Icon: enlarge
Ethiopian military on the border with Eritrea: Reports of looting and murders are mounting
Photo: EDUARDO SOTERAS / AFP
Alem Hadush lost his future when the grenades hit the Tigrin city of Wukro, on the northern edge of which the famous rock church Wukro Chirkos is enthroned.
“My wife was pregnant.
We were expecting our first child.
Now both are dead, ”he says on the phone.
After weeks, Addis Ababa allows telecommunications connections to parts of the state of Tigray again.
"She died when the Eritrean artillery bombarded our city."
Hadush tells how Eritrean armed forces murdered six of his friends, how units from neighboring Eritrea are indiscriminately looting in many places in Tigray.
Reports from Tigray about marauding units from the neighboring country are increasing.
The war in northern Ethiopia has already cost thousands of lives.
More than 50,000 Ethiopians have fled to Sudan since the fighting began on November 4.
The fear of witnessing the beginning of a state collapse, which would be unparalleled in recent history, is growing among foreign observers.
A collapse that could have consequences for the stability of the entire region.
Not only is it now considered certain that Eritrean troops are fighting in Tigray, Sudanese soldiers were recently attacked by Ethiopian troops on Sudanese territory.
So the conflict already involves neighboring countries.
The conflict involves neighboring countries
According to aid workers and diplomats, many thousands of soldiers from neighboring Eritrea are involved in the fighting.
Eyewitnesses confirm this.
"On Tuesday, the Eritrean armed forces killed 81 civilians who were holed up in the Al-Nejashi mosque," said a woman from the Tigrin city of Negash on the phone.
She managed to escape the massacre and arrived on Wednesday last week after a ten hour walk in Mekele, the capital of Tigray.
For the Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed and Eritrea's President Isaias Afewerki, the Tigrin leadership party TPLF is a common enemy.
Before Abiy Ahmed took office in 2018, the TPLF had dominated the Ethiopian federal government for almost three decades.
Under the leadership of the TPLF, Ethiopia and Eritrea waged a bloody war between 1998 and 2000 that claimed an estimated 100,000 lives.
Abiy also received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for the peace agreement between the two countries.
On Tuesday, the Eritrean armed forces killed 81 civilians holed up in the Al-Nejashi mosque
Anonymous witness from Negash city
On December 9th, Abiy Ahmed informed UN Secretary General António Guterres that he could guarantee that no Eritrean troops would operate on Ethiopian territory.
The news agency Reuters revealed shortly afterwards that the US government assumed that Eritrean soldiers had already entered Ethiopian territory via the border towns of Zalambessa, Rama and Badme in mid-November.
A State Department spokesman later confirmed this.
"We consider this a worrying development and we urge that these troops be withdrawn immediately," he said.
The fighting continues
In an article for African Arguments, Mesfin Hagos, former Eritrean defense minister and now opposition politician, wrote in early December that Eritrea had sent various divisions to Ethiopia.
So when Abiy declared the operations in Tigray over, he was as little like a victorious general as George W. Bush at the time, who announced that the mission in Iraq had been completed - and that the worst was only to begin there.
Because in Tigray the fighting continues bitterly.
The Ethiopian army, units from Eritrea, allies and militias from the neighboring province of Amhara are still facing the fighters of the TPLF.
Icon: enlarge
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed: As little a victorious general as George W. Bush once did in Iraq
Photo: POOL New / REUTERS
In the war over Tigray, a long-standing conflict between supporters of two opposing visions for the country of Ethiopia escalates.
One camp believes that a strong central government is the only guarantee of the country's unity and territorial integrity.
The other camp demands that power must move from the center to the periphery.
A federal system that gives the regions considerable autonomy is best.
Ironically, the Tigrins, who long held the country with an iron hand, now see themselves as the spearhead in the fight against a centralized government.
They have withdrawn their troops into the mountains and are probably preparing for a protracted guerrilla war.
More and more civilians seem to be joining.
Alem Hadush, the 29-year-old whose wife and child were robbed by the grenades in Wukro: "I will now, like many other young people from Wukro, go to the mountains and join the TPLF forces," he says on the phone.
The rebel crowd in Tigray
A development that the TPLF wanted.
"We are recruiting more and more young fighters to consolidate our military strength," said Wed Gere, a Tigrin military who continues to operate covertly in the cities that the TPLF has abandoned and who only wants to be named by his code name.
"We withdrew from the cities and relocated the troops to the highlands after the Ethiopian army announced that it would bomb the capital Mekele across the board." Government troops were deliberately allowed to penetrate the cities in order to destroy civilian victims to avoid.
As a result, the fighting takes place in many areas of Tigray, but not in the cities.
And as long as even a piece of Tigray is occupied by enemy forces - by the Ethiopian army, by Eritrean associations or troops from the neighboring province of Amhara - there is no chance that peace will be found in Tigray or even all of Ethiopia.
The man who calls himself Wed Gere says: "From child to old man we will fight to the last drop of blood and defend the sovereignty of the country!"
Icon: The mirror