Civilians in Tigray capital told to save themselves

NAIROBI, Kenya — Ethiopia’s military is warning civilians in the besieged Tigray regional capital that there will be “no mercy” if they don’t “save themselves” before a final offensive to flush out defiant regional leaders, a threat that Human Rights Watch on Sunday said could violate international law.

“From now on, the fighting will be a tank battle,” spokesman Col. Dejene Tsegaye said late Saturday, asserting that the army was marching on the Tigray capital, Mekele, and would encircle it with tanks.

He accused the Tigray leaders of hiding among the population of the city of roughly a half-million people and warned civilians to “steer away” from them.

But “treating a whole city as a military target would not only unlawful, it could also be considered a form of collective punishment,” Human Rights Watch researcher Laetitia Bader tweeted Sunday.

Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, is giving the leaders of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front 72 hours to surrender, saying that “you are at a point of no return.” He accused the TPLF leaders of using religious sites, hotels, schools and even cemeteries as hideouts and using

Mekele residents as human shields.

For days, Abiy’s government has asserted that it was marching to Mekele in a final push to end the deadly conflict, which erupted Nov. 4 between the federal government and the heavily armed Tigray regional government. The TPLF dominated Ethiopia’s ruling coalition for a quarter-century before Abiy took office and introduced dramatic political reforms and sidelined TPLF leaders.

Now, each side regards the other as illegal.

And Ethiopia’s government expelled an analyst with the International Crisis Group, William Davison.