A human tide of 300,000 Tigrayans are now camping in this beleaguered city at six schools, a local college and any number of half constructed buildings which dot the city.
A senior UN official told Sky News that 50,000-60,000 arrivals have turned up in the past few weeks alone.
Shire has seen a huge influx of people over the past four months, and it was ill prepared.
Its schools and a university campus have become theatres of suffering.
Aid agencies estimate some 200,000 people are currently living in the city’s makeshift camps. Many of them are women and children.
The first arrivals came back in November when fighting broke out. They mostly came from the southern and south-western lowlands of Tigray that were hotbeds of the fighting in the early days.
In the intervening years, President Omar al-Bashir’s decision to prosecute that war cost the country and its people dearly. Six U.S. special envoys to Sudan, an engaged U.S. Congress, and a robust activist community all helped to put in place one of the most biting and comprehensive sanctions regimes in the world whose effects sadly reverberated beyond Khartoum’s Presidential Palace to the markets, schools, and hospitals serving average Sudanese citizens across every corner of the country.
At the time, the largest ever United Nations peacekeeping force was also deployed, robbing many Sudanese of a sense of sovereignty, a feeling that lingers today. Choked off from the international financial system and denied basic access to the global community, Sudan became an international pariah whose growth was stunted and whose population’s prospects were put on hold.
Of the hospital that begins its days with an influx of bodies bearing gunshot or knife wounds — people killed, relatives and Red Cross workers say, for breaching the nightly curfew.
Of the young man who made the mistake of getting into a heated argument with a government soldier in a bar. Hours later, friends said, four soldiers followed him home and beat him to death with beer bottles.
What followed was an hours-long killing rampage, according to accounts from 10 survivors, including Tesfay, as well as from victims’ relatives and friends and activist groups. Soldiers went house to house in Bora, a town in northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region, and executed more than 160 people.
Done killing, the soldiers stopped families from taking their dead. Only on Sunday — two days after the slaughter — were gravediggers allowed to set about their grim task; one of them buried 26 corpses in the graveyard of the Abune Aregawi Church, survivors said.
“The situation in Sheraro is beyond dire. Despite families arriving every day, no aid has been delivered for weeks. Food, water and medicine are running out fast. People could die unless they get humanitarian aid now,” warned Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).
“People have told us that they fled sexual violence, killings and widespread violence in Tigray, only to arrive in Sheraro and find a desperately helpless situation. We also heard accounts of refugees hiding in remote villages scared to be identified, which puts them at the risk of being cut off from any assistance. Lactating mothers also told us that they have been unable to produce milk for their babies,” he added.
The world is standing by, allowing a genocide to unfold in Tigray, Ethiopia. After all the promises of “never again”, there’s a deafening silence over the outrages taking place in one of the west’s “go-to” partners in Africa.
At a recent 24-hour global lobby on the crisis, one of the young Tigrayan presenters broke down on air. The cause was social media footage of yet another massacre. Young Tigrayan men, already gunned down by forces from their own country’s government, were being finished off and having their bodies thrown over cliffs by federal soldiers shouting racial abuse.
The breadth and depth of human suffering in the Ethiopian region of Tigray is perfectly clear to humanitarian workers, human rights groups and the international diplomatic community.
After four months of warfare between Ethiopia’s national defence force and fighters from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), observers are collecting a worrying selection of data.
Forces from the Amhara region took control of several areas in Tigray after backing federal troops that staged an incursion into its neighbor’s territory, said Gizachew Muluneh, a spokesman for the Amhara government. Fighting has continued in Tigray since Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordered the army to retaliate after forces loyal to Tigray’s ruling party attacked a military camp in November.
The land “was taken by force and now has been returned by force,” Gizachew said. “Although it wasn’t our original objective, it happened by default.”
“The war is escalating. Now it is focused on the civilians,” Kibrom said.
“How can we live like this?”
Every phase of the four-month-old conflict in Tigray has brought suffering to Wukro, a fast-growing transport hub once best-known for its religious and archaeological sites.
Ahead of federal forces’ arrival in late November, heavy shelling levelled homes and businesses and sent plumes of dust and smoke rising above near-deserted streets.
