✞✞✞ Isis executes a Coptic Christian in North Sinai: he had financed the construction of a church✞✞✞
Nabil Habashi Khadim, 62, was an esteemed merchant and philanthropist. He was kidnapped on 8 November last and killed with a Kalashnikov shot to the head. His murder was posted online by the jihadist movement who accused him of having contributed to the construction of the only Christian place of worship in Bir Al-Abd,
The Islamic State (IS, formerly Isis) has executed an Egyptian Orthodox Coptic Christian, killing him with a bullet to the head in an execution filmed and posted online yesterday on the jihadist group social channels and shared by numerous users and platforms.
The victim, already considered a “new martyr” by the country’s Orthodox, is an esteemed intellectual and businessman: 62 year-old Nabil Habashi Khadim who was kidnapped on November 8 in the city of Bir Al-Abd, in northern Sinai. In teh video he is seen being shot in the head with a Kalashnikov while kneeling on the ground.
Local sources report that the man had contributed to the construction of the only Christian place of worship in the city, the church of the Madonna dell’Anba Karras (Our Lady). This is also one of the reasons that led the jihadist commando to kidnap him.
In the video, one of the executioners belonging to the local Daesh cell (Arabic acronym for IS) explicitly accuses the man of having contributed, even financially, to the construction of the church just before pulling the trigger and executing him. The jihadist group also accuses the Church of “collaboration” with the Egyptian army, police and secret services.
Still others link the timing of the killing to the upcoming Easter holidays, which fall on May 2 for the Coptic Orthodox.
Witnesses say that Nabil Habashi Khadim, the latest in a “long line of North Sinai martyrs” was an esteemed jeweller from the city of Bir Al-Abd. His family is considered to be among the oldest in the Coptic community in the area, very active in the gold trade as well as owning a clothing store and a cell phone resale business.
On 8 November a group of men, armed but in civilian clothes, kidnapped him on the street in front of his house and fled undisturbed. In all these months the searches of the police and the appeals of the family for his release have been in vain.
His death caused grief and emotion in the Egyptian Coptic community, whose leader Pope Tawadros II issued a stark condemnation and asked for prayers for the man “kidnapped by Takfiri elements in North Sinai five months ago and subsequently martyred”.
The Church, continues the note, “weeps for a son and a faithful servant” who is now in the heavenly glory of Christ for having “testified to his faith even to the sacrifice of blood”. The declaration concludes by confirming the support of the Coptic Orthodox community “for the efforts of the Egyptian state” to counter “these hateful acts of terrorism” and “to preserve our dear national unity” for a “future of peace and prosperity”.
Islamic extremist groups have been fighting for years in northern Sinai, which intensified following the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and the rise of the Islamic State in the region the following year. Several Christians have also been targeted, killed in attacks against individuals and groups of faithful.
In February 2018, the Egyptian security forces, the army and the police launched a massive campaign against armed groups and jihadists, with particular attention to the North Sinai area.
In just over two years, more than 840 terror suspects and over 60 soldiers have been killed.
Addis Ababa – 22 April 20151. Demonstrators arrive in Meskel Square
More than 100,000 Ethiopians on Wednesday protested the killing of Ethiopian Christians in Libya and their own government’s failure to raise living standards of the poor, with poverty fuelling the flow of migrants through dangerous areas.
The government-supported march at Addis Ababa’s Meskel Square turned violent as stone-throwing protesters clashed with the police, who arrested at least 100 people.
The protesters chanted: “We want revenge for our sons blood,” referring to Ethiopians seen being beheaded or shot in a video released on Sunday by the extremist group Islamic State.
The Ethiopian victims were widely believed to have been captured in Libya while trying to reach Europe.
🔥 “In Sweden — the rape capital of Europe — studies continue to reveal that migrants, mostly from North Africa, the Middle East, and Muslim sub-Sahara, account for the overwhelming majority of rapes,”
🔥 “Four Muslim migrants from North Africa gang-raped a 36-year-old woman on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria, after she stopped to ask how she could help them.”
🔥 “A British woman (alias, Ella) revealed that her Muslim rapists called her “a white whore,” and much worse, during the more than 100 times the Pakistani grooming gang raped her in her youth.”
🔥 “According to Dr. Taj Hargey, a British imam, Muslim men are taught that women are “second-class citizens, little more than chattels or possessions over whom they have absolute authority.”
🔥 “A Muslim man who almost killed his 25-year-old German victim while raping her — and shouting “Allah!” — afterwards inquired if she liked it.”
Four Muslim migrants from North Africa gang-raped a 36-year-old woman on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria, after she stopped to ask how she could help them. According to the March 3 report,
The alleged victim is believed to have lived on the Canary Islands, whereas the suspects are thought to have arrived only recently on a boat…. [T]hey were given initially government-provided accommodations managed by the Red Cross but later kicked out for breaking the rules. They are then thought to have set up camp in the park where the woman was allegedly attacked after enquiring about their situation. The woman had asked if she could help them with anything, but within ‘a matter of seconds’ this had led to her being assaulted…
This woman, who was described “as either an Irish expat or coming from a Nordic country,” joins countless other European women — especially those “from a Nordic country” — to be raped by Muslim migrants.
