Methodology
Frontline maps Ethiopia’s armed conflicts from 1 January 2019 at woreda (district) level. The same rules apply to every side, and they are published here so readers can check that they were followed.
What we publish, and what we don’t
- Control of each woreda: controlled by one actor, contested, or unknown. Nothing finer than woreda level: no troop positions, unit locations or front lines.
- Events (battles, air and drone strikes, shelling, attacks on civilians, ceasefires, statements, control changes) at town or coordinate level, each with its sources and a confidence grade.
- No casualty counts of our own. Fatalities are shown only as reported by UCDP or a named outlet.
- No predictions of who wins, and no town-by-town forecasts.
- Frontline is not a news outlet. It aggregates, verifies and maps reported events; it does not break stories or publish opinion.
Confidence grades
Every event and every control change carries one grade. Only A and B grades move the map.
| Grade | Rule | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| A | Two independent sources, at least one not a party to the conflict | Published as verified; can change control |
| B | One credible independent source (a wire service, UCDP, OCHA) | Published as verified; can change control |
| C | A single party’s claim (state media, TPLF, Fano, OLA, Eritrean channels) | Published in the feed labelled “claimed”; never changes control |
| D | Unverified social media | Held for review; shown only once upgraded |
A party’s own claim never changes the map on its own, however often it is repeated. The database itself rejects a control change graded C or D.
Open-source monitors (OSINT accounts) are graded on what the post itself verifies: geolocated footage, identified aircraft or vehicles, or flight-tracking data count as one credible independent source (B); a claim the monitor merely relays stays the party’s (C); the rest is unverified social media (D).
Where a source names the weapon systems involved (a drone type, an aircraft, artillery) or gives numbers of people killed or wounded, we record them as reported, under the source’s grade. Totals shown on the map are the sum of per-event reported figures and can overlap; they are not Frontline’s own count. Photos and videos attached to a source are kept as links only, shown on request, never copied or loaded without asking.
Control rules
- Controlled: one actor administers the woreda centre and moves freely by day, on an A or B source.
- Contested: two actors each hold an A or B claim within the same 14 days, or there has been verified fighting inside the woreda in the last 7 days.
- Unknown: no A or B source in 60 days. The woreda fades to grey rather than keeping a stale colour.
- A control change is itself an event, so the feed and the map never disagree.
- Inferred: when forces are reported to advance along a road from one captured place to another, the woredas they must pass through are marked as held by the advancing side from the date the far end was reached, shown in a lighter shade and labelled inferred. Nothing is inferred across country with no reported line of advance, and a direct report always replaces an inference.
- Factions are shown in their parent movement’s colour on the map, and listed separately on actor pages.
During major offensives, control changes are held for a second reviewer before publication. A three-person editorial board, covering Amharic, Tigrinya and Afaan Oromo, decides disputed changes by majority and records the vote.
Advances
The map’s “advances” layer draws an arrow wherever a block of neighbouring woredas changed to one actor’s control over more than one date. Each arrow connects the earliest and latest captures in that block and links straight to the control rows and sources behind it – it is a different view of data already on this map, not a new claim. It shows a sequence that has already happened, nothing more.
Frontline publishes no predictions of where a front will move next or which town is likely to fall next, and the map’s advances layer is not an exception: an arrow never extends past the latest dated capture it is built from. A genuine forecasting module – region-level intensity bands and zone-level control-change probabilities, each shown with its backtested accuracy – is planned for a later release, after months of tracking give it something to be scored against. Until then, nothing on this site should be read as a forecast.
Alliances are dated
Who fights alongside whom changes. Eritrea’s army fought beside the federal army in 2020–22 and is reported to be backing Tigray’s forces in 2026. Every relation between two actors is stored with the dates it held, and the alliance view shows the relation in force on the date you choose.
Naming
- Each actor is named by its own name, with a neutral description: “Tigray Defence Forces, the armed wing aligned with the TPLF”.
- Government designations such as “Shene” or “terrorist”, and partisan terms such as “junta” or “liberators”, appear only inside quoted statements, or listed as designations on an actor’s page — never as its name.
- Place names follow the official woreda names, with local variants in Amharic, Tigrinya and Afaan Oromo. Where a name is itself disputed, both forms are shown.
Attacks on civilians
Attacks on civilians are recorded and graded like any other event. We publish no graphic media and do not identify victims.
Corrections
Corrections are dated and public. A reversed control change stays visible in the woreda’s history and in the map’s control changes list as a correction; nothing is silently overwritten. Every change to every record is versioned internally.
Sources
- Historical events, 2019 onward: the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset (Uppsala Conflict Data Program), used under CC BY 4.0 and treated as grade B. UCDP publishes once a year, so the most recent months come from our own reviewed pipeline. Where UCDP records a location only to zone or region level, we show the event without placing it in a woreda.
- Daily layer: Ethiopian and international outlets, wire services and official channels of every party, read and graded by our editors. We store the facts extracted and a link to the source, not the article text.
- Boundaries: woreda polygons and names from OCHA COD-AB Ethiopia.
Using the data
Event lists can be downloaded as CSV from the event feed. If you use events that come from UCDP, cite UCDP as well as Frontline:
Sundberg, Ralph and Erik Melander (2013) Introducing the UCDP Georeferenced Event Dataset. Journal of Peace Research 50(4).
Independence and privacy
Frontline takes no funding from any government, party or armed group involved in the conflict. Readers need no account, and the site sets no tracking cookies. IP addresses are truncated in logs, and logs are kept for 30 days.
Unverified third-party mapping
The map’s Unverified layer, off by default, shows a public map kept by an outside volunteer mapper (currently @Ethiomapping’s “Ethiopian Conflict Map”), exactly as they publish it: their areas of control as dashed outlines, their reported events as hollow markers. Frontline has not checked any of it, most of it cites no source, and none of it feeds our control map, event feed or counts. It is offered for comparison, with a banner while it is on, and every feature opens with that warning.