The injury-plagued life, and now death, of Asmelash Woldeselassie highlights the brutality and cyclical nature of conflicts in Ethiopia’s mountainous Tigray region.
Having joined the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) around the time of its formation in 1975, Asmelash lost his eyesight when he was bombed in his hideout in the Imba Alaje mountain during the war that ended with the guerrilla movement marching into Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, to seize power from the notorious Mengistu Haile Mariam regime in 1991.
Ethiopian refugees, who fled the Tigray conflict, gather to receive aid at the Tenedba camp in Mafaza, eastern Sudan on January 8, 2021, upon their arrival at the camp from the reception center.
A United Nations situational report said last week some 4.5 million people in the Tigray region are in need of emergency food assistance.
The federal government’s military operation in Tigray ended in late November after the federal forces took control of Mekelle ousting the TPLF, the former regional ruling party.
Ethiopia’s Tigray region may be facing a new chapter of starvation and deaths, the aftermath of a conflict that began last November, to crackdown on an erstwhile ruling party.
NAIROBI (Reuters) – The former ruling party in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray is committed to “extended resistance”, according to an audio message purporting to be from its leader, who accused federal government forces and their allies of rape and looting.
The comments attributed to Debretsion Gebremichael would be his first in public or via media since early December.
The recording was posted on Facebook by a media outlet affiliated with the former ruling party the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which has battled the government since Nov. 4.
Administrators in Tigray have estimated that more than 4.5 million people, or close to the region’s entire population, need emergency food aid and some people have begun dying of starvation.
Ethiopia’s government has privately told Biden administration staffers its embattled Tigray region has “returned to normalcy,” but new witness accounts describe terrified Tigray residents hiding in bullet-marked homes and a vast rural area where effects of the fighting and food shortages are yet unknown.
The conflict that began in November between Ethiopian forces and those of the Tigray region who dominated the government for nearly three decades continues largely in shadow. Some communications links are severed, residents are scared to give details by phone and almost all journalists are blocked. Thousands of people have died.
(Bloomberg) — The former leader of Ethiopia’s embattled region of Tigray vowed to continue a months-long battle with the federal government in a conflict that has displaced hundreds of thousands, killed thousands and threatened to destabilize the Horn of Africa.
“Let our enemies and friends know that until we get our victory we will not go anywhere,” said Debretsion Gebremichael, who was president of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. He spoke in a recorded telephone interview broadcast late Saturday on an online television channel, Dimitsi Weyane.
Ongoing heavy fighting and massacres of innocent civilians, property & livestock lootings by Eritrean troops with a green-light given them by Abiy Ahmed, as well as severe mass starvation, are reported in the Erob Woreda of northeastern Tigray!
