💭 Strange clouds have been found over the Iranian city of Helkhal. The reasons are unknown. This means that we can soon expect an earthquake like in Turkey where similar clouds appeared before the earthquake itself.
💭 Is America Behind The Genocide against Orthodox Christians of Ethiopia? Ned Price is confirming this!
💭 The Worst Mass Killing of The 21st Century by The Nobel Peace Laureate Abiy Ahmed Ali – who is The most evil ‘leader’ since Hitler is supported by the US adminstration.
☆ Since 2020 Genocide in Tigray: Over a million Orthodox Christians Massacred
☆ 200.000 Women, Nuns, Girls Raped in
☆ The Siege ofTigray is Causing mass Starvation for Millions
Think about it, Mr. Ned Price is telling us that America is working together with a brutal mass genocider who has slaughtered over a million Orthodox Christians. Think about it, Americans!
Atrocity comparisons tend to be odious, but the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has verified 7,199 civilian deaths in Ukraine. The number of combat deaths is in the tens of thousands.
By contrast, the number of casualties in Ethiopia might never be known. The best estimates have been put together by Jan Nyssen, a geographer at Ghent University in Belgium, who has calculated that up to 600,000 non-combatants died during the Tigrayan war between November 2020 and November 2022. Many of them starved to death. If one adds fighters who died in combat, the total number of deaths could approach 1 million.
At the Munich Security Conference a week ago, US Vice-President Kamala Harris accused Russia of committing crimes against humanity. But given the simultaneous near-planetary silence on Tigray, it is safe to conclude that not all crimes against humanity are equal.
To me, currently, there is no more concerning and life saving issue facing Americans and Europeans than what’s happening in Christian Ethiopia. Ukraine, Israel or Islamic states are less relevant. The account of world history we know today was created with a European world viewpoint at its core. Ethiopia is where the Two World Wars Began – and where the Third is brewing
Today, this evil world doesn’t want to talke about the fate of Ethiopian Christians, but The Almighty Egziabher God and His Holy Angels and Saints are in Northern Ethiopia.
The fact that the world today doesn’t even want to show a minimum degree of empathy with the Orthodox Christians of Ethiopia, tells us that this world is of Lucifer-Satan.
There is no other ‘Super Power” than The Supreme Almighty God Egziabher. Americans need to raise their voices and tell what this administration is doing is is very very wrong!! The administration knows exactly what’s happening to the Orthodox Christians of Ethiopia. Mr. Ned Price is openly telling us that the administration is working with the genocidal regime. In 2021 Ned Price used to say that the Biden Administration is working with the ‘People of Ethiopia’. Now, it is working ‘with the government of Ethiopia’.
Well, the journalist was supposed to ask a simpler question like; Why is the US working with the fascist Oromo regime of evil Abby Ahmed Ali that – together with the Eritreans, Amharas, Somalis, Arabs, Iranians and Turks – has massacred and starved to death over a million Orthodox Christians