Why is this ongoing phenomenon not being checked? One of the reasons revolves around the specter of “racism.” The “woke” establishment tends to see European women accusing Muslim men of raping them through a skeptical light.
For example, in Sweden — the rape capital of Europe — studies continue to reveal that migrants, mostly from North Africa, the Middle East, and Muslim sub-Sahara, account for the overwhelming majority of rapes, as captured by the following title: “Report: 9 in 10 Gang Rapists In Sweden Have Foreign Origins.”
To neutralize these findings, on March 9, 2021, the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention (“Brå”) said that “Immigrants’ sharp over-representation in rape statistics may be due to the fact that Swedish women are more likely to report immigrants for rape than they are to report Swedish men.” Stina Holmberg, a research councilor at Brå, elaborated:
It may be that you are more inclined to report something you [a Swedish women] have been exposed to, if the crime was committed by someone you feel more alien to, and who has low social status.
Skepticism for rape reports against non-white males turns to open hostility whenever this issue is forthrightly discussed, as Sarah Champion, a Labor politician and MP for Rotherham (the epicenter of sex grooming), learned last summer, when she was accused of “fanning the flames of racial hatred” and “acting like a neo-fascist murderer.” Her crime? She had dared to assert that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls.” (The same elements that accused Champion of being a “murderer” also, and rather unsurprisingly, characterize the UK’s anti-extremism program, Prevent, as being “built upon a foundation of Islamophobia and racism.”)
Perhaps most telling is an April 2020 article titled, “I was raped by Rotherham grooming gang — now I still face racist abuse online.” In it, a British woman (alias, Ella) revealed that her Muslim rapists called her “a white whore,” and much worse, during the more than 100 times the Pakistani grooming gang raped her in her youth.
“We need to understand racially and religiously aggravated crime if we are going to prevent it and protect people from it and if we are going to prosecute correctly for it,” Ella said in a recent interview.
Prevention, protection and prosecution — all of them are being hindered because we are neglecting to properly address the religious and racist aspects of grooming gang crimes…. It’s telling them that it’s OK to hate white people.
That there are “racial” and “religious” aspects to the epidemic of Muslims raping European women is an understatement. According to Dr. Taj Hargey, a British imam, Muslim men are taught that women are “second-class citizens, little more than chattels or possessions over whom they have absolute authority.” The imams, moreover, preach a doctrine “that denigrates all women, but treats whites with particular contempt.” Consider a few earlier examples:
Another British woman was trafficked to Morocco where she was prostituted and repeatedly raped by dozens of Muslim men. They “made me believe I was nothing more than a slut, a white whore,” she recollected. “They treated me like a leper, apart from when they wanted sex. I was less than human to them, I was rubbish.”
Another British girl was “passed around like a piece of meat” among Muslim men who abused and raped her between the ages of 12 and 14. Speaking now as an adult, a court heard how she “was raped on a dirty mattress above a takeaway and forced to perform [oral] sex acts in a churchyard,” and how one of her abusers “urinated on her in an act of humiliation” afterwards.
A Muslim man called a 13-year-old virgin “a little white slag” — British slang for “loose, promiscuous woman” — before raping her.
In Germany, a group of Muslim migrants stalked a 25-year-old woman, hurled “filthy” insults at and taunted her for sex. They too explained their logic — “German girls are just there for sex” — before reaching into her blouse and groping her.
Another Muslim man who almost killed his 25-year-old German victim while raping her — and shouting “Allah!” — afterwards inquired if she liked it.
In Austria, an “Arabic-looking man” approached a 27-year-old woman at a bus stop, pulled down his pants, and “all he could say was sex, sex, sex,” prompting the woman to scream and flee.
In short, there certainly is a “racist” aspect to the rape of European women by migrants — though in reverse: nonwhite Muslim men tend to see white women as nymphomaniacs that are “hot” for being degraded and abused — a stereotype that, incidentally, stretches back to the very beginnings of Islamic history.
Even so, Ella’s attempts to highlight these “religious and racist aspects” that fueled the abuse she and other European girls and women experienced — that is, her attempt to connect the dots in an effort to help eliminate this phenomenon — led only to “a lot of abuse from far-left extremists, and radical feminist academics,” she said. Such groups “go online and they try to resist anyone they consider to be a Nazi, racist, fascist or white supremacist.”
“They don’t care about anti-white racism, because they appear to believe that it doesn’t exist. They have tried to floor me and criticise me continually and this has been going on for a couple of months. They tried to shut me down, shut me up… I’ve never experienced such hate online in my life. They accuse me of ‘advocating for white paedophiles’ and being a ‘sinister demonic entity.’”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 15, 2021
Health officials say Ethiopian troops and their allies have been forcing women into sexual slavery in the Tigray region. That is after the conflict began there last year when Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed ordered an offensive. Thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced. Now, a woman’s story of surviving gang rape offers an insight into the sexual violence against women in Tigray and the Ethiopian military’s involvement. A warning – some viewers may find the information in this story distressing.
The young mother was trying to get home with food for her two children when she says soldiers pulled her off a minibus in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, claiming it was overloaded.
It was the beginning of an 11-day ordeal in February, during which she says she was repeatedly raped by 23 soldiers who forced nails, a rock and other items into her vagina, and threatened her with a knife.
