LA Times: In an out-of-sight war, a massacre comes to light

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.

LA Times: A rape survivor’s story emerges from a remote African war

Mehrawit, 27, was separated from her sister and locked in a room with only a thin, dirty mattress. For two weeks, she said, the Eritrean soldiers gang-raped her repeatedly, fracturing her spine and pelvis and leaving her crumpled on the floor. One day, she counted 15 soldiers who took turns sexually assaulting her over eight hours, her cries of agony punctuated by their laughter.

“I was numb,” she recalled from a hospital bed in the regional capital, Mekele, days after she escaped. “I could see their faces. I could hear them giggle. But after a while, I was no longer feeling the pain.”

Her account is one of few emerging from the murky conflict in Tigray, where human rights groups say pro-government forces are sexually abusing civilians in a remote highland region far from the world’s gaze.