Did Ethiopia launch a drone attack on Eritrean troops who crossed into Tigray, as a Guardian headline states?

What was claimed

On 8 October, the Guardian published a report headlined “Ethiopia launches drone attack against Eritrean troops who crossed into Tigray” A. We have kept a copy B. Its first sentence repeats both points as fact: “Eritrean troops who crossed into Ethiopia’s Tigray region have come under drone attack from government forces.”

The headline makes two claims. The first is that Eritrean troops crossed into Tigray. The second is that Ethiopia attacked them with drones. We have checked both.

What the article itself says

The rest of the article is more careful than its headline. The second paragraph says the soldiers reached Adigrat “according to civilian witnesses, a militia commander and the conflict monitoring group Acled”. The third says the drone strikes happened, “Acled said” A.

So the Guardian’s own text gives the drone attack a single source, ACLED, and the crossing three. The headline drops all of them.

The crossing

Each of the three sources the Guardian names is either unverified or partisan.

• The militia commander is from the Tigray Peace Force, which is allied with the Ethiopian government and is fighting alongside it. The Associated Press, which reported his account, said it could not verify it C.
• The civilian witnesses spoke to Reuters and the BBC. Reuters said it could not verify their accounts D. The BBC said it “has not yet been able to independently verify any of the reported troop movements” E.
• ACLED is a respected conflict monitor, but AP said it could not verify ACLED’s account either, and that ACLED had not answered a question about what its claim was based on C.

Eritrea’s information minister denied, according to Reuters, that Eritrean forces were there G. The Guardian itself quotes him saying “we are not in the business of refuting wild allegations or narratives” and notes that he “did not explicitly confirm or deny” a troop presence A.

The drone attack

The headline’s verb is “launches”, with Ethiopia as its subject. But Ethiopia has not said it launched anything. AFP reported on the same day that neither government had responded to questions about the fighting, and the only Ethiopian military comment it obtained was an anonymous commander speaking of “small pockets of the enemy forces” F. The attribution to Ethiopia comes from ACLED, which AP could not verify C.

In other words, the headline names a government as having carried out a military strike that the government has not acknowledged, on the strength of one monitor’s unverified report.

Our verdict

Unsupported. The Guardian’s headline states as fact that Eritrean troops crossed into Tigray and that Ethiopia attacked them with drones. Its own article attributes both claims to witnesses, a government-allied commander and a conflict monitor, none of them verified. Ethiopia has not acknowledged the strikes, and Eritrea has not confirmed its troops were there. The headline presents as established what the article itself treats as reports.