Doctors showed Reuters the bloodstained stone and two 3-inch nails they said they had removed from her body.
The woman, 27, is among hundreds who have reported that they were subjected to horrific sexual violence by Ethiopian and allied Eritrean soldiers after fighting broke out in November in the mountainous northern region of Ethiopia, doctors said.
Some women were held captive for extended periods, days or weeks at a time, said Dr. Fasika Amdeselassie, the top public health official for the government-appointed interim administration in Tigray.
“Women are being kept in sexual slavery,” Fasika told Reuters. “The perpetrators have to be investigated.”
Reports of rape have been circulating for months. But Fasika’s assertion, based on women’s accounts, marks the first time an Ethiopian official – in this case, a top regional health officer – has made a sexual slavery accusation in connection with the conflict in Tigray.
In addition, eight other doctors at five public hospitals told Reuters that most of the rape victims described their attackers as either Ethiopian government soldiers or Eritrean troops. It was more common for women to report sexual violence by Eritrean soldiers, the doctors said.
The Eritreans have been helping Ethiopia’s central government fight the region’s former ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), in the conflict plaguing the Horn of Africa nation.
Taken together, the descriptions paint the most detailed picture to date of the sexual violence against women in Tigray and the military’s alleged involvement in it.
Most people interviewed for this article declined to be identified. They said they feared reprisals, including possible violence, by soldiers who guard the hospitals and towns.
Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed acknowledged in a speech to parliament on March 23 that “atrocities were being committed by raping women” and promised that the perpetrators would be punished. He did not identify the alleged perpetrators.
He said then for the first time that Eritrean soldiers had entered the conflict in Tigray in support of the Ethiopian government after the TPLF attacked military bases across the region in the early hours of Nov. 4. Ethiopia’s government had previously denied this, and the Eritrean government still does not acknowledge their troops’ presence. The TPLF was the dominant power in the central government when Eritrea fought a bloody border war with Ethiopia a generation ago.
Neither the Ethiopian nor the Eritrean governments responded to Reuters’ questions about specific cases raised by women and their doctors, or about the accusation of sexual slavery. No charges have been announced by civilian or military prosecutors against any soldiers. However, officials in both countries emphasized that their governments have zero tolerance for sexual violence – a point Abiy’s spokeswoman, Billene Seyoum, said the prime minister reiterated recently in discussions with military leaders.
The alleged sexual violence has drawn international attention.
Billene said the United Nations, the African Union and Ethiopia’s state-appointed human rights commission have been authorized to carry out joint investigations into alleged abuses by all sides in the conflict. That includes the “criminal clique,” she said, referring to the TPLF.
An Ethiopian military spokesman and the head of a government task force on the Tigray crisis did not respond to phone calls and text messages seeking comment. Reuters could not reach military leaders in either country.
Asked about the reports that Eritrean troops have committed rapes in Tigray and are keeping women in sexual slavery, the country’s information minister, Yemane Gebremeskel, accused TPLF activists of “coaching ‘sympathizers’ to create false testimonies.”
“All the fabricated stories – which are alien to our culture and laws – are peddled to cover up the crimes of the TPLF which started the war,” he told Reuters in a written response.
Reuters was unable to reach a TPLF spokesman.
RECORDS OF ABUSE
Fasika, the health official, said at least 829 cases of sexual assault have been reported at the five hospitals since the conflict in Tigray began.
Those cases were likely “the tip of the iceberg,” Fasika said. Rape is under-reported in Ethiopia because it carries a huge stigma. Also, most of the region’s health facilities are no longer functioning, and travel between towns remains dangerous, he said.
Most of the women who have come forward are either pregnant or sustained severe physical injury from the rapes, Fasika said.
Reuters interviewed 11 women who said they had been raped by soldiers from Eritrea, Ethiopia or both. Four said they were kidnapped, taken to military camps and gang raped, in some cases alongside other women. The women did not know the camp names but said they were located near Mekelle and the towns of Idaga Hamus, Wukro and Sheraro.
Five other women said they were held in fields or deserted houses for up to six days. And two said they were raped in their own homes.
Reuters could not independently verify their accounts. However, all told similar stories of being beaten and brutalized. Healthcare providers confirmed that the 11 women’s injuries were consistent with the events they described, and they showed Reuters medical records for three of the women detailing their conditions.
The health care providers also shared details of nine other cases of sexual assault, including the ordeals of two 14-year-old girls.
Although Ethiopia’s government declared victory over the TPLF in November, fighting continues in some areas, and medical workers say new rapes are reported at the region’s health facilities every day.
“This is being done to dishonour the women, to break their pride,” said a doctor at Ayder Referral Hospital, in Mekelle, citing the brutality of the attacks and humiliation of victims. “This is not for sexual gratification. The rapes are to punish Tigray.”
‘TELL MY STORY’
The 27-year-old mother said uniformed soldiers from Eritrea pulled her off a minibus on the road from Mekelle to the city of Adigrat on Feb. 6. They tied her up and marched her through fields to a bush camp, she said. After 11 days of rapes and beatings, she said, the soldiers forced nails, cotton, plastic bags and a rock into her vagina and left her alone in the bush.
Villagers found her unconscious and brought her to a nearby hospital.
She said she was still bleeding from severe internal injuries and could not control her urine, walk without a crutch or sit up for long periods. One leg was broken, she said.
