Kidnappings surge as guerrilla insurgency advances

The gunmen came for Alemetu when she was sleeping. They marched her out of her home in Ethiopia's Oromia region and took her to a disused school in the countryside, where she was held hostage for four weeks.

- Fred Harter

About 40 fighters were living at the school, although hundreds of men passed through. Alemetu, who was pregnant when she was taken, said her captors beat her with a horsewhip. On one occasion, she was tied up and suspended upside down from a tree for several hours.

She was released only after her family paid a ransom of 110,000 birr ($1,950), a huge sum in rural Ethiopia, which they raised by selling livestock and borrowing from friends. When Alemetu was kidnapped, the family was already struggling to pay a 90,000 birr ransom for her uncle, a farmer, who was held for 15 days in a separate abduction. The family is now destitute.

"It is very rare to find a family in our area who has not been affected by kidnapping," said Alemetu. "The government has no control."

Alemetu identified her kidnappers as insurgents from the Oromo Liberation Army, a rebel group that has been fighting Ethiopia's government since 2018. The OLA styles itself as the champion of the Oromo, Ethiopia's largest ethnic group, who claim a long history of marginalisation, but it has been accused of massacres and other abuses.

Ethiopia's federal parliament classifies the OLA as a terrorist organisation.