🛑 Travellers on an intercity train in Austria were startled on Sunday when a recording of an Adolf Hitler speech was played on board.
Instead of the normal announcements, a crowd could also be heard shouting “Heil Hitler” and “Sieg Heil” over the train’s speaker system.
The operator said there had been several such incidents in recent days.
One passenger on the Bregenz-Vienna service told the BBC that everyone on the train was “completely shocked”.
David Stoegmueller, a Green Party MP, said the speech by the Nazi German leader was played over the intercom shortly before the train, an ÖBB Railjet 661, arrived in Vienna.
“We heard two episodes,” he said. “First there was 30 seconds of a Hitler speech, and then I heard ‘Sieg Heil’.”
Mr Stoegmueller said the train staff were unable to stop the recording and were unable to make their own announcements. “One crew member was really upset,” he added.
In a statement sent to the BBC, Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) said: “We clearly distance ourselves from the content.
“We can currently assume that the announcements were made by people directly on the train via intercoms. We have reported the matter to the police,” the ÖBB said.
It is understood that complaints have been filed against two people.
Mr Stoegmueller said he had received an email from a man who was on the train with an old lady who was a concentration camp survivor. “She was crying,” he said.
He said another passenger remarked that when other countries had technical problems, it involved the air conditioning breaking down.
“In Austria, the technical problem is Hitler.”
Hitler was born in Austria and emigrated to Germany in 1913 as a young man.
“We all heard witness accounts of underage girls and old women being raped and gang-raped by the joint forces. Priests and deacons were slaughtered by the soldiers,” the testimony says.
👉 Courtesy: The Guardian
Lawyers bringing first complaint to Africa’s top rights body over conflict in country say violations ‘could amount to war crimes’
Ethiopia has committed a wide range of human rights violations in its war against Tigrayan rebel forces, including mass killings, sexual violence and military targeting of civilians, according to a landmark legal complaint submitted to Africa’s top human rights body.
Lawyers acting for Tigrayan civilians said the complaint, filed on Monday, marked the first time that the African Union’s human rights commission had been asked to look into the conduct of Ethiopian troops in their war with the northern region’s rebel forces.
The alleged violations, “could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, but further investigation would be required”, said Antonia Mulvey, executive director of the rights organisation Legal Action Worldwide (Law), which submitted the complaint with the US legal firm Debevoise & Plimpton and the Pan African Lawyers Union (Palu).
“The African Commission [on Human and Peoples’ Rights] has a unique opportunity to stand by victims and survivors from this conflict, to order emergency measures to stop unlawful killing of civilians trapped in Tigray and to hold Ethiopia to account,” added Mulvey.
Reporting to the 55-member African Union, the commission’s role is to investigate alleged human rights violations and make recommendations to heads of state and government. It can also make referrals to the African court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the union’s judicial arm.
The Law-Palu complaint alleges that since the conflict with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) erupted in November 2020, federal forces in Ethiopia have committed widespread violations, including the military targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure; mass and extrajudicial killings; gender-based sexual violence; arbitrary arrest and detention; mass displacement of civilians; destruction of property, food, and religious sites and cultural heritage; ethnic discrimination; and enforced information blackouts.
In a statement, lawyers said the allegations were based on the testimony of Tigrayan victims who could not be listed as complainants due to fear of reprisals from the government in Addis Ababa.
One written testimony, seen by the Guardian, contains allegations that Ethiopian and Eritrean forces carried out killings and rapes in the Shire region of Tigray in November 2020.
“We all heard witness accounts of underage girls and old women being raped and gang-raped by the joint forces. Priests and deacons were slaughtered by the soldiers,” the testimony says.
“The Ethiopian government has called the military operation in Tigray a ‘law-enforcement operation’,” the testimony continues. “But what we saw in Shire … was quite different. We saw with our own eyes that the military campaign was not only about eliminating the TPLF, but also about destroying the people and development of Tigray.”
A joint investigation released in November by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and the UN found there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that all parties to the conflict in Tigray had, to varying degrees, committed human rights violations. Some of those breaches, it added, might amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
On Monday, Law said that, while reports suggested that abuses had been committed by different parties, Tigrayan civilians constituted “the overwhelming majority of victims”.