She also described a different kind of pain: While in the hospital, she has no way to speak to her 4-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter because the Eritrean soldiers took her cellphone. She had left the children with her mother to search for food and never returned. At the time, the family had less than a week’s worth of bread.
“I don’t know anything, if they are dead or alive,” she said. “The enemy destroyed my life.”
A 32-year-old mother in Mekelle told Reuters that soldiers removed her from a minibus on the same road at the end of February. They were dressed in Ethiopian uniforms, she said, but spoke with an Eritrean accent and had traditional facial scarification typical of the neighbouring country. She said they shot her 12-year-old son dead in front of her, then brought her to a camp where she was held with other female captives and repeatedly raped for 10 days.
“Tell my story,” she said. “This is happening to women out there right now. I want this to end with me.”
A 28-year-old house cleaner said soldiers grabbed her from a street in Mekelle on the afternoon of Feb. 10 and took her to a field outside a military base where she was raped by more than 10 men wearing Ethiopian or Eritrean uniforms.
Wiping away tears, she said that during her two-week ordeal, soldiers doused her with alcohol and mocked her as they assaulted her. She escaped when her captors were distracted by gunfire, she said.
SHOT FOR RESISTING
The government has set up a task force separate from the human rights commission to investigate the reports of sexual violence. Its head, Mebrihit Assefa, said the body includes representatives from the regional health bureau, the attorney general’s office and federal police.
The task force plans to set up five centres where rape survivors can file reports with law enforcement and receive medical and psychosocial support.
“Our prosecutors (and) police officers are there to investigate all crimes committed, including sexual violence,” said Awol Sultan, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office.
He did not respond to questions about the women alleging they were raped during captivity, or whether prosecutors were in touch with either the Eritrean or Ethiopian militaries. The results of the criminal investigations will be released publicly at an unspecified date, he said.
Abera Nigus, the head of Tigray’s justice bureau, said the legal process was likely to be complicated because most courts are not functioning in Tigray, and many rape victims cannot identify their assailants.
Knowing their rapists are still at large also has discouraged women from seeking help, doctors said.
Many of the women who sought treatment at hospitals had vaginal and anal tears, sexually transmitted diseases and injuries that rendered them incontinent, said the Ayder hospital doctor, an obstetrician gynecologist. The doctor shared notes from 11 cases the hospital had treated involving women raped by soldiers.
One woman had been gang raped on three separate occasions, according to the hospital notes.
Another was five months pregnant when she was raped, the notes indicate. Two 14-year-old girls were sexually assaulted in front of their families. One girl had a hand and foot amputated.
💭 “At the center of this chaos is Abiy. At every turn he has blundered. He has overpromised, mistaken image for reality, made needless enemies and locked himself into dangerous alliances. Those who once embraced his rhetoric of reform and peacemaking are looking naïve at best. He’s not a consensus-builder, rather an agent of polarization. Perhaps most significantly for the incoming U.S. diplomatic team, the Ethiopian leader has demonstrated an explosive combination of hubris and poor judgement that make him an unreliable interlocutor — sitting atop a fragile country of 110 million people in a volatile region. There’s no obvious solution: it’s a problem from hell.”
👉 ፻/100% ትክክል! 👍
War broke out in the Tigray region of Ethiopia in November. Five months later, the scale of the carnage, destruction, and destabilization is becoming evident.
The spark for the fighting was an attack on army bases by soldiers loyal to the region’s ruling Tigray People’s Liberation Front which was at odds with the federal government headed by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. But wars don’t happen overnight: the European Union, International Crisis Group, and many others issued warnings. Most worryingly, Eritrea — with whom Prime Minister Abiy had made a much-heralded peace agreement in 2018 — had a scarcely-hidden war plan.
Abiy’s initial goal was cutting the TPLF down to size. But his coalition partners’ war aims appear to go much further. For Eritrea’s President Isaias Afewerki, the aim is nothing less than the extermination of any Tigrayan political or economic capability. For the militia from the neighboring Amhara region it is a land grab — described by the U.S. State Department as “ethnic cleansing.”
Since then, we have learned of massacres, mass rape, ransacking of hospitals, and hunger as a weapon of war. It’s an urgent humanitarian crisis—and a threat to international peace and security.
For the first month, the Trump administration endorsed the war, backing up Abiy’s depiction of it as a domestic “law enforcement operation” and praising Eritrea for ‘restraint’ — at a time when divisions of the Eritrean army had poured over the border and reports of their atrocities were already filtering out.
The Biden administration is building a sensible policy — but is hampered by the slow process of putting its senior team in place. Secretary of State Antony Blinken made reasonable demands. President Biden dispatched Senator Chris Coons to convey how seriously Washington is taking the crisis. A special envoy for the Horn of Africa — reported to be the senior diplomat Jeffrey Feldman — is due to be appointed, short-cutting the process of confirming an Assistant Secretary of State for Africa. The new USAID Director Samantha Power, a passionate advocate of action against mass atrocity, is awaiting confirmation.
But Biden’s approach is not working. To be precise, the Ethiopian government is providing just enough of a plausible impression of compliance to postpone or dilute effective action.
