'I saw people dying on the road': Tigray's traumatised war refugees

When Ethiopia’s army shelled Humera, a small agricultural city in Tigray, in midNovember, 54-year-old Gush Tela rushed his wife and three children to safety in a nearby town.

A few days later, he felt compelled to find out what had become of his home. As he approached the city on his motorbike, riding through the arid countryside, he said the stench of countless dead bodies filled the air.

Men, women and children lay strewn along the road and in the surrounding fields, their bodies riddled with bullet holes, Tela said.

“I saw many dead people being eaten by dogs,” Tela said from a refugee camp just over the border in Sudan, his voice breaking. “I saw many people dying on the road. Many difficult things, difficult to express, difficult to imagine.”

Tigray was plunged into conflict on 4 November, when Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, ordered a military campaign against the region’s ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. Abiy accused the TPLF attacking federal military camps in Tigray and seeking to destabilise the country, which the TPLF denies.

Accounts have emerged of appalling violence committed by multiple actors on both sides of the conflict, but with communications down and the media barred, it has been impossible to independently verify incidents – and who was responsible.

On Wednesday, the United Nations said it and Ethiopia’s government had signed a deal to allow “unimpeded” humanitarian access to Tigray – at least the parts now under federal government control. The aid may come too late for some. For weeks, the UN and others have pleaded for access amid reports of food, medicines and other supplies running out for millions of people.

Before the conflict, the worsening political tensions between Addis Ababa and the TPLF seemed remote to Tela. “I was searching only for work. I was not much interested in the political process. I knew nothing about what was happening,” he said. “I never felt this situation would ever happen.”

Faint outlines of Tigrayan buildings and telephone towers break through the milky sky in Hamdayet, the small, impoverished Sudanese border town where Tela and 3,000 other refugees are encamped. They are among more 45,000 who have fled the violence, travelling for days through woods and over the Sittet River to the safety of Sudan. A second camp has sprung up in Um Raquba.

Many of the refugees nurse multiple diseases, often picked up on the days-long, gruelling journey. Clinics at the two camps are struggling to provide necessary care. Those who have made it tell of desperate people who were left behind, blocked by federal Ethiopian forces.

At the weekend, federal troops took over the Tigrayan capital, Mekelle, and