Mulvey, a British solicitor who served on the UN’s fact-finding mission on Myanmar, said Law was keen to work alongside the commission’s existing inquiry into Tigray “to put an end to the impunity that has allowed these crimes to continue”.
Donald Deya, chief executive officer of Palu, said: “The government of Ethiopia is obliged by both its constitution and international law to protect all its citizens and residents from mass atrocities and violations of their human rights.
“Where it is unable or unwilling to uphold the same, as is the case here, we must seek recourse to competent international institutions. Hence, our urgent appeal to the African commission,” he said.
There was no immediate comment on the complaint from the Ethiopian government or the commission, which is based in the Gambia.
Ethiopia is not a state party to the founding statute of the international criminal court in The Hague, in effect making a trial there for alleged war crimes impossible without a referral from the UN security council. That possibility is considered highly unlikely due to objections from Russia and China, which can veto any such motion as permanent members of the council.
Yohannes and Gebremeskel knew it would be freezing cold inside the bulk cargo area of the Airbus A350 plane on the long flight from Ethiopia’s capital to Belgium.
But the two ground technicians with Ethiopian Airlines, both of Tigrayan origin, said they felt a threat from the Ethiopian authorities that left them no choice but to stow away among crates of fresh flowers.
Both men said family members had been detained under sweeping emergency laws that have targeted ethnic Tigrayans — and that they feared it was their turn next. The laws were imposed in November as Ethiopian government troops battle forces from the northern Tigray region in a bitter conflict that has now dragged on for 14 months. The government denies the laws targeted any particular group and recently lifted the state of emergency.
A view of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on November 27. Witnesses and Ethiopia's human rights commission accused authorities of arresting people in the capital based on ethnicity, using the wider powers granted by the state of emergency.
A view of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on November 27. Witnesses and Ethiopia’s human rights commission accused authorities of arresting people in the capital based on ethnicity, using the wider powers granted by the state of emergency.
So, in the early hours of December 4, Yohannes and Gebremeskel, both 25, made a spur of the moment decision to climb into the storage section of a converted Ethiopian Airlines cargo plane that was sitting in one of the hangars at Addis Ababa Bole International Airport, waiting for the early morning flight to Brussels, Belgium.
As ground technicians with Ethiopia’s flagship commercial airline for the past five years, they had access to the compartment for routine inspection purposes. But if their hiding place was discovered, they would face harsh punishment, they said. CNN has changed both men’s names at their request for security reasons.
For more than three hours before take-off, they hid in the cold among the cabin crew’s luggage, not far away from the plane’s cargo shipment — crates loaded with roses ready to be delivered to Europe.
“We took the risk. We were — we had no choice, we had no choice, we couldn’t live in Addis Ababa, we were being treated as terrorists,” Yohannes, who has now obtained asylum in Belgium, told CNN in one of several phone conversations.
Four of his relatives have been killed, his fiancée is in prison in Ethiopia’s Afar region and his sister, about seven months pregnant, was seized from his house along with his furniture, he said. Yohannes believes these killings and detentions were motivated by their Tigrayan ethnicity and actioned under Ethiopia’s new emergency laws. “I don’t know where she [his fiancée] is currently,” he added. CNN has not been able to independently verify the deaths or imprisonment of Yohannes’ relatives.
“We took the risk. We were — we had no choice, we had no choice, we couldn’t live in Addis Ababa, we were being treated as terrorists.”
Yohannes
A spokeswoman for the office of Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed noted in an emailed statement to CNN that the state of emergency was lifted on January 26, 2022.
“You would note that the Council of Ministers have today decided to lift the State of Emergency. Individuals apprehended under the SOE [State of Emergency] have been released in great numbers, over the past weeks by the security sector, following investigations,” spokeswoman Billene Seyoum Woldeyes said.
“The SOE was never enacted to ‘persecute’ any group of people based on their identity,” she said.
