The Biden administration has been pressuring the Ethiopian government to end its military offensive and for Eritrea to withdraw its forces. Biden recently sent Senator Chris Coons to meet with the Ethiopian prime minister, who won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.
Rape has also been used as a weapon of war in the Tigray region by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers. CNN’s Nima Elbagir recently spoke to one Ethiopian woman who fled to Sudan after being raped.
The dire humanitarian situation continues to escalate in Tigray, putting 4.5m people on the brink of starvation. In order to tackle the enormous humanitarian needs, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken demanded a cessation of hostilities and the immediate withdrawal of both Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF) and Amhara regional forces from Tigray.
Increasing the pressure on Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, President Biden subsequently dispatched Senator Coons to Ethiopia to express deepening concern about ethnic cleansing and human rights violations in Tigray.
R&B singer The Weeknd has promised to donate $1m (£700,000) to Ethiopians caught up in the conflict in Tigray.
The star, born Abel Tesfaye in Canada, is the son of Ethiopian immigrants.
“My heart breaks for my people of Ethiopia as innocent civilians ranging from small children to the elderly are being senselessly murdered,” he said.
Fighting between the Ethiopian army and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) began in November and has left millions of people homeless.
Ethiopia’s military is fighting “on eight fronts” in hotspots including the northern Tigray region, where adversaries have adopted “guerrilla” tactics, according to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
His comments Saturday indicated that intense fighting continues in Tigray, where Abiy declared victory more than four months ago.
Ethiopian military forces are now fighting a “difficult and tiresome” guerrilla war in the northern Tigray region, prime minister Abiy Ahmed has admitted.
His comments mark a sharp break with previous insistence that military operations launched in November had been a rapid and decisive success.
A gruesome video allegedly filmed by a whistleblower in the Ethiopian Army shows what appears to be Ethiopian troops executing an estimated 34 unarmed men in the Tigray region in January, the US-based Tigrai Media House reported.
An analysis of the video published by CNN in collaboration with Amnesty International seemed to corroborate the video, finding that it had indeed featured soldiers in Ethiopian Army uniforms, with the surrounding landscape seeming to line up with an area of central Tigray which had recently reported a massacre.
The G7 group of leading nations on Friday called for the “swift” withdrawal of Eritrean troops from Ethiopia’s conflict-hit northern Tigray region, as the International Crisis Group (ICG) warned of a prolonged stalemate.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced last week that Eritrean forces would leave the region, just three days after finally acknowledging their presence amid mounting reports of massacres and widespread sexual violence.
A week after reaching an agreement with the Ethiopian prime minister to withdraw from the country’s Tigray region, the Eritrean forces haven’t showed signs of leaving.
The forces haven’t vacated the area or shown any intention to leave, according to Getachew Reda, spokesperson for the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, whose forces have been fighting against a coalition of Ethiopian federal forces, Amhara regional and Eritrean forces in Tigray for the past five months.
List compiled by researchers of victims of mass killings includes infants and people in their 90s
Almost 2,000 people killed in more than 150 massacres by soldiers, paramilitaries and insurgents in Tigray have been identified by researchers studying the conflict. The oldest victims were in their 90s and the youngest were infants.
The identifications are based on reports from a network of informants in the northern Ethiopian province run by a team at the University of Ghent in Belgium. The team, which has been studying the conflict in Tigray since it broke out last year, has crosschecked reports with testimony from family members and friends, media reports and other sources.
Rape is being used as a weapon as fighting rages in remote parts of Tigray region. “Even if we had shouted,” one woman said, “there was no one to listen.”
A senior United Nations official told the Security Council last week that more than 500 Ethiopian women had formally reported sexual violence in Tigray, although the actual toll is likely far higher, she added. In the city of Mekelle, health workers say new cases emerge every day.
The assaults have become a focus of growing international outrage about a conflict where the fighting is largely happening out of sight, in the mountains and the countryside. But evidence of atrocities against civilians — mass shootings, looting, sexual assault — is everywhere.
