According to Tigrayan sources ten drones supplied by Turkey are being built in Addis Ababa with the support of Turkish technicians.
The weapons, which are said to be for both surveillance and tactical use, are being built at a training and intelligence centre of the Information Network Security Agency or INSA.
The director-general of INSA – Temesgen Tiruneh– is reportedly in overall charge of the program, and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is said to visit the site frequently.
The agency is said to be building a runway from which the drones can be launched, about ten kilometres from the centre of Addis.
Drones in the Tigray war
There have been previous reports that drones were being used in the Tigray war, being flown from United Arab Emirates bases in Eritrea.
This was discounted by the independent investigators, Bellingcat.
Bellingcat concluded in November 2020 that: “In sum, the claims made by the Tigray forces are not impossible, but so far they seem improbable.
Satellite imagery confirms the presence of Chinese-produced drones at the United Arab Emirates’s military base in Assab, but that is all it confirms. There is currently no further evidence that these same drones have been involved in operations in support of the Ethiopian airforce, though there have been confirmed sightings of Ethiopian jet fighters in the conflict zone.”
But the current report is different – quoting first hand accounts by people who have seen the drones currently under construction.
👉 It’s Drone Jihad Against ❖ Christian Ethiopia – that Babylon America executed via UAE.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on July 11, 2021
By The New York Times
A scrappy force of local Tigrayan recruits scored a cascade of battlefield victories against the Ethiopian military, one of Africa’s strongest. Times journalists witnessed the decisive week in an eight-month civil war.
SAMRE, Ethiopia — The Tigrayan fighters whooped, whistled and pointed excitedly to a puff of smoke in the sky, where an Ethiopian military cargo plane trundling over the village minutes earlier had been struck by a missile.
Smoke turned to flames as the stricken aircraft broke in two and hurtled toward the ground. Later, in a stony field strewn with smoking wreckage, villagers picked through twisted metal and body parts. For the Tigrayan fighters, it was a sign.
“Soon we’re going to win,” said Azeb Desalgne, a 20-year-old with an AK-47 over her shoulder.
The downing of the plane on June 22 offered bracing evidence that the conflict in the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia was about to take a seismic turn. A Tigrayan guerrilla army had been fighting to drive out the Ethiopian military for eight months in a civil war marked by atrocities and starvation. Now the fight seemed to be turning in their favor.
The war erupted in November, when a simmering feud between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Tigrayan leaders, members of a small ethnic minority who had dominated Ethiopia for much of the three previous decades, exploded into violence.
Since then, the fighting has been largely hidden from view, obscured by communications blackouts and overshadowed by international outrage over an escalating humanitarian crisis. But during a pivotal week, I went behind the front lines with a photographer, Finbarr O’Reilly, and witnessed a cascade of Tigrayan victories that culminated in their retaking the region’s capital, and altered the course of the war.
We saw how a scrappy Tigrayan force overcame one of the largest armies in Africa through force of arms, but also by exploiting a wave of popular rage. Going into the war, Tigrayans were themselves divided, with many distrustful of a governing Tigrayan party seen as tired, authoritarian and corrupt.
But the catalog of horrors that has defined the war — massacres, ethnic cleansing and extensive sexual violence — united Tigrayans against Mr. Abiy’s government, drawing highly motivated young recruits to a cause that now enjoys widespread support.
“It’s like a flood,” said Hailemariam Berhane, a commander, as several thousand young men and women, many in jeans and sneakers, marched past en route to a camp for new recruits. “Everyone’s coming here.”
A column of thousands of Tigrayans who joined the rebels. Many said they were motivated by atrocities perpetrated against civilians by the Ethiopian military and its allies.
Mr. Abiy, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 and has staked his prestige on the Tigray campaign, has downplayed his losses. In a self-assured address to Parliament on Tuesday, of a kind that once dazzled admiring Westerners, Mr. Abiy insisted that his military’s retreat from Tigray was planned — the latest phase of a fight the government was on course to win.