The pair are not the only airline employees to attempt a risky escape from their home country in recent weeks. On December 1, shortly before Yohannes and Gebremeskel fled to Belgium, two other Ethiopian Airlines technicians concealed themselves in a passenger aircraft destined for Washington, DC, a spokesperson for the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) confirmed to CNN via an emailed statement.
Yohannes and Gebremeskel decided to flee from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport after reports that security was more lax there following the suspension of dozens of Tigrayan guards.
Yohannes and Gebremeskel decided to flee from Addis Ababa Bole International Airport after reports that security was more lax there following the suspension of dozens of Tigrayan guards.
They had concealed themselves in the ceiling space above the seating, according to a source at Ethiopian Airlines with firsthand knowledge of the internal investigation that was launched afterward.
Their journey would last more than 36 hours in total, as the plane flew from Addis Ababa via Lagos, Nigeria, and Dublin, Ireland, before finally landing at Dulles International Airport in Washington, DC.
Upon arrival in the US, the individuals were detained by the US Department of Homeland Security before later being transferred to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
CNN has also spoken to several other Tigrayan employees of Ethiopian Airlines who have fled Ethiopia in recent months through their jobs as flight crew. They told similar stories of widespread detentions of Tigrayans in Ethiopia and of targeted ethnic harassment from within the airline.
Concealed above plane crew’s bunk
CNN has been unable to speak directly to the stowaways who reached Washington, DC, but the source at Ethiopian Airlines said that both men were also of Tigrayan origin.
A CBP spokesperson said in a statement to CNN that after an identification and security examination, officers discovered the two “possessed Ethiopian Airlines employee identification cards, and that they stowed away with the intent of claiming asylum in the United States.”
“The two Ethiopian males are presently housed at a federal detention facility pending a hearing before an immigration judge,” the statement added. “CBP issued a civil penalty to Ethiopian Airlines for the security breach and were briefed on measures the airline is undertaking to enhance the airline’s aircraft security plan.”
CNN has obtained photos of the inside of the Boeing 777 aircraft as it looked during an inspection in the aftermath of the escape. In some pictures, it is possible to see the crew bunk in the center of the plane’s seating area, which the two men reportedly entered before lifting a mattress to reveal a maintenance access panel.
The images indicate they then cut a larger hole in the panel to enable them to smuggle themselves through the gap into the plane’s ceiling. They hid in this spot, not far above the aircraft’s toilets, for over a day and a half. CNN showed Boeing the photographs and a Boeing representative deferred to Ethiopian Airlines for comment.
The source at the airline told CNN they believed the fact that the stowaways were former maintenance technicians for the airline enabled them to know exactly where to hide inside the plane to go undetected without damaging the structure of the aircraft.
That they had the necessary tools with them to cut through the panelling might suggest the pair had planned the attempt in advance, the source at the airline added.
In total, 16 Ethiopian Airlines technicians appeared to have escaped via any possible means, either by boarding as cabin crew and walking off or stowing away, he said. CNN has been unable to independently verify this number.
For Yohannes and Gebremeskel, the decision to flee was an impromptu one, they said. They picked the first scheduled flight to a European country that was available and had to leave possessions including their cell phones behind in their lockers.
For the whole of their seven-hour flight to Brussels, they sat in the cargo area of the Airbus A350 with no food, no water, in the freezing cold, unbeknownst to the other members of the crew on board.
“I didn’t even have any clothes with me, I was wearing the uniform for maintenance […] I’m still wearing it,” Yohannes said.
“We don’t have anything to change into here, no underwear, no shoes, even the shoes […] we tried to cover our feet and the legs with what we had, it was night shift, on night shift we have the jacket of Ethiopian Airlines crew,” Gebremeskel, who also obtained asylum in Belgium, told CNN.
It was not how Gebremeskel imagined he would experience his first trip out of Ethiopia. Despite working for five years at Ethiopian Airlines, he had never boarded an international flight.
Airline employees claim discrimination against Tigrayans
Many people have left Ethiopia by land since the conflict began in November 2020. As of mid-December 2021, more than 50,000 people had fled into neighboring Sudan, according to UN figures. At the peak of the influx, “more than 1,000 people on average were arriving each day, overwhelming the capacity to provide aid,” a UN report said.
