After the bombs they attacked with knives: Fleeing Ethiopians describe Tigray assault
Yared was trying to escape a government assault on his hometown in northern Ethiopia with his children when he saw the bodies on the road.
“I saw one lady. She was lying on the ground. She was dead,” the 35-year-old driver said. Beside her body, he saw two children.
“One was about seven years old, but he was also dead. They were killed by a bomb. The other one was a baby. He was trying to breastfeed from her,” he said.
Yared breaks down in tears when he explains that his mother was also killed by one of the explosions. “Bombs were coming from everywhere. As we tried to escape, there were people with knives and swords,” he said.
The Daily Telegraph has spoken to more than a dozen refugees from Humera town in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, who fled across the border into two refugee camps in eastern Sudan. Humera, a town with a population of about 30,000, was one of the first places to be attacked when Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning prime minister, sent his federal military into Tigray to oust the region’s leaders, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), on November 4.
The refugees described being bombarded for several days by indiscriminate artillery shelling and rocket fire coming from the border with Eritrea. They say they were attacked by knife-wielding militiamen from the neighbouring Amhara region, who had joined forces with federal troops and killed people as they tried to escape.
“It was very, very bad. The soldiers of Abiy Ahmed didn’t differentiate between people. They crushed all the people. It is like a genocide,” said Zenebe, a young ethnic Tigrayan from Humera. “They didn’t only use guns; they used knives. They used big weapons. So many big weapons [shooting] from Eritrea.”
The TPLF claims Eritrea is involved in fighting on the side of government forces, which Ethiopia denies.
Gidey, a Tigrayan who walked into Sudan with her five children, said she saw people executed by occupying forces in Humera.
“I saw soldiers kill a taxi man and the two people in the taxi because there was a poster of the Tigrayan president in the car. They asked for gold. They said:
‘If you don’t give me gold, we will kill you’. They shot the driver in the chest,” she said.
“It is worse than the Derg,” one man said, referring to Ethiopia’s Marxist dictatorship which killed thousands of people in the 1980s.
All the refugees said they had seen bodies in the streets of Humera but it is difficult to verify their claims as the government shut the power off before fighting began which meant mobile phones could not be recharged to record the assault. However, some accounts of bombardment have been corroborated by an AFP reporter who gained access to Humera with Ethiopian government minders. The journalist was not allowed to visit a local hospital to get an accurate picture of the number of dead or injured.
The Ethiopian Army declared Humera “liberated” on November 12 and the military is now believed to be advancing on Mekele, Tigray’s capital. On Monday, a spokesman for the Ethiopian Federal Army told state media that they were about to surround the city with tanks and artillery. “We want to send a message to the public in Mekele to save yourselves from any artillery attacks and free yourselves from the junta,” Colonel Dejene Tsegaye said. Shortly after the announcement, Ahmed — who last year told guests at the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony that “war is the epitome of hell” — wrote on Twitter: “We urge you to surrender peacefully within 72 hours, recognising that you are at the point of no return.”
The news that Mekele might soon be shelled has alarmed international observers. A full-scale attack on the city of 500,000 people would have catastrophic humanitarian consequences. Human
Rights Watch (HRW) said the threat of attacking a populated area could violate international law. “Treating a whole city as a military target would not only be unlawful, it could also be considered a form of collective punishment,” said Laetitia Bader, the Horn of Africa director for HRW.
Many of the refugees from Humera who spoke to the Telegraph had just arrived at Um-Rakoba camp in eastern Sudan. From 1985 to 2000, the rugged desert land was filled with tales of people who fled Ethiopia’s famine and the Derg. Last week, the camp reopened for the thousands flooding in.
More than 6300 people have arrived there in the past two weeks. All the infrastructure which was there before is gone, so in 40C heat men and women have set about constructing tents out of tarpaulins. On Monday, another convoy of almost 900 men, women and children were on their way to the camp in a convoy of trucks.
“I am very sad to see people here again,” said the camp’s manager Abdelbasit Abdelghani, who helped close the camp 20 years ago.
Under one of the shelters, a young man called Teame sits in a blue denim shirt. Teame cannot find his five-month pregnant wife and says he has not slept in 10 days.
“I saw two of my friends killed by guns. My wife — where is she now? I don’t know,” he said, “I need a psychiatrist. My mind is disturbing me so much.
“I see images of my dead friends, of my wife, in my dreams. After that, I can’t sleep anymore.”