Born: 1995, France
Profession: Photographer
Lives and works: Paris, France
FANO’S KINGDOM
Since 2023, in the northwestern highlands of Ethiopia, an insurgency led by Amhara nationalists—the country’s second-largest ethnic group—has plunged the region into violent conflict. Known collectively as the Fano, these former soldiers and students turned guerrilla fighters have taken up arms to defend their community, targeted by massacres in neighboring regions, and to reclaim a central role on the political stage, long dominated by Amharas during Ethiopia’s imperial era.
Opposing them, federal troops dispatched from Addis Ababa have carried out repeated abuses against civilians. Targeted airstrikes, rape, and arbitrary arrests: alleged war crimes committed in the Amhara region are driving young people into the ranks of the rebellion, which now controls vast rural areas, pushing entire parts of the country back into the terror of war—barely two and a half years after the conflict in neighboring Tigray, in which Fano fighters were accused of ethnic cleansing.
In May 2025, I traveled clandestinely to the Amhara region to embed with the Fano, documenting their guerrilla warfare, their camps, their wounded, and above all the alleged war crimes that have already claimed thousands of victims. Deliberately isolated by the Ethiopian authorities, who prevent journalists and human rights organizations from accessing the area, the Amhara region—home to 23 million people—is facing a catastrophic humanitarian crisis. More than 2.3 million people depend on food aid, healthcare workers are regularly targeted by federal forces, and dissenting voices are arrested. This report offers rare insight into one of the world’s most overlooked conflicts.
