“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.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday described violence in Ethiopia’s Tigray region as “ethnic cleansing” as he pressed for a prompt investigation, aid and the exit of Eritrean troops.
An attempt to get U.N. Security Council approval for a statement calling for an end to violence in Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region and to spotlight the millions in need of humanitarian assistance was dropped Friday night after objections from India, Russia and especially China, U.N. diplomats said.
Three council diplomats said Ireland, which drafted the statement, decided not to push for approval after objections from the three countries.
U.N. humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock warned Thursday that “a campaign of destruction” is taking place in Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray province, saying at least 4.5 million people need assistance and demanding that forces from neighboring Eritrea accused of committing atrocities in Tigray leave Ethiopia.
Soldiers from Eritrea systematically killed “many hundreds” of people, the large majority men, in a massacre in late November in the Ethiopian city of Axum, Amnesty International says in a new report, echoing the findings of an Associated Press story last week and citing more than 40 witnesses.
Crucially, the head of the government-established Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, Daniel Bekele. says the Amnesty findings “should be taken very seriously.” The commission’s own preliminary findings “indicate the killing of an as yet unknown number of civilians by Eritrean soldiers” in Axum, its statement said.
The Amnesty report on what might be the deadliest massacre of Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict describes the soldiers gunning down civilians as they fled, lining up men and shooting them in the back, rounding up “hundreds, if not thousands” of men for beatings and refusing to allow those grieving to bury the dead.
