 and 17, days before the Merti and Shirka killings. Earlier in the year, separate attacks in February and March killed roughly 35 people in Arsi, and a June attack on Orthodox Christians in Sherka was described by Abiy himself as an attempt to “disrupt the election,” according to the EHRCO report as covered by Borkena — though which election, and why killing Orthodox Christians in a rural district would disrupt it, is not explained in that account.
The church’s response
The Holy Synod’s statement called the killings “extremely tragic cruelty and suffering inflicted on our citizens” and said the violence “violated constitutional protections for life and religious freedom” and threatened the country’s tradition of interfaith coexistence. It asked government institutions to publicly condemn the attacks, strengthen protection for civilians, and bring those responsible to justice — a request it has repeated after each preceding incident this year without, on the public record, a named perpetrator ever being charged. The church held a prayer of absolution at Menbere Patriarch Kidiste Kidusan Maryam Monastery on October 26 and ordered similar prayers across Ethiopian Orthodox parishes worldwide the following day. It said it would also seek a meeting with senior government officials on longer-term security measures.
The Oromia regional government has pledged to pursue those responsible, per Reuters’ report. What that pledge is worth is measurable against EHRCO’s own five-year count: 454 civilian deaths documented, no perpetrator publicly named or charged in that record. Whether Merti and Shirka produce a 455th line in next year’s tally, or an actual prosecution, is the number worth watching next.