A refugee camp in Um Rakuba, Sudan, pictured in August. More than 50,000 Ethiopians have fled to Sudan since the Tigray conflict began in late 2020, according to the UN.
A refugee camp in Um Rakuba, Sudan, pictured in August. More than 50,000 Ethiopians have fled to Sudan since the Tigray conflict began in late 2020, according to the UN.
Meanwhile, attempts to leave Ethiopia by air by legal means have become increasingly difficult for Tigrayans, according to Ethiopian Airlines employees CNN spoke with.
Several attempted to leave by boarding planes from Addis Ababa’s Bole Airport as legitimate passengers but were denied access due to their Tigrayan ethnicity, they claimed. One former employee told CNN there were four checkpoints at the airport where passengers had their passports checked before departure.
“They check place of birth and name,” they told CNN, recalling three of their own failed attempts to leave. If the person was born in Tigray or had a Tigrayan name they were denied exit from Ethiopia, the former employee said.
As a result, several employees told CNN they escaped by working on board international flights as flight crew and fleeing when the aircraft landed abroad, often when the destination was in Europe or the US.
CNN has obtained IDs that confirm the identities of all four men who stowed away. Flight paths of the two flights — the one to Brussels and the one from Addis to Dulles airport through Dublin — have also been crosschecked on FlightRadar24.
Ethiopian Airlines has not responded to CNN’s request for comment regarding the stowaways’ journeys or the allegations of discrimination against Tigrayans.
This is not the first time Ethiopian Airlines has made headlines during the conflict in Ethiopia. In October last year CNN revealed that the airline had been ferrying weapons between Ethiopia and Eritrea at the outset of the conflict in November 2020, an act that was condemned by the international community as a potential violation of aviation law.
CNN’s investigation triggered calls by US lawmakers for sanctions and investigations into Ethiopia’s eligibility for a lucrative US trade program. Ethiopia was kicked out of the program over human rights violations at the start of 2022.
The airline has issued multiple denials about transporting weapons.
‘We were shaking’
After the aircraft carrying Yohannes and Gebremeskel landed in Brussels, the two waited for their chance to reach the terminal building.
“There were two guys working on the aircraft. One was unloading the cargo shipment and the other was coming with a torch around the plane,” Yohannes said. “So when the first was unloading the flowers we jumped to the ground — me and my friend — we jumped, and we ran to the terminal.”
Inside, employees gave them water and something to eat, but Yohannes and Gebremeskel were still in shock. “We were afraid they were going to send us back […] The guards, they brought us tea, but we were kneeling down on the ground, we were shaking,” Yohannes added.
Slowly, they felt a sense of relief, perhaps for the first time since they took off from Addis Ababa.
Their decision to flee had been prompted in part by reports that 38 Tigrayan security guards had been recently suspended at Bole Airport, meaning security was more lax than usual, they said.
“We were afraid of course … Luckily, we were not found. If we had been found, the punishment would have been harsh.”
Gebremeskel
But NISS, Ethiopia’s national intelligence security service, was still searching every part of the aircraft before departure, Gebremeskel explained, in order to prevent escapes. The Ethiopian Prime Minister’s spokesperson, Billene Seyoum, did not comment on these allegations.
Ethiopian Airlines has not responded to CNN’s request for comment on the security situation at Bole Airport
“We had some tools with us, we were afraid they were going to catch us because they check — the guy from the national intelligence security service checks every flight before departure,” Gebremeskel said.
“We were afraid of course. We were sitting with some tools with us. Maybe they will come to check that we’re working on it. Luckily, we were not found. If we had been found, the punishment would have been harsh.”
Yohannes hopes that in Belgium, he will find a country that will “respect my demands, the right to life.”
Pieter-Jan De Block, their lawyer, confirmed in a statement to CNN that both his clients had “obtained international protection in Belgium” and that they’d been released from the center where they were staying.
For Gebremeskel, the picture is bittersweet. With his family still far away — his parents are in a refugee camp in Sudan — and no money or job in Belgium, life is not easy. Although he has accommodation now, his first two nights after being granted asylum were spent sleeping at a train station.