Seen from the ground, though, Tigray has been slipping through his fingers.
In the past three weeks, Tigrayan fighters have captured a wide swath of territory; retaken the regional capital, Mekelle; imprisoned at least 6,600 Ethiopian soldiers — and claimed to have killed about three times as many.
In recent days, Tigrayan leaders have expanded the offensive to new parts of the region, vowing to stop only when all outside forces have been expelled from their land: Ethiopians, allied troops from the neighboring country of Eritrea and ethnic militias from the next-door Amhara region of Ethiopia.
“If we have to go to hell and back, we’ll do it,” said Getachew Reda, a senior Tigrayan leader.
Press officers for Mr. Abiy and the Ethiopian military did not respond to questions for this article.
We flew into Mekelle on June 22, a day after national elections in Ethiopia which had been heralded as major step toward the country’s transition to democracy.
In Tigray, though, there was no voting and the Ethiopian military had just launched a sweeping offensive intended to crush for good the Tigrayan resistance, now known as the Tigray Defense Forces, commanders on both sides said.
An Ethiopian airstrike had struck a crowded village market that day, killing dozens. We watched as the first casualties arrived at Mekelle’s largest hospital.
Days later, three aid workers from Doctors Without Borders were brutally murdered by unknown assailants.
In the countryside, the war was moving at a furious pace. Ethiopian military positions fell like dominoes. Hours after the Tigrayans shot down the military cargo plane, we reached a camp holding several thousand newly captured Ethiopian soldiers, about 30 miles south of Mekelle.
Clustered behind a barbed wire fence, the prisoners erupted into applause when we stepped from our vehicle — hoping, they later explained, that we were Red Cross workers.
Some were wounded, others barefoot — Tigrayans confiscated their boots as well as their guns, they said — and many pleaded for help. “We have badly wounded soldiers here,” said Meseret Asratu, 29, a platoon commander.
An estimated 3,000 Ethiopian soldiers captured by the Tigrayans were being held at a makeshift prison camp about 30 miles south of Mekelle on June 29. Many were wounded, others barefoot.
Further along the road was the battlefield where others had died. The bodies of Ethiopian soldiers were scattered across a rocky field, untouched since a fight four days earlier, now swelling in the afternoon sun.
Personal items cast aside nearby, amid empty ammunition boxes and abandoned uniforms, hinted at young lives interrupted: dog-eared photos of loved ones, but also university certificates, chemistry textbooks and sanitary pads — a reminder that women fight on both sides of the conflict.
Stragglers were still being rounded up. The next day, Tigrayan fighters marched five just-captured prisoners up a hill, where they slumped to the ground, exhausted.
Dawit Toba, a glum 20-year-old from the Oromia region of Ethiopia, said he had surrendered without firing a shot. War in Tigray was not like he had imagined it. “We were told there would be fighting,” he said. “But when we got here it was looting, robbery, attacks on women.”
“This war was not necessary,” he added. “Mistakes have been made.”
Driving off, we came across a figure sprawled on the roadside — an Ethiopian, stripped of his uniform, with several bullet wounds to his leg. He groaned softly.
The wounded soldier appeared to have been dumped there, although it wasn’t clear by whom. We drove him back to the prisoner camp, where Ethiopian medics did some basic treatment on the ground outside a school. Nobody was sure if he would survive.
Artillery boomed in the distance. The Tigrayan offensive was continuing to the north, using captured heavy guns against the Ethiopian troops who had brought them in. A platoon of fighters walked through, bearing a wounded man on a stretcher. Teklay Tsegay, 20, watched them pass.
Before the war, Mr. Teklay was a mechanic in Adigrat, 70 miles north. Then, last February, Eritrean soldiers fired into his aunt’s house, killing her 5-year-old daughter, he said. The following day, Mr. Teklay slipped out of Adigrat to join the resistance.
“I never thought I would be a soldier,” he said. “But here I am.”
