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.
“New reports and footage emerging from Tigray of extrajudicial killings, murders of civilians, sexual and gender-based violence, and forced displacement are deeply disturbing,” Coons, a Delaware Democrat, tweeted Saturday.
His comments come after a CNN investigation found that men wearing Ethiopian army uniforms executed unarmed men in Tigray. A BBC-led investigation also published Thursday corroborated the same massacre near Mahibere Dego, a mountainous area of central Tigray.
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 mass killing near Mahibere Dego is one of several to have been reported over the course of Ethiopia’s five-month-old conflict during which thousands of civilians are believed to have been killed, raped and abused. But with independent access to journalists severely restricted until recently and telephone and internet services often blocked, it has been challenging to verify accounts of atrocities in Tigray. Amid the effective communications blackout, few videos have emerged from the fighting and those that have are difficult to authenticate.
Through a forensic frame-by-frame investigation of the video footage — corroborated by analysis from Amnesty International’s digital verification and modeling experts — as well as interviews with 10 family members and local residents, CNN has established that men wearing Ethiopian army uniforms executed a group of at least 11 unarmed men before disposing of their bodies near Mahibere Dego.
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.
Horrific video footage has emerged appearing to show members of the Ethiopian military carrying out a massacre in which at least 15 unarmed men were rounded up and shot in the back of the head in the war-torn region of Tigray.
Their dead bodies can be seen strewn across the mountainous terrain while the perpetrators shoot at them again to make sure there are no survivors.
The victims are then picked up and flung off the side of a ridge near the town of Mahibere Dego, northern Tigray region, it is claimed.
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.
An investigation by BBC Africa Eye has uncovered evidence that a massacre in northern Ethiopia was carried out by members of the Ethiopian military. It also reveals the precise location of the atrocity, in which at least 15 men were killed.
In early March, a series of five video clips surfaced on social media showing armed, uniformed men leading a group of unarmed men to the edge of a cliff, shooting some at point blank range, and pushing dead bodies over the cliff.
