“The soldiers came in the middle of the day and started to kill young men,” said Giray Seyfu, 24, who worked in agricultural irrigation in Mai Kadra, a town in northern Tigray.
“They stormed the town, hacked people with knives, shot bullets and beat people to death with sticks. I must have seen about 130 people dead. We had to run,” Seyfu said.
The United Nations says new fighting in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray is forcing more civilians to flee to neighbouring Sudan.
“I saw many dead people being eaten by dogs,” Tela said from a refugee camp just over the border in Sudan, his voice breaking. “I saw many people dying on the road. Many difficult things, difficult to express, difficult to imagine.”
Humanitarian sources are telling CNN that the Ethiopian army are trying to block its citizens from fleeing the conflict.
“We jumped over dead bodies. Our neighbors were dead, but we couldn’t bury them so we just kept running. Abiy’s actions are terrible.”
“This is inhumane, slaughtering people, stealing all their belongings, I feel the world has betrayed Tigray because people are doing nothing while people are being killed,” said Berhan.
“We don’t want to go back, because we saw the administration of Abiy Ahmed. He kills us, Tigrinya speakers with the help of the Eritrean government,” Bereket Gebremichael said, referring to the official local language spoken in the Tigray region.
“We don’t want to be killed, so we don’t want to go back until Abiy Ahmed hands over to the people” of Tigray region, he added.
In Sudan, UNHCR chief @FilippoGrandi meets Ethiopian refugees from Tigray and launches an appeal for nearly US$150m.
“They were looting our properties and wanted to kill us so we all fled. We heard our people being shot. We saw dead bodies, so my family and I took what we could from our properties. We have farms that we should be harvesting but we left everything behind. Some even left their family members.”
Filippo states that most of the refugees had to leave their family and work; makes mention of it being a harvest time so a major source of livelihood is lost.
