A striking question is being asked in Addis Ababa's policy circles and across the Ethiopian diaspora: why does the official anthem of the Amhara Fano National Front — an armed insurgency that has been fighting Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's federal government since August 2023 — not mention the word "Amhara" once?
Listeners who have parsed the anthem note that it invokes only Ethiopia and Habesha — the broader cultural identity that historically encompasses both Amhara and Tigrayan highlanders — as the polities worth fighting for. The movement's formal name includes Amhara. Its official song does not.
That gap is not an accident, Ethiopian political analysts say. It is a window into one of the most significant and least-reported armed conflicts in the world today.
The Conflict Nobody Is Watching
The Amhara-Fano conflict has, by most independent conflict monitoring assessments, produced more than 5,000 combat-related deaths since the federal government declared a state of emergency in the Amhara region in August 2023 and deployed heavy military assets — including drones and airstrikes — against Fano fighters. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) recorded over 1,800 distinct conflict events in the region in the twelve months following the emergency declaration. Estimates of internally displaced people from Amhara conflict zones range from 500,000 to over one million, according to UNOCHA humanitarian situation reports.
International coverage has been sparse to the point of negligence. The Tigray war — which formally ended with the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement — consumed the global media bandwidth allocated to Ethiopian conflict for three years. What has followed in the Amhara highlands has been treated, where it has been covered at all, as a footnote.
Dr. Seife Tadelle Woldemichael, a political scientist who focuses on Ethiopia's federal politics, describes the information environment as a product of deliberate restriction. "The Amhara region has been under communications blackout, intermittently, since the emergency declaration. Internet is cut. Journalists face significant access restrictions. What we know about casualty figures comes largely from diaspora networks and leaked government documents."
The Anthem and What It Signals
Return to the anthem. The Amhara Fano National Front emerged initially as a self-defence militia — Fano has existed in various forms as a traditional Amhara armed self-organisation for generations. Its post-2023 iteration hardened into a structured insurgency after the federal government moved to disarm and absorb Amhara special forces and regional militias into the national military command structure.
Amhara communities experienced that move as a direct threat to the autonomy provisions of Ethiopia's 1995 federal constitution, which divides the country into ethnically defined regional states. The grievance was, in origin, ethnic and regional: Amhara political elites argued their people were being stripped of military protection in a country where ethnic federalism had created armed regional competitors.
So why does the anthem sing only of Ethiopia?
Dr. Merera Gudina, a veteran opposition politician and political scientist who leads the Oromo Federalist Congress, offered one reading: "Fano's leadership has understood that pure Amhara ethno-nationalism cannot build the coalition they need. They cannot prevail against the federal military without support from other communities — or at minimum, without the passive tolerance of communities that are not Amhara. Framing the struggle as Ethiopian patriotism, not Amhara grievance, is both a tactical and possibly a genuine ideological calculation."
Dr. Alem Habtu, an Ethiopian diaspora scholar of Horn of Africa politics, urged caution about reading too much into the anthem alone: "The Fano movement is not monolithic. There are factions within it that are straightforwardly Amhara nationalist. Others genuinely believe they are fighting for a unitary Ethiopian state against an ethnically fractious federal order. The anthem may represent one tendency, not the whole movement."
The Strategic Picture
The conflict matters beyond its scale. Ethiopia is the continent's second most populous country, with 126 million people. The Amhara region is its second largest by population. A protracted insurgency in the highland core of Ethiopian statehood — simultaneous with ongoing Oromo Liberation Army activity in the west and unresolved tensions in Tigray — poses an existential challenge to the integrity of the federal state.
The African Union, whose headquarters sit in Addis Ababa, has been conspicuously quiet. IGAD — the Intergovernmental Authority on Development — has been absorbed by the Sudan crisis and the Somalia stabilisation process. Western governments, wary of complicating relations with Abiy Ahmed after investing heavily in the Tigray peace process, have issued carefully worded expressions of concern without applying meaningful pressure.
In that vacuum, the Fano anthem plays on. Whether its pan-Ethiopian lyrics represent a genuine ideological evolution, a coalition-building strategy, or simply one faction's aspiration within a fractured movement, analysts agree on one thing: a conflict of this scale, this complexity, and this strategic significance deserves far more than the footnote it currently occupies in international reporting.
54 countries, 2,000 languages, 1.4 billion people. This is Ethiopia's story today — and almost nobody is telling it.
Amara Diallo reports from Nairobi. Research drew on ACLED conflict data, UNOCHA humanitarian reports, and interviews with Ethiopian political scientists and regional conflict analysts.