As Tigrayans quietly mustered a guerrilla army this year, they drew on their experience of fighting a brutal Marxist dictatorship in Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s, under the flag of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
Then, Tigrayan intellectuals used Marxist ideology to bind peasant fighters to their cause, much like the Viet Cong or rebels in Angola and Mozambique.
But this time, the Tigrayan fighters are largely educated and hail from the towns and cities. And it is anger at atrocities, not Marxism, that drew them to the cause.
The wave of recruits has included doctors, university professors, white-collar professionals and diaspora Tigrayans from the United States and Europe, colleagues and friends said. Even in government-held Mekelle, recruitment grew increasingly brazen.
Two weeks ago, a T.D.F. poster appeared on a wall beside St. Gabriel’s, the city’s largest church. “Those who fail to join are as good as the walking dead,” it read. Hours later, Ethiopian soldiers arrived and tore it down.
Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe, 61, a senior fellow at the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, in Massachusetts, was visiting Mekelle when war erupted in November. I found him near the town of Samre, a leather-holstered pistol on his hip.
“I joined the resistance,” said the academic, who once helped broker a peace deal for the United Nations in Darfur. “I felt I had no other option.”
Even some Ethiopian commanders felt alienated by Mr. Abiy’s approach to the conflict.
Until late June, Col. Hussein Mohamed, a tall man with a gold-tooth smile, commanded the 11th Infantry Division in Tigray. Now he was a prisoner, held with other Ethiopian officers in a closely guarded farmhouse.
Of the 3,700 troops under his command, at least half were probably dead, said Colonel Hussein, confirming that he was speaking voluntarily. “The course of this war is political madness, to my mind,” he said.
He always had serious reservations about Mr. Abiy’s military alliance with Eritrea, Ethiopia’s old foe, he said: “They ransack properties, they rape women, they commit atrocities. The whole army is unhappy about this marriage.”
Still, Ethiopian soldiers have been accused of much the same crimes. I met Colonel Hussein in a stone-walled room, with a tin roof, as rain splattered outside. When the room’s owner, Tsehaye Berhe, arrived with a tray of coffee cups, her face clouded over.
“Take it!” she snapped at the Ethiopian officer. “I’m not serving you.”
Moments later Ms. Tsehaye returned to apologize. “I’m sorry for being emotional,” she said. “But your soldiers burned my house and stole my crops.”
Colonel Hussein nodded quietly. Col. Hussein Mohamed, who commanded an Ethiopian army division, was captured with his troops and held in a closely guarded farmhouse. He called the war “political madness.”
Even before Ethiopian forces abandoned Mekelle on June 28, there were hints that something was afoot. The internet went down, and at the regional headquarters where Mr. Abiy had installed an interim government, I found deserted corridors and locked offices. Outside, federal police officers were slinging backpacks into a bus.
Smoke rose from the Ethiopian National Defense Forces’ headquarters in Mekelle — a pyre of burning documents, it turned out, piled high by detainees accused of supporting the T.D.F.
Weeks earlier, Ethiopian intelligence officers had tortured one of them, Yohannes Haftom, with a cattle prod. “We will burn you,” Mr. Yohannes recalled them saying. “We will bury you alive.”
But after he followed their orders to cart their confidential documents to the burn pit on June 28, the Ethiopians set Mr. Yohannes free. Hours later, the first T.D.F. fighters entered Mekelle, setting off days of raucous celebration.
Residents filled streets where young fighters paraded on vehicles like beauty queens, or leaned from speeding tuktuks spraying gunfire into the air. Nightclubs and cafes filled up, and an older woman prostrated herself at the feet of a just-arrived fighter, shouting thanks to God.
A woman in Mekelle fell to the ground and shouted thanks to God on June 29, as it became clear that Tigrayan forces had taken control of Mekelle.
On the fourth day, fighters paraded thousands of Ethiopian prisoners through the city center, in a show of triumphalism that was a pointed rebuke to the leader of Ethiopia. “Abiy is a thief!” people chanted as dejected soldiers marched past.