Blinken’s first demand was that Eritrean forces should withdraw. This pushed Abiy — after months of dissembling — to admit that the Eritrean army was actually present and that he would request Pres. Isaias to pull them back. Abiy’s problem is that if Eritrea withdraws, he loses Tigray: the Tigrayan resistance would overwhelm his depleted army. Isaias is a veteran operator and he has prepared for this: his security agents and special forces are now so strategically placed inside Ethiopia that Abiy’s fragile government would be endangered if he withdrew.
Second, the U.S. insisted on a ceasefire and political negotiations. This is essential to stop the battlefield slaughter — thousands were killed in combat in March—and the ongoing scorched earth campaign that is reducing Tigray’s economy to the stone age. But Abiy rejected this. He and Isaias appear determined to try one more offensive to vanquish the Tigrayan Defense Forces. What they fail to see is that inflicting atrocities only stiffens the resolve of the Tigrayans to fight back. Speaking on April 3 Abiy belatedly conceded that a “difficult and tiresome” guerrilla war is in prospect — but he has made no mention of peace talks.
Third, Blinken demanded unfettered humanitarian access for international relief agencies to provide food and medicine for to the starving. He might have added, without a pause in the fighting, farmers cannot prepare their lands for cultivation. The agricultural cycle brooks no delay: ploughing needs to begin soon, before the rains come in June. If there’s no harvest this year, hunger will deepen.
The World Food Program and international agencies are reaching about 1.2 million of the 4.5 million people estimated to need emergency relief. But there are reports that as soon as food is distributed, soldiers sweep through and take it from civilians at gunpoint. The aid effort is, at the moment, too little and too late.
Last, there should be an independent investigation into reports of atrocities, which the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has begun, but in partnership with the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission. This has the drawback that it’s unrealistic to expect the staff of an Ethiopian government body—whatever their personal integrity—to withstand the personal pressure that the authorities will put on them. And many Tigrayans will automatically reject their findings as biased.
The United States has other policies in this complicated mix too. Last year, the Treasury took on the task of trying to mediate in the Nile Waters dispute between Ethiopia and Egypt. Abiy inherited a huge dam, under construction on the Blue Nile, from his predecessors. It’s a point of national pride, the centerpiece of Ethiopia’s development. Egypt sees any upstream state controlling the Nile waters as an existential threat.
To protect the “Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam” project, Ethiopia’s ministry of foreign affairs had constructed a coalition of African riparian states, which isolated Egypt and minimized the danger of direct confrontation. Abiy upended this: 18 months ago he went into direct talks with Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who invited the United States to mediate — confident that the Trump administration would lean his way. Sudan, the other party to the talks, had no option but to line up with Cairo and Washington. By the time he had realized his error, Abiy was stuck, and the scenario foreseen by his diplomats was unfolding: Ethiopia was the one isolated as Egypt pressed home its advantage and the United States suspended some aid. Since then the talks have repeatedly broken down, with each side escalating its rhetoric.
To compound the error, in preparing for his assault on Tigray, Abiy antagonized Sudan. A few days before the war, he asked Sudanese leader General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan to seal the Sudanese border. He hadn’t anticipated that this would trample over a delicate live-and-let-live border agreement, whereby the Sudanese allowed Ethiopian farmers to cultivate land inside their territory. They were ethnic Amharas. In sealing the frontier, the Sudanese troops drove those villagers out — enraging the powerful Amhara regional government and igniting a needless border conflict.
To complicate the picture still further, Isaias’s planned axis of autocracy extends through Ethiopia to Somalia. A painstaking process of stabilizing and reconstructing Somalia is imperiled by President Mohamed Farmajo’s failure to agree an electoral timetable with the opposition, and refusal to step down when his term of office expired in February. Farmajo’s special presidential forces have been trained in Eritrea and many Somalis believe that he plans to use them to impose a military solution on his rivals.
The African peace and security order lies wrecked. The African Union has failed to act. Ethiopian diplomacy and pressure (the organization’s headquarters are in Addis Ababa) has kept Ethiopia’s war and Eritrea’s destabilization of the wider region off the AU agenda. Abiy rebuffed African mediators and convinced enough of his fellow African leaders that it was a purely domestic affair to prevent an African consensus position against the war. In turn, Africa’s inaction gave a green light to Russia and China to threaten to veto any resolution at the UN Security Council. Last month, the U.S. tried and failed this route. This passes the baton to the U.S. and Europe acting alone — at the G7 last week and next week at the Spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF.
At the center of this chaos is Abiy. At every turn he has blundered. He has overpromised, mistaken image for reality, made needless enemies and locked himself into dangerous alliances. Those who once embraced his rhetoric of reform and peacemaking are looking naïve at best. He’s not a consensus-builder, rather an agent of polarization. Perhaps most significantly for the incoming U.S. diplomatic team, the Ethiopian leader has demonstrated an explosive combination of hubris and poor judgement that make him an unreliable interlocutor — sitting atop a fragile country of 110 million people in a volatile region.
There’s no obvious solution: it’s a problem from hell.
The atrocities have been seared into the skin and the minds of Tigrayans, who take shelter by the thousands within sight of the homeland they fled in northern Ethiopia.
They arrive in heat that soars above 38 C (100 F), carrying the pain of gunshot wounds, torn vaginas, welts on beaten backs. Less visible are the horrors that jolt them awake at night: Memories of dozens of bodies strewn on riverbanks. Fighters raping a woman one by one for speaking her own language. A child, weakened by hunger, left behind.
