Ethiopia conducts another ‘heavy’ airstrike on Tigray capital Mekele
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia - Ethiopia’s military launched a new airstrike on the Tigrayan capital Mekele on Wednesday, the second round of bombardments this week against Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) targets in the city.
The raids mark a sharp escalation in the near year-long conflict in northern Ethiopia pitting government forces and their allies against the TPLF, Tigray’s once dominant ruling party.
The government said the latest strike on Mekele was aimed at weapons caches.
“It targeted at the facilities that TPLF have turned into arms construction and repair armaments sites,” Legesse Tulu, head of the Government Communication Service, told AFP.
It was not immediately known if there were any casualties from the strike, which the TPLF said hit a residential area.
“It was heavy and the jet was so close,” one local resident told AFP, adding that it had destroyed an industrial site.
“It has burned the whole compound. We don’t know the casualties but now the whole company is burned to ash.”
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government, barely two weeks into its new term, appears to be pressing a new offensive against the TPLF, which dominated national politics for almost three decades before he took power in 2018.
The conflict has already killed untold numbers of people and triggered a deep humanitarian crisis, with the United Nations saying up to 2mn people have been displaced and hundreds of thousands plunged into faminelike conditions.
Tigray, a region of 5mn people, remains under a de facto blockade, with the warring parties each accusing the other of hindering the delivery of desperately needed aid.
TPLF spokesman Getachew Reda said Wednesday’s bombing raid had targeted a residential area of Mekele ‘causing injury to civilians and harm to property’.
“Abiy’s reaction to his losses in the ongoing fighting is to target civilians hundreds of kms away from the battlefield,” he said on Twitter.
Legesse, the government spokesman, said the site had been ‘appropriated by the TPLF as a heavy weapons storage, manufacturing and repair site’ and accused the TPLF of using ordinary people as human shields. “We confirm and assure these surgical operations have not any intended harm to civilians,” he said.
On Monday, Ethiopia’s air force carried out two aerial assaults on Mekele, the city held by the TPLF since it was recaptured from government forces in June.
The airstrike targeted at the facilities that Tigray People’s Liberation Front have turned into arms construction and repair armaments sites
LEGESSE TULU