He told CNN he hoped one day to return to Ethiopia but that until the country is a place where “people aren’t treated differently for their ethnicity,” that hope feels very remote.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 27, 2022
🔫 Arms from UAE likely bound for Ethiopia & Eritrea
The Houthi armed forces seized a UAE-owned vessel allegedly ‘carrying military equipment’ off Hodeidah, spokesperson Brigadier General Yahya Saree announced in a televised address on Monday.
During the address, Saree presented footage of the vessel ‘Rwabee,’ showing vehicles and military equipment, as well as weapons and ammunition on board.
“The Yemeni naval forces succeeded in carrying out a special military operation targeting a vessel in the Yemeni territorial waters in the Red Sea, specifically off the Hodeidah Governorate, while it was carrying out hostile activities,” said Saree.
“This hostile vessel carries military equipment, including machinery and devices, and other equipment that is used in the aggression against the Yemeni people,” he went on to say.
He also pointed out that the naval forces “were watching this vessel as it was transporting large and different quantities of weapons,” adding that its seizure falls “within the framework of the legitimate defence of our country and our people.”
Saree concluded by emphasising that the armed Houthi forces “will not hesitate to carry out special operations and will face escalation with escalation.”
The Saudi coalition accused the Houthis of ‘piracy,’ announcing that the movement ‘hijacked the vessel ‘Rwabee’ off the port of Hodeidah,’ noting that it ‘was flying the UAE flag’ and ‘was carrying equipment which was used in the Saudi field hospital on the island of Socotra.’
The coalition called on the Houthis to release the ship ‘immediately,’ threatening that it would take ‘all necessary measures and procedures to deal with this violation, including the use of force.’
The Saudi-led coalition, with the participation of the UAE, began its military operations in Yemen in 2015 under the slogan of supporting government forces against the Ansar Allah Houthi movement after its forces seized the capital, Sanaa, in 2015, which subsequently resulted in the outbreak of a war that caused the worst humanitarian disaster in the world, according to the United Nations.
A ship hijacked by Yemeni militias in the Red Sea has 11 crew on board from five countries, the United Arab Emirates told the United Nations Security Council president on Monday.
Seven of the crew are Indian and the others come from Ethiopia, Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines, the UAE’s permanent representative said in a letter.
It denounced the “act of piracy” against the UAE-flagged Rwabee, which the Houthi militias seized on January 2.
The Iran-backed militias say they seized the Rwabee in Yemeni waters and have released a video which they say shows military equipment on board.
“This act of piracy is contrary to fundamental provisions of international law,” said the letter, signed by UAE ambassador Lana Nusseibeh and dated January 9.
“It also poses a serious threat to the freedom and safety of navigation as well as international trade in the Red Sea and to regional security and stability.”
Nusseibeh described the Rwabee as a “civilian cargo vessel” that was leased by a Saudi company and was carrying equipment used at a field hospital. It was travelling on an international route, she added.
The Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen to support the internationally-recognised government in March 2015 after the Houthis captured the capital, Sana’a, the previous September.
The UN estimated that the war would have killed an estimated 377,000 people directly or indirectly by the end of 2021, and calls it the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe.
Ethiopia FM condemns Houthi terrorist attack, affirms solidarity with UAE in phone call with H.H. Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed
💭 Turkish embassy in Ethiopia forced to move to Kenya over insecurity
Turkey’s embassy in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa has been moved to neighboring Kenya due to threats after the deployment of Turkish drones by the Abiy Ahmed regime to suppress the Tigray rebellion, the T24 news website reported.
Although the Turkish government hadn’t made an official statement regarding the sale of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to the Ethiopian government, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had visited the country and met with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan twice in the past six months, adding to the widespread belief that drones bought from Turkey, in addition to Iran and the United Arab Emirates, had changed the course of the civil war in Ethiopia, journalist Barçın Yinanç wrote in an article on the T24 news website on Monday.
“Turkey’s embassy in Addis Ababa cannot operate from the capital due to threats it has received. The ambassador and several embassy staff are serving from [neighboring] Kenya. There was no statement from the [Turkish] Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the matter,” the journalist said.