Now, for the first time, they also bring proof of an official attempt at what is being called ethnic cleansing in the form of a new identity card that eliminates all traces of Tigray, as confirmed to The Associated Press by nine refugees from different communities. Written in a language not their own, issued by authorities from another ethnic group, the ID cards are the latest evidence of a systematic drive by the Ethiopian government and its allies to destroy the Tigrayan people.
The Amhara authorities now in charge of the nearby city of Humera took Seid Mussa Omar’s original ID card displaying his Tigrayan identity and burned it, the soft-spoken nurse said. On his new card examined by the AP, issued in January with the Amharic language, an Amhara stamp and a border of tiny hearts, even the word Tigray had vanished.
“I kept it to show the world,” Seid said. He added that only 10 Tigrayans remained of the roughly 400 who worked at the hospital where he had been employed, the rest killed or fleeing. “This is genocide … Their aim is to erase Tigray.”
What started as a political dispute in one of Africa’s most powerful and populous countries has turned into a campaign of ethnic cleansing against minority Tigrayans, according to AP interviews with 30 refugees in Sudan and dozens more by phone, along with international experts. The Ethiopian government of Nobel Peace Prize winner Abiy Ahmed is accused of teaming up with his ethnic group — his mother was Amhara — and soldiers from neighboring Eritrea to punish around 6 million people. Witnesses say they have split much of Tigray between them, with the Amhara in the west and Eritrean forces in the east.
Ethiopia claims that life in Tigray is returning to normal, and Abiy has called the conflict “tiresome.” But the refugees the AP spoke with, including some who arrived just hours before, said abuses were still occurring. Almost all described killings, often of multiple people, rapes and the looting and burning of crops that without massive food aid could tip the region into starvation.
For months, the people of Tigray have been largely sealed off from the world, with electricity and telecommunication access severed and mobile phones often seized, leaving little to back up their claims of thousands, even tens of thousands, killed. That has begun to change.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted last month that “ethnic cleansing” has taken place in western Tigray, marking the first time a top official in the international community has openly described the situation as such. The term refers to forcing a population from a region through expulsions and other violence, often including killings and rapes.
Refugees told the AP that Amhara authorities and allied forces in western Tigray have taken over whole communities, ordering Tigrayans out or rounding them up. A refugee from Humera, Goitom Hagos, said he saw thousands of Tigrayans loaded into trucks and doesn’t know what happened to them.
The Amhara now control some government offices in western Tigray and decide who belongs — and even whether Tigrayans exist at all. Some were ordered to accept the Amhara identity or leave, and others were told to leave anyway, the refugees said.
Lemlem Gebrehiwet was forced to flee while heavily pregnant and gave birth three days after reaching Sudan. She recalled the new authorities telling her, “This is Amhara.”
Shy, her baby girl waiting, she struggled to comprehend. “Maybe we did something wrong.”
Seid, the nurse, fled Humera early in the conflict after his hospital came under heavy shelling, with the wounded carried in screaming and colleagues killed. He returned in January in the hope that conditions had improved, as Abiy’s government promised.
They hadn’t. His home had been looted, and the remaining Tigrayans had shrunk to a quiet population of the elderly, women and children who were discouraged from speaking their own language, Tigrinya.
At the hospital, Tigrayans had to pay for care, unlike the Amhara. Anyone who came was allowed to speak Amharic only. Tigrayan staffers weren’t paid, and every night there was gunfire.
Ten days after returning to the hospital, Seid left for Sudan. Now, at this dusty post, refugees pass blazing days sprawled on plastic mats under shelters of woven straw. They stay perilously close to the border in the hope that missing loved ones will emerge from Tigray.
“The federal government is trying to be king. We Tigrayans refuse,” said one refugee, Nega Chekole.
In response to allegations that the Amhara are ordering Tigrayans to leave and issuing new ID cards, the spokeswoman for the prime minister’s office, Billene Seyoum, said the area is under a provisional administration “who are all from the region.”
The Ethiopian government says it rejects “any and all notions and practices of ethnic cleansing” and will never tolerate such practices, “nor will it turn a blind eye to such crimes.” However, almost everyone the AP interviewed said they had watched fellow Tigrayans being killed or seen bodies on the ground.
In her town of more than a dozen ethnic groups, Belaynesh Beyene was dealt a ghastly lesson in just how little Tigrayans suddenly were worth.
In the early days of the fighting, she said she saw 24 bodies in the streets of Dansha in western Tigray. The 58-year-old grandmother and other residents were prevented from burying them by the Amhara youth militia, a practice that witnesses across Tigray have reported as an added insult to grief. The practice applies only to Tigrayan corpses.
“They accidentally killed an ethnic Oromo in a Tigrayan household,” she said. “When they realized their ‘mistake,’ they came and buried him.”
A spokesman for the Amhara regional government, Gizachew Muluneh, didn’t answer questions from the AP. The Amhara have said they are taking back land they claim belongs to them.
Soldiers from Eritrea, long an enemy of Tigray’s now-fugitive leaders, have also been blamed for some of the worst human rights abuses. Under pressure, Abiy said last month the soldiers will leave, after long denying their presence.
