Khthon documents mass graves, atrocity crimes, and forensic evidence from conflict zones worldwide. Our work is strictly humanitarian and apolitical.
This site may contain imagery and descriptions of deceased individuals, violent injuries, and human remains gathered in the course of active investigations. Content is presented for accountability and documentation purposes only.
Khthon documents mass graves, atrocity crimes, and forensic evidence from conflict zones worldwide. Our work is strictly humanitarian and apolitical.
This site may contain imagery and descriptions of deceased individuals, violent injuries, and human remains gathered in the course of active investigations.
Khthon · Active Investigation
Ethiopia's recent mass-grave landscape is rooted in the Tigray war (2020–2022) and subsequent violence in Amhara and Oromia. Communications blackouts, movement restrictions, and the involvement of multiple armed actors — including Eritrean troops — have left a patchwork of alleged atrocity sites documented only partially, primarily through satellite imagery and cross-border testimony.
Situation Overview
Ethiopia's recent mass-grave landscape is rooted in the Tigray war (2020–2022) and subsequent violence in Amhara and Oromia. During the Tigray conflict, Ethiopian federal forces, Eritrean troops, and aligned Amhara formations fought Tigrayan forces amid communications blackouts and tight movement restrictions. Reports of massacres, death in detention, and disappearances emerged from towns and rural districts across Western Tigray, central Tigray, and along border corridors into Sudan.
Even after large-scale combat subsided, localised conflicts and security operations have persisted, leaving a patchwork of alleged atrocity sites and graves that remain only partially documented. The absence of systematic forensic access — denied by a combination of insecurity, government obstruction, and active information management — makes Ethiopia one of the most acute examples in our coverage of how access denial shapes both the evidence that survives and the methodology required to recover it.
A UN probe (ICHREE) and parallel investigations by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented multiple massacre events, but ground-truth forensic investigation has been rare. The Pretoria Peace Agreement (November 2022) ended major combat but has not opened access to many atrocity sites.
GEOINT Methodology
Ethiopia illustrates how access denial shapes methodology. Khthon leans heavily on time-series satellite analysis and SOCMINT/HUMINT from survivors, local officials, and cross-border witnesses.
GEOINT Under Access Denial
01 · SATINT
Episodic Trench Detection
Time-series satellite analysis catches episodic trenching — disturbance that appears between imagery passes, often during periods of documented military activity. Shelterbelts, field margins, and scrub adjacent to converted detention sites (schools, police stations, municipal buildings) are priority search zones. Agricultural cycling can erase surface signatures within one growing season, making temporal precision critical.
02 · HUMINT / SOCMINT
Cross-Border Testimony
Survivor accounts from Ethiopian refugees in Sudan and Djibouti provide the primary coordinate data for satellite searches. Transfer route descriptions, landmark references, and timing from witnesses anchor search windows. Crowdsourced documentation by diaspora networks and local civil society — despite active suppression — supplements formal testimony with contemporaneous location data.
03 · RIVER ANALYSIS
Waterway Corridor Mapping
River corridors — the Tekeze, Gash, and their tributaries — provided both disposal sites (banks, sandbars) and access routes (drivable fords, bridge abutments) during the Tigray conflict. Khthon maps these corridors against reported incident locations, looking for trenching signatures near access points and changes in riverbank morphology consistent with mass burial or body disposal.
NOV 2020
Tigray war begins — federal offensive and early massacres
Ethiopian federal forces and Eritrean troops launch a military offensive against the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), triggering the most devastating conflict in Africa in decades. Within days, the Mai Kadra massacre kills hundreds of ethnic Tigrayans and Amhara in Western Tigray. Communications are severed across the region. Eritrean forces massacre civilians at the Axum Church of St. Mary of Zion in late November — killing an estimated 800 people — in what becomes one of the most documented single atrocity events of the conflict.
DEC 2020–MAR 2021
Federal forces control — detention, disappearances, burial
Ethiopian federal forces, Eritrean troops, and aligned Amhara Fano militia consolidate control over most of Tigray. Systematic killings of Tigrayan men, mass detention in schools and public buildings, and widespread sexual violence are documented by UN investigators and survivor testimony. Detainees killed in custody are disposed of in field margins, shelterbelts, and near river crossings — the disposal pattern Khthon has subsequently identified as the primary burial signature of this phase of the conflict.
JUN–NOV 2021
TPLF counteroffensive — front lines shift, new burial zones
The TPLF launches a major counteroffensive in June 2021, retaking most of Tigray and advancing into Amhara and Afar regions. The rapid movement of front lines produces a second wave of burial sites — including TPLF-associated killings of Amhara civilians in Kobo and Chenna — that overlay the earlier federal/Eritrean burial landscape. The chaotic front-line movement and communications blackout prevent contemporaneous documentation; satellite imagery becomes the primary evidence of mass events.
NOV 2021–NOV 2022
Federal counteroffensive — Western Tigray ethnic cleansing
Ethiopian and Eritrean forces launch a coordinated offensive, retaking territory with heavy use of drone strikes on civilian infrastructure. In Western Tigray — territory claimed by both Tigray and Amhara — systematic ethnic cleansing of Tigrayan communities continues under Amhara regional forces and Fano militia. Forced displacement, killings at checkpoints, and disposal of bodies in farm pits and wadis produce a dense cluster of burial sites along the Tekeze River corridor and the Sudan border road.
NOV 2022
Pretoria Peace Agreement — access still denied
The Pretoria Peace Agreement between the Ethiopian federal government and TPLF formally ends major combat. However, Eritrean forces remain in Tigray; Western Tigray remains under Amhara administration and closed to independent investigators; and humanitarian and forensic access to most atrocity sites remains severely restricted. The agreement's silence on accountability mechanisms means that evidence preservation — rather than investigation — becomes the primary forensic objective for organisations like Khthon.
2023–Present
Amhara and Oromia — new conflict zones, new burial sites
Violence in Amhara region intensifies after federal forces launch operations against Fano militia in 2023. Security operations in Oromia against the Oromo Liberation Army continue to produce documented killings and disappearances. Both conflicts operate under tight information restrictions. Khthon extends its Ethiopia monitoring framework to these new theatres, applying the same detention-route and field-margin signature analysis developed for Tigray to emerging incident clusters in the Amhara highlands and Oromia lowlands.
Ongoing
Khthon monitoring — episodic trenching and cross-border testimony
Khthon maintains active satellite monitoring of Tigray, Western Tigray, Amhara, and Oromia using time-series analysis calibrated to the detention-disposal workflow signatures identified during the 2020–2022 conflict. Cross-border testimony from Ethiopian refugees in Sudan and Djibouti continues to provide HUMINT anchors for satellite searches. Where agricultural cycling threatens to erase disturbance signatures, Khthon prioritises multi-pass analysis during ploughing and harvest seasons to catch residual surface anomalies before they are fully obscured.
Browse Khthon's full catalogue of country and case reports across seven global regions, or get involved with our ongoing investigations.