The conflict that has been going on for over a year in Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than 2 million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine.
Forces under Abiy Ahmed, the Ethiopian military, ethnic militias, and troops from neighboring Eritrea, are fighting to oust the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or T.P.L.F., from its stronghold in the northern region of Tigray.
In early November, the government teetered when fighters from Tigray surged south toward Addis Ababa, forcing the prime minister to declare a state of emergency. Foreigners fled the country and the government detained thousands of civilians from the Tigrayan ethnic group.
But weeks later Abiy pulled off a stunning military reversal, halting the rebel march less than 100 miles from the capital, then forcing them to retreat hundreds of miles to their mountainous stronghold in Tigray.
He succeeded partly by mobilizing ordinary citizens to take up arms to block the Tigrayan advance. However, his fortunes were greatly boosted by a fleet of armed drones, recently imported from the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Iran, that pummeled the Tigrayan forces, according to a report by The New York Times last week.
A drone strike on a flour mill in May Tsebri, a town in the northwest of Ethiopia (Tigray region), reportedly killed 17 people on Monday January 10 and injured dozens more, according to eyewitnesses.
The January 10 bombings came just days after a similar attack on a camp for displaced persons in Dedebit killed 59 and injured nearly 140 on Friday January 7.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 20, 2022
New revelations about atrocities by Somali soldiers in Ethiopia’s Tigray war are casting a spotlight on an emerging military alliance that has reshaped the Horn of Africa, weakening Western influence in a strategically important region.
The Globe and Mail has obtained eyewitness accounts of massacres by Somali troops embedded with Eritrean forces in Tigray in the early months of the war. The new evidence raises disturbing questions about a covert military alliance between Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia that has inflicted death and destruction on the rebellious Tigray region in northern Ethiopia.
Officially, the three governments have denied any alliance, and Somalia has denied that its troops were deployed in Tigray. But The Globe’s investigation has provided, for the first time, extensive details of civilian killings committed by Somali soldiers allied with Eritrean forces in the region.
Gebretsadik, a 52-year-old farmer from the village of Zebangedena in northwestern Tigray, said the dusty roads of his village were strewn with the bodies of decapitated clergymen in December, 2020, a few weeks after the beginning of the war.
Some of the priests and monks were people he recognized. Somali soldiers, working alongside Eritrean forces who had captured the village, had targeted churches and killed the clergymen, he said.
“They slaughtered them like chickens,” he told The Globe.
The Somali and Eritrean troops stayed in the village until late February, according to Gebretsadik, who often fled to the bushes and mountains around the village to escape attacks during that time.
The Globe talked to dozens of survivors who had witnessed atrocities in six Tigrayan villages where Somali troops had been stationed between early December, 2020 and late February, 2021. The Globe is not publishing their full names or their current locations because their lives could be in danger.
The survivors said the Somali troops were wearing Eritrean military uniforms, but they were clearly identifiable as Somali because of their language and their physical appearance. Unlike the Eritreans, they could not speak any Tigrinya, the language spoken in Tigray and much of Eritrea. The witnesses said they also heard the Eritrean troops referring to them as Somalis.
Last year, United Nations and U.S. officials said they had received information that Somali troops were present in Tigray, but few details were known. Somali parents held several protests in Mogadishu and other places in Somalia last year, complaining that their sons had been ordered to fight in Tigray after being originally sent to Eritrea for military training. Hundreds of Somali soldiers were reportedly killed in the fighting.
Up to 10,000 Somali troops were deployed in Tigray, according to current and former Ethiopian officials who spoke to The Globe. The Globe is not identifying the individuals because they face the threat of reprisals for their comments.
Until now, few details were known about the activities of the Somalis in Tigray. But the survivors told The Globe that the Somali troops had massacred hundreds of civilians in villages controlled by the Eritrean military, often beheading them. No Ethiopian troops were present in the villages, they said.
“They showed no mercy,” said Berket, a 32-year-old farmer in the Tigrayan village of Mai Harmaz. “The Eritreans interrogate you before they kill you. But the Somali troops were full of contempt for that.”
