ADDIS ABABA: Ethiopia’s military on Sunday threatened an all-out assault on Mekele, capital of the dissident Tigray region and seat of the local government it is seeking to dislodge, warning civilians to flee while they still can.
“The next decisive battle is to surround Mekele with tanks,” Dejene Tsegaye, a military spokesman, told state broadcasters on Sunday, threatening a siege of the city.
He added a warning for Mekele’s half a million residents: “Save yourself. A directive has been communicated for you to dissociate yourself from this junta, after that there will be no mercy.”
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner — launched a military campaign against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) on November 4, accusing its forces of attacking two federal military camps in the region and the party of defying his government and seeking to destabilize it.
A communications blackout in the region has made claims from both sides in the conflict difficult to verify, but hundreds of people are reported to have been killed while tens of thousands have fled the fighting into neighboring Sudan.
Abiy’s government has claimed the capture of a string of towns in recent days, including the ancient city of Aksum and the town of Edega Hamus, 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Mekele.
“Defense forces have controlled Edaga Hamus city, which is on the road from Adigrat to Mekele,” the Ethiopia State of Emergency Fact Check, a government agency, said Sunday. “The defense force are currently marching on the campaign’s last goal, Mekele city.”
The TPLF claimed Saturday that civilians had been killed during a “heavy bombardment” of Adigrat town by the Ethiopian Defense Forces (EDF). The government insists it does not target civilians.
The TPLF led the overthrow of Mengistu Hailemariam, head of Ethiopia’s military Derg regime, in 1991 and dominated the country’s politics until Abiy became prime minister in 2018.
The party continues to rule Tigray, one of 10 regional states under Ethiopia’s system of ethnic federalism whereby regions are delineated by ethnicity and language.
TPLF leaders have complained of being sidelined by Abiy and blamed for the country’s woes. The bitter feud with the central government led the TPLF to hold their own elections this year in defiance of a national postponement due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Abiy has spurned all calls for peace, including from the African Union — which plans to send three former national presidents as special envoys in the coming days — the US and the UN which has warned of a looming humanitarian disaster.
His government regards the TPLF as a criminal administration and appears intent on winning the military battle rather than negotiating.
Military action has already spread beyond Tigray’s borders with the TPLF firing rockets at Asmara, the capital of neighboring Eritrea to the north, which it accuses of supporting the Ethiopian government, and the city of Bahir Dar to the southwest.
The campaign has seen warplanes bombing Tigray and heavy fighting, while Amnesty International has documented a gruesome massacre in which “scores, and likely hundreds, of people were stabbed or hacked to death” in the southwestern town of Mai-Kadra.
The UN has called for the opening of humanitarian corridors to allow aid agencies access, and has said it is preparing for as many as 200,000 refugees to flee unrest in the coming months.
Ethiopia army threatens ‘no mercy’ in assault on regional capital
https://arab.news/btm27
Ethiopia army threatens ‘no mercy’ in assault on regional capital
- Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched a military campaign against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) on November 4
- A communications blackout in the region has made claims from both sides in the conflict difficult to verify
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
