Ethiopia’s Tigray government attacks two airports

NAIROBI, Kenya — Ethiopia’s Tigray regional government said Saturday it fired rockets at two airports in the neighboring Amhara region as a conflict threatens to spread into other parts of Africa’s second-most-populous country.

The Tigray regional government said in a statement that such strikes would continue “unless the attacks against us stop.” Ethiopia’s federal government said the airports in Gondar and Bahir Dar were damaged in the strikes late Friday.

Fighting that erupted in the northern Tigray region on Nov. 4 has reportedly killed hundreds on both the federal government and regional government sides, sent well over 17,000 refugees fleeing into neighboring Sudan and raised international alarm about a possible civil war at the heart of the Horn of Africa.

Each side regards the other as illegal, the result of a monthslong falling out amid dramatic shifts in power after Nobel Peace Prize-winning Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office two years ago.

The Tigray regional government, which once dominated the country’s ruling coalition, broke away last year, and the federal government says members of the region’s ruling “clique” must be arrested and their well-stocked arsenal destroyed.

The Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which governs the region, in a statement denied allegations that scores or even hundreds of civilians were “hacked to death” Monday in the town of Mai-Kadra. The massacre was confirmed by Amnesty International.

The statement by Tigray regional president Debretsion Gebremichael asserted that the allegations against the TPLF forces, repeated by Abiy, are “being proliferated with the intent to incite hatred toward (ethnic) Tigrayans in Ethiopia.”