![\"Ethiopian](\"https:\/\/www.zegabi.com\/articles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/endf-soldiers.jpg\")
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Ethiopian National Defense Force trainees during an exercise in Hurso in December 2006. This archive photo does not show the young men described in this story. U.S. Navy photo by Eric A. Clement, public domain<\/em><\/p>\n Mothers in Addis Ababa have told The Globe and Mail that their sons were pushed onto unmarked trucks in late-night raids or taken from a bar and forced into Ethiopia\u2019s army.<\/p>\n The paper described the raids as part of a growing militarization of Ethiopian society under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who is preparing for fighting at home and possible conflicts with neighboring countries.<\/p>\n Azeb Girma told the Canadian newspaper that her 19-year-old son, her only child, failed to come home one night, and that she called his phone again and again and searched the neighborhood for him. It was more than a month before she learned that men in civilian clothes had pushed him onto an unmarked truck and forced him into the army, and the paper said he was one of dozens of young men from her neighborhood in Addis Ababa who were taken in late-night raids. Azeb said he was sent for military training after he was taken in March and was then deployed to a border town in northern Ethiopia, where the army is fighting Tigrayan forces.<\/p>\n \u201cI found out about his fate when he called me in the middle of the night, using a stolen phone, telling me he is in training with the prospect of being sent to active duty,\u201d Azeb told the paper. \u201cI had big hopes for my child, including having him go to university. Often I don\u2019t hear from him for weeks. This is worsening my health. It\u2019s not the life I anticipated for him.\u201d<\/p>\n Etsegenet Tadios, who is 55, said two of her sons were taken in September from a bar in Addis Ababa while they were playing pool and watching a soccer match on television with friends, and that they too were forced to join the military to fight in the north. Etsegenet only found out what had happened a few weeks ago, when they called her from an unknown number on their way to a northern border town, sounding terrified, and she told the paper she worries that with so little training they may not survive the fighting, especially if it grows into a conflict with Eritrea.<\/p>\n The paper also spoke with Yonas Sileshe-Mariam, a 49-year-old taxi driver in Bishoftu, the Oromia city about an hour\u2019s drive from the capital, who said many young people there had disappeared and were later found in the military, some of his own nephews and cousins among them. \u201cMany of our children live in fear of conscription,\u201d Yonas said. \u201cFamilies are forced to sacrifice their children in a meaningless war.\u201d<\/p>\n The recruitment drive is also public. In a post dated Nov. 11, the communication office of the Bui town administration in East Gurage zone said on X that the town\u2019s army recruitment task force had called on all bodies to work together<\/a> to carry out its recruitment work (our translation from Amharic). The post did not say how many recruits the town was expected to send or how they would be found.<\/p>\n In the report by its Africa bureau chief, Geoffrey York, The Globe and Mail<\/a> put the Ethiopian military at an estimated half a million soldiers, and Cameron Hudson, a U.S.-based analyst of the Horn of Africa, told the paper he estimates the army has more than doubled in size since the Tigray war ended in 2022. The paper said the size is hard to confirm because of government secrecy. Kjetil Tronvoll, a Norwegian professor of peace and conflict studies who studies Eritrea and Ethiopia, told the paper the government has \u201csignificantly expanded both their hardware and personnel,\u201d and that \u201cthe heavy military equipment has been flowing in, in huge shipments.\u201d Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed recently sent cabinet ministers and senior officials to a military training program and posted photos of them jogging and doing push-ups at an army base.<\/p>\n A late-2024 report by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, cited by the paper, found that many civilians in Oromia, children among them, had been detained and forced into the military in violation of the constitution. In one detention center for conscripts, almost half of the 32 detainees were 15 or 16 years old, and one was 11. The paper also cited a July report by Human Rights Watch that accused the Tigray Defense Forces of abducting and forcibly recruiting civilians, including children as young as 15, on the streets, in offices and in nighttime house-to-house searches.<\/p>\n The Globe and Mail\u2019s report did not include a response from the Ethiopian Gov\u2019t, and Mereja Media<\/a> noted the same when it carried the story on Friday. Earlier this week, five U.S. senators led by Jeanne Shaheen asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to halt U.S. arms sales to Ethiopia, as Zegabi reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n Sources<\/strong><\/p>\n\n