The celebrations eventually reached the house where Mr. Getachew, the Tigrayan leader and T.D.F. spokesman, now descended from his mountain base, was staying.
As the whiskey flowed, Mr. Getachew juggled calls on his satellite phone while a generator rattled in the background. Mr. Abiy had once been his political ally, even his friend, he said. Now the Ethiopian leader had cut the power and phone lines to Mekelle and issued a warrant for his arrest.
Buoyed by victory, the guests excitedly discussed the next phase of their war in Tigray. One produced a cake with the Tigrayan flag that Mr. Getachew, sharing a knife with a senior commander, cut to loud cheers.
For much of his career, he had been a staunch defender of the Ethiopian state. But the war made that position untenable, he said. Now he was planning a referendum on Tigrayan independence.
“Nothing can save the Ethiopian state as we know it, except a miracle,” he said. “And I don’t usually believe in them.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on July 10, 2021
😠😠😠 😢😢😢
Tigrayans in Humera and Alematta plead for help to escape ethnic violence
Tigrayan residents of the towns of Humera and Alematta say they are being singled out, attacked and driven from their homes by Amhara Special Forces.
The city of Humera, close to the tri-point of Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan, has been at the forefront of the Tigray war since it began in November last year.
Attacks from Ethiopian troops and Amhara special forces from the South and by the Eritrean army from the North drove the Tigrayan forces from the city. But many Tigrayans remained. Now, as the Tigray Defence Forces are reportedly advancing from their strongholds in central Tigray westwards and southwards, the Tigrayans living in Humera are again under severe threat.
Tigrayans in Alematta say they are also being attacked.
This information has come from several sources.
Many Tigrayans in Humera and surrounding area say they are trapped and threatened.
Amhara Special Forces have been going door to door, warning Tigrayans to get out of what they call “their land”. Tigrayans say they have been given just 24 hours to leave their homes. Some people have been beaten and the community is traumatised.
“We told the Amhara that we don’t have a safe route to leave: the border with Sudan is closed and we are prevented from moving to Amhara or Tigray. They replied by telling us to go to Eritrea, but we said we can’t and won’t go to Eritrea.”
An appeal for help
The community says the situation is really urgent. They say they are being starved, abused, traumatized and have no hope.
Residents of Humera are appealing for the Red Cross, and other International Humanitarian Organisations, to come to their aid. They fear that unless a route out of the town is found along which Tigrayans can escape from Humera they will be abused or killed by the Amhara.
Alematta
Similar reports are coming from the town of Alematta and surrounding areas.
Many Tigrayans are taken from their home by Amahra force at gunpoint, without warning. There is a report that 9 young Tigrayan men were killed in public on Friday – accused of being supporters of the Tigrayan “junta”.
Tigrayans in the town are terrified, with many taken to prisons where they are being held. Older people and children have been taken to Mokeoni and left there – told they can walk into territory held by the Tigray Defence Forces, some 25 kilometres away.
These displaced people are being forced to leave their homes without money, clothes, or documents.
The UN Ocha recently reported that: “The road from Mekelle to Alematta, in Southern Zone, was also cleared but access beyond it has been denied by Amhara Security Forces (ASF), who are still in control of areas south of Korem toward Alematta and beyond.”
The Tigrayans of Humera and Alematta are appealing to the International Committee of the Red Cross to arrange safe routes along which these threatened people can escape to safety.
The Teka Tesfay Cluster comprises of three churches:
❖ Petros & Paulos
❖ Mikael Melehayzenghi
❖ Medhane Alem Adi Kesho
Medhane Alem Adi Kesho is one of Tigrai’s oldest and finest rock-hewn churches estimated to date from the 10th or early 11th century. An unusual feature is the beautifully decorated narthex connecting the northern and southern ends of the church. Two doors lead to the interior of the church where the ceiling is supported by six huge square pillars. The ceiling is decorated with reliefs and geometrical patterns. Because of its immense height and massive pillars, this church resembles a cathedral. There are engravings on the walls and a croix patêe on the right side of the back wall.