One of his neighbours, a 76-year-old priest, was among those killed by the Somali troops, he said.
Kibrom, a 37-year-old man who fled the village of Hamlo in January, said the beheadings by Somali troops became an “everyday reality” in his village.
“The churches were inhabited by the troops,” he said. “They burned the holy books and sacred objects. Churches became the most unsafe places. Villagers stopped going to churches because the Somali troops would kill anyone they found in churches.”
According to former Ethiopian officials, most of the Somali troops crossed the border from Eritrea into western Tigray in the early weeks of the war. They said the Somali troops, under the command of the Eritrean army, had already been stationed in trenches near the border before the war began.
“They undoubtedly have participated in the war,” said Gebremeskel Kassa, who was chief of staff in the interim administration in Tigray that the Ethiopian government appointed after seizing control of the region in the early months of the war. He later fled abroad, fearing for his safety when Ethiopian officials criticized him for Tigrayan military gains in the region.
Mr. Gebremeskel said he knew about the Somali deployment from his travels in Tigray and his private meetings with top Ethiopian officials and military generals.
“All of us who were top officials had knowledge of that,” he told The Globe. “The Somali troops took training in the Eritrean camp of Sawa as a result of a military deal between the three governments before the war started.”
When the deployment became politically controversial in Somalia, especially after the protests by the parents and questions by parliamentarians, the Somali soldiers were sent back to Eritrea, he said. They completed their withdrawal by March, the officials said.
The unofficial military alliance among Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, which is believed to date back to secret agreements after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in Ethiopia in 2018, is a further blow to the declining influence of Western governments in the Horn of Africa.
Eritrea had already been long isolated on the international stage, but Ethiopia and Somalia had close relations with the United States and other Western governments in the past. Ethiopia’s relations with the West have deteriorated since the Tigray war began, largely as a result of Western pressure to halt the war.
Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, the authoritarian ruler of his country for nearly three decades, is a key player in the three-country alliance. “He sees this as an opportunity to reshape the whole of the Horn of Africa in his direction,” said Martin Plaut, a British-based Eritrea expert and commentator.
“Getting these Somali troops involved was just the first instalment of this much longer, much more important relationship that he was trying to build in which he would be the king, with allies both in Somalia and Ethiopia,” Mr. Plaut told The Globe.
“He has pursued his ambition of destroying the Tigrayans since the 1970s. To achieve his ends, he would like to establish a transnational relationship in the Horn that allows the individual states to exist, but to support each other, while crushing local movements.”
Yemen’s Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility for the strike
Three people were killed and six wounded in an apparent drone attack on Abu Dhabi on Monday, UAE police have said. Yemen’s Houthi rebels have announced a strike “deep” in Emirati territory.
Three fuel trucks exploded in the industrial Mussafah area near storage facilities used by oil firm ADNOC, after which a “minor fire” broke out at a construction site at Abu Dhabi International Airport, the Emirati WAM news agency reported, citing police.
Preliminary investigation suggests that the blast and the fire were caused by a drone attack.
Police said that “no significant” damage was done to the area, later adding that two Indian nationals and a Pakistani national were killed, while six people were wounded.
Yemeni media reported that the Houthis had announced a military operation “deep in the UAE” and promised to reveal more details later on Monday.
Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree previously said that the rebels were confronting “a wide advance of the UAE mercenaries” and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) fighters.
The Saudi-led coalition intervened in the Yemeni civil war in 2015 on behalf of ousted President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi. The collation carried out bombing raids into the Houthi-controlled areas, while the rebels responded by firing rockets and sending armed drones into Saudi territory.
In 2019, a drone attack claimed by Houthis caused massive fires at several Saudi oil refineries operated by state-owned company Saudi Aramco.
💭 Ethiopian Canadians Painfully Watch Tigray Conflict From Afar
👉Courtesy: CBC News
💭 Ethiopian-Canadians have been painfully watching from afar as Ethiopia’s deadly conflict in the Tigray region between government forces and rebels, leaving thousands dead and more at risk of starvation.
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Addis Ethiopia Weblog 