ADDIS ABABA: Nine million people risk displacement from the escalating conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, the United Nations said, warning that the federal government’s declaration of a state of emergency was blocking food and other aid.
Prime Minster Abiy Ahmed is pressing ahead with a military campaign he announced on Wednesday against the northern region, despite international pleas to pursue dialogue with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). The group led the country’s multi-ethnic ruling coalition until Abiy took office in 2018.
On Friday he vowed air strikes in Tigray would continue. Though the initial strikes targeted arms depots and military sites, Abiy cautioned civilians to avoid mass gatherings lest they become “collateral damage,” further raising fears.
About 600,000 people in Tigray depend on food aid to survive, while another 1 million receive other forms of support, all of which are disrupted, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a report released Saturday.
Clashes between federal troops and Tigrayan forces had broken out in eight locations in the region, according to the report.
Six combatants were killed and more than 60 wounded in fighting near the border between the Tigray and Amhara regions, a humanitarian source told Reuters on Sunday. Both sides suffered casualties and some of the wounded were brought to hospitals in and near the town of Gondar, the source said.
A desert locust infestation in East Africa has hit Tigray particularly hard and efforts to combat the insect swarms are feared to have stopped because of the conflict, risking further damage to crops, the UN report read.
Abiy won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for making peace with neighboring Eritrea. Accepting the honor, he called war “the epitome of hell” and referenced his own time on the frontline in the 1998-2000 war that claimed more than 100,000 lives.
He said on Twitter on Saturday that his military campaign “aims to end the impunity that has prevailed for far too long,” he said, a reference to the dominance of Tigrayans in the country’s politics before he took office.
Animosity between Abiy and his former allies then mounted steadily. Tigrayans complain of persecution under Abiy, an ethnic Oromo, who ordered the arrest of dozens of former senior military and political officials from the TPLF in a crackdown on corruption. Last year, Abiy reorganized the ruling coalition into a single party that the TPLF refused to join.
Mediation offers
Experts and diplomats are sounding alarms of a potential civil war that could destabilize the country of 110 million people and the strategic Horn of Africa region.
The federal military’s biggest command, and the majority of its heavy weapons, are stationed in Tigray. One of the biggest risks is that the army will split along ethnic lines, with Tigrayans defecting to their region’s own force. There are signs that is already happening, analysts say.
Tigrayan forces number up to 250,000 men and have their own significant stocks of military hardware, experts say.
“The fragmentation of Ethiopia would be the largest state collapse in modern history,” a group of former United States diplomats said in a statement published by the US Institute of Peace on Thursday. The escalation of the conflict would also kill remaining hope for the democratic reforms Abiy has promised, the statement read.
Abiy spoke on Saturday with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who “offered his good offices.” The UN chief also spoke on Saturday to the African Union chief Moussa Faki Mahamat and to Sudanese Primes Minster Abdalla Hamdok in his capacity as chair of the regional Africa group IGAD, according to the spokesman.
But Abiy is not listening to requests for mediation, diplomats and security officials in the region have told Reuters. He did not issue a statement on the call with the UN chief.
Ethiopia’s parliament voted on Saturday to replace the Tigray regional government, another step to deny the legitimacy of the administration elected in September in a poll held in defiance of Abiy’s federal government.
In escalating conflict, people of Ethiopia’s Tigray risk displacement, UN says
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In escalating conflict, people of Ethiopia’s Tigray risk displacement, UN says
- Prime Minster Abiy Ahmed is pressing ahead with a military campaign he announced on Wednesday against the northern region
- On Friday he vowed air strikes in Tigray would continue
Sudanese trek through mountains to escape Kordofan fighting
- For eight days, Sudanese farmer Ibrahim Hussein led his family through treacherous terrain to flee the fighting in southern Kordofan — the latest and most volatile front in the country’s 31-month-old
PORT SUDAN: For eight days, Sudanese farmer Ibrahim Hussein led his family through treacherous terrain to flee the fighting in southern Kordofan — the latest and most volatile front in the country’s 31-month-old conflict.