Hiwot Hadush, a teacher from Zalambessa, said scores of people were killed after the Eritreans went house to house, opening fire.
“Even if someone was dead, they shot them again, dozens of times. I saw this,” she said. “I saw many bodies, even priests. They killed all Tigrayans.”
In another border community, Irob, furniture maker Awalom Mebrahtom described hiding and watching Eritrean soldiers order 18 Tigrayans, mostly young men like him, to lie in a remote field. They were shot to death.
The killings continue. In early March, after months on the run, 30-year-old Alem Mebrahtu attempted a desperate crossing of the Tekeze river. Separated from her three small children in the early chaos of the conflict, she had heard they were in Sudan.
Sympathetic women from the Wolkait ethnic group pleaded with Eritrean soldiers near the river to let Alem cross, while urging her to pretend to be Wolkait, too. It worked, but she saw a grim reminder of what could have happened if she had failed.
Bodies lay scattered near the riverbank, she said. She estimated around 50 corpses.
“Some were face-down. Some were looking up at the sky,” she said.
Exhaustion still pressed deep under her eyes, Alem started to cry. There by the river, confronted with death, tears hadn’t been allowed. The Eritrean soldiers beat people for expressing grief, she said.
Samrawit Weldegerima, who had arrived just two weeks earlier in Hamdayet, also saw corpses by the river, counting seven. Freshly branded on their temples were the markings some Tigrayans have to express their identity, she said.
“When I saw them, I was terrified,” Samrawit said, touching her belly, six months pregnant. “I thought I was already dead.”
Those who crossed the river were amazed to find that the Amhara were now in charge in western Tigray. Alem’s home in Humera was occupied by Amhara militia. She asked them for her clothes, but they had been burned. She was told to get out.
Reluctantly, to protect herself, she is trying to learn Amharic.
“Their aim is to leave no Tigrayan,” she said. “I hope there will be a Tigray for my children to go home to.”
The idea of home remains dangerous. Days after Abiy urged people in Tigray to return in late March, at least two men trying to do so from Hamdayet were fatally shot within sight of the border crossing.
They were buried by hundreds of refugees at the Orthodox church in Hamdayet, where the blank walls are being mapped for murals of sacrifice and salvation. Some of the faithful drop to their knees and clutch the stones, deep in prayer. Others rest their foreheads against the entrance, as if they can’t go on.
Even as the Amhara fighters took turns raping her, they offered the young woman a twisted path to what they considered redemption.
She had returned to her looted home in Humera. There, she was seized by militia members speaking Amharic. When she asked them to speak her native Tigrinya, which she understood far better, they became angry and started kicking her.
She fell, and they fell upon her. She remembers at least three men.
“Let the Tigray government come and help you,” she recalled them saying.
They also made her a proposal: “Claim to be Amhara and we’ll give you back your house and find you a husband. But if you claim to be Tigrayan, we will come and rape you again.”
The woman’s Amhara neighbor was present during the attack. When she later approached him for help, there was none.
“So what?” she recalled him saying. “You came back. Behave and be quiet.”
The woman cried all night. The next day, she found little comfort in learning that many others in her neighborhood had been raped, too.
“One mother and daughter had been forced to watch each other,” she said. “One woman was raped on the road, with people watching. Other accounts were worse than mine.”
She left for Sudan. It was mid-February. Afraid to speak with anyone, she waited almost a month before seeking medical care.
“I was ashamed,” she said, and started to cry. She watched the doorway warily, fearing the rumors that can spread among the refugees.
She said she was grateful to be HIV-negative, but she is pregnant. For a long moment, she was silent. She can hardly think about that yet. Her family back home doesn’t know.
The United Nations has said more than 500 rapes in Tigray have been reported to health care workers. But the woman from Humera, whose account was confirmed by her doctor, assumes many more survivors are hiding it just as she did. The AP doesn’t name people who have been sexually abused.
Several refugees from different Tigray communities told the AP they watched or listened helplessly as women were taken away by Amhara or Eritrean fighters and raped. It was like taunting, said Adhanom Gebrehanis from Korarit village, who had just arrived in Hamdayet with the welts from a beating by Eritrean soldiers on his back.
“They do these things openly to make us ashamed,” he said.
He described watching Eritreans pull aside 20 women from a group of Tigrayans and rape them. The next day, 13 of the women were returned.
Go,” Adhanom said the Eritreans told the others. “We already have what we want.”
A midwife from Adwa, Elsa Tesfa Berhe, described treating women secretly after Eritrean soldiers swept through health centers, looting even the beds and telling patients to leave. As Berhe snuck out to deliver babies and care for the wounded, she saw people trying to bury bodies at the risk of being shot, or pouring alcohol on corpses in an attempt to hide the smell.
With the health centers destroyed, little if any care remains for women and girls who have been raped. No one knows how many now carry the children of their attackers.
Berhe had just arrived in Sudan. She cried as she recalled a 60-year-old woman who was raped vaginally and anally by Eritrean soldiers and then waited for days, trying to hide the bleeding, before seeking help.
“She didn’t want to tell anyone,” Berhe said. She heard the woman ask, “Can anyone trust me if I say I was raped?”
Another woman was raped by four Eritrean soldiers while her husband hid under the bed, Berhe said. Her husband recounted the attack when they sought an abortion.
A third woman described how Eritrean soldiers ordered her father to rape her, then shot and killed him when he refused. The soldiers raped her instead.
Berhe fears that the situation in rural areas is even worse, as described by the displaced people arriving in cities. So far, few from the outside world can reach the areas where the majority of Tigrayans lived before the conflict, as fighting continues.
“Do you think there is a word to explain this? There is no word,” said a midwife from Humera, who gave only her first name, Mulu.
In Hamdayet she befriended seven women from the same village, Mai Gaba, who said they were raped separately by various fighters, including Ethiopian federal forces. Mulu fears that Mai Gaba is a conservative example and estimates that some communities have seen scores of assaults.
“This is to harm the community psychologically,” Mulu said. “Most of the people in Tigray support the (fugitive Tigray leaders). To destroy them, you must destroy Tigrayans.”
There is more to come.
Almost every person interviewed described a worrying shortage of food, and some said Tigrayans are being starved. Many recalled seeing crops being looted or burned in communities by Amhara or Eritrean fighters, a toll that even shows up in satellite imagery.
Kidu Gebregirgis, a farmer, said he was questioned almost daily about his ethnicity, his shirt yanked aside to check for marks from the strap of a gun. He said the Amhara harvested around 5,000 kilograms (5.5 short tons) of sorghum from his fields and hauled it away, a task that took two weeks. He shook his head in amazement.
The conflict began shortly before the harvest in the largely agricultural region. Now the planting season approaches.
“But there is no seed,” Kidu said. “There’s nothing to start again.”
The prospect is terrifying, said Alex de Waal, the author of a new report warning of mass starvation in Tigray and a researcher at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
“What I fear is that millions of people are in the rural areas, staying because they are hopeful they will be able to plant,” he said. “If they’re not able to plant, if food supplies run out, then all of a sudden we could see a mass migration.”
Tigrayans who passed through rural communities described starving people, often elderly, begging outside churches. Sometimes they did, too.
Alem, the exhausted mother, begged for money and tightened her clothes to control the hunger pangs. Abedom, a day laborer who only gave one name, begged while roaming the mountains and villages for three months.
“It was normal to go a whole day without food,” he said. “So many people were hungry. They loot everything, so if they take it all, how do I survive?”
The hunger was staggering. One refugee saw a man faint on the road in Adi Asr, close to death. Another described a fellow traveler so tired he simply stopped walking. Yet another saw a child, too weak to go on, left behind.
Again, ethnicity was crucial. Belaynesh, from Dansha, said she made sure to speak Amharic when approaching farmhouses in western Tigray for food.
Ethiopia, under international pressure, has said food aid has been distributed to more than 4 million people in Tigray. Refugees disagreed, saying they saw no such thing in their communities or asserting that food was being diverted.
Maza Girmay, 65, said she heard food was being distributed, so she went to the government office in her community of Bahkar to inquire.
“They told me, ‘Go home, you’re Tigrayan,’” she said. “We Tigrayans are Ethiopian. Why do they treat us as non-Ethiopian?”
The rejection brought her to tears. An Orthodox cross tattooed on her forehead, long faded from childhood, wrinkled with her sorrow.
In the community of Division, farmer Berhane Gebrewahid said he was shot by Amhara fighters seeking his cattle. He said food aid was distributed in February by Amhara authorities but refused to Tigrayans, including him. Even the name of his homeland had been changed to Northern Gondar, after a major city in Amhara.
A colonel with the Tigray fighters, Bahre Tebeje, worried that starvation will kill more people than the war itself.
“Most food aid returns to the Amhara and Eritreans,” he asserted, leaning forward intently, a tattered black-and-white kaffiyeh around his neck. “It’s not being distributed to the people.”
Severe malnutrition is already above emergency levels as humanitarian workers rush to reach communities, the U.N. has said. In Hamdayet, a handful of such cases were recently sent to a regional hospital for treatment, according to a doctor there. One woman, recovering, still couldn’t produce milk for her baby, who whimpered and sucked at a limp breast.
Battered and hungry, Tigrayans still arrive daily at the border post where Sudanese soldiers watch a no man’s land in the shadow of a fading flag. One recent evening, the AP saw three new refugees approaching.
In Sudan, the Tigrayans are registered and asked for their ethnicity. For once, they are free to answer.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on April 5, 2021
🔥 #TigrayGenocide / የትግራይ ጀነሳይድ
💭 “Many people believe that it is now genocidal, that what is a political intent to destroy is becoming now an intent to destroy, in whole or part, a people,”
We get an update on how the Ethiopian government has announced Eritrean forces are withdrawing from the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia, where harrowing witness accounts have emerged of Eritrean soldiers killing Tigrayan men and boys and rape being used as weapon of war by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers. Eritrea entered the Tigray region to support Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s military offensive in November targeting the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. The true death toll from the conflict remains unknown, but researchers recently identified almost 2,000 people killed in 150 massacres by warring factions. CNN senior international correspondent Nima Elbagir, who just returned from reporting on the region, says what started as a “competition for power” has descended into ethnic cleansing. “Many people believe that it is now genocidal, that what is a political intent to destroy is becoming now an intent to destroy, in whole or part, a people,” says.
