Rockets from Ethiopia region said to target Eritrea airport
NAIROBI, Kenya — Rockets were fired at Eritrea’s capital on Saturday, diplomats said, as the deadly fighting in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region appeared to spill across an international border.
At least three rockets appeared to be aimed at the airport in Eritrea’s capital, Asmara, hours after the Tigray regional government warned it might attack. It has accused Eritrea of attacking it at the invitation of Ethiopia’s federal government since the conflict in northern Ethiopia started on Nov. 4.
Eritrea is one of the world’s most reclusive countries, and no one on the ground, including the information ministry, could immediately be reached. Details on any deaths or damage were not known. Tigray regional officials did not respond to requests for comment.
Experts have warned that Eritrea, long at bitter odds with the Tigray regional government, or Tigray People’s Liberation Front, could be pulled into Ethiopia’s growing conflict that has killed untold hundreds of people on each side and sent some 25,000 refugees fleeing into Sudan.
Earlier Saturday, the Tigray regional government said that it fired rockets at two airports in the neighboring Amhara region as the deadly conflict threatens to spread into other parts of the country.
The Tigray regional government said in a statement on Tigray TV 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, asserting that Tigray regional forces were “repairing and utilizing the last of the weaponry within its arsenals.”
Each side regards the other as illegal, the result of a monthslong falling-out after 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” now must be arrested and their wellstocked arsenal destroyed.
Fears of ethnic targeting are rising. 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, which cited a man helping to clear away bodies as saying many of the dead were ethnic Amharas.
The statement by Tigray regional president Debretsion Gebremichael asserted that the allegations against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front forces, repeated by Abiy, are “being proliferated with the intent to incite hatred toward [ethnic] Tigrayans in Ethiopia.”
“A justified risk/threat of fear of ethnic profiling and discrimination has arisen,” the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission said in a statement Saturday. It has visited 43 people in police custody in the capital, Addis Ababa, and said “some of the detained have reported that they have been arrested only because of their ethnicity.”
The international community is warning against deadly ethnic tensions. The U.N. office on genocide prevention has condemned reports of “targeted attacks against civilians based on their ethnicity or religion” in Ethiopia, warning that the rhetoric sets a “dangerous trajectory that heightens the risk of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”
Communications and transport links with the northern Tigray region remain severed, making it difficult to verify claims on both sides of the fighting. Desperate families cannot reach relatives, and the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations warn of disaster as food, fuel and other supplies run short for millions of people.