“We left everything behind,” said the 47-year-old, who escaped with his family of seven from Keiklek, near the South Sudanese border.
“Our animals and our unharvested crops — all of it.”
Hussein spoke to AFP from Kosti, an army-controlled city in White Nile state, around 300 kilometers (186 miles) south of Khartoum.
The city has become a refuge for hundreds of families fleeing violence in oil-rich Kordofan, where the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — locked in a brutal war since April 2023 — are vying for control.
Emboldened by their October capture of the army’s last stronghold in Darfur, the RSF and their allies have in recent weeks descended in full force on Kordofan, forcing nearly 53,000 people to flee, according to the United Nations.
“For most of the war, we lived in peace and looked after our animals,” Hussein said.
“But when the RSF came close, we were afraid fighting would break out. So we left, most of the way on foot.”
He took his family through the rocky spine of the Nuba Mountains and the surrounding valley, passing through both paramilitary and army checkpoints.
This month, the RSF consolidated its grip on West Kordofan — one of three regional states — and seized Heglig, which lies on Sudan’s largest oil field.
With their local allies, they have also tightened their siege on the army-held cities of Kadugli and Dilling, where hundreds of thousands face mass starvation.
Running for their lives
In just two days this week, nearly 4,000 people arrived in Kosti, hungry and terrified, said Mohamed Refaat, Sudan chief of mission for the UN’s International Organization for Migration.
“Most of those arriving are women and children. Very few adult men are with them,” he told AFP, adding that many men stay behind “out of fear of being killed or abducted.”
The main roads are unsafe, so families are taking “long and uncertain journeys and sleeping wherever they can,” according to Mercy Corps, one of the few aid agencies operating in Kordofan.
“Journeys that once took four hours now force people to walk for 15 to 30 days through isolated areas and mine-littered terrain,” said Miji Park, interim country director for Sudan.
This month, drones hit a kindergarten and a hospital in Kalogi in South Kordofan, killing 114 people, including 63 children, according to the World Health Organization.
Adam Eissa, a 53-year-old farmer, knew it was time to run. He took his wife, four daughters and elderly mother — all crammed into a pickup truck with 30 others — and drove for three days through “backroads to avoid RSF checkpoints,” he told AFP from Kosti.
They are now sheltering in a school-turned-shelter housing around 500 displaced people.
“We receive some help, but it is not enough,” said Eissa, who is trying to find work in the market.
According to the IOM’s Refaat, Kosti — a relatively small city — is already under strain. It hosts thousands of South Sudanese refugees, themselves fleeing violence across the border.
It cost Eissa $400 to get his family to safety. Anyone who does not have that kind of money — most Sudanese, after close to three years of war — has to walk, or stay behind.
Those left behind
According to Refaat, transport prices from El-Obeid in North Kordofan have increased more than tenfold in two months, severely “limiting who can flee.”
In besieged Kadugli, 56-year-old market trader Hamdan is desperate for a way out, “terrified” that the RSF will seize the city.
“I sent my family away a while ago with my eldest son,” he told AFP via satellite Internet connection, asking to be identified only by his first name. “Now I am looking for a way to leave.”
Every day brings “the sound of shelling and sometimes gunfire,” said Kassem Eissa, a civil servant and head of a family of eight.
“I have three daughters, the youngest is 14,” he told AFP, laying out an impossible choice: “Getting out is expensive and the road is unsafe” but “we’re struggling to get enough food and medicine.”
The UN has issued repeated warnings of the violence in Kordofan, raising fears of atrocities similar to those reported in the last captured city in Darfur, including summary executions, abductions and rape.
“If a ceasefire is not reached around Kadugli,” Refaat said, “the scale of violence we saw in El-Fasher could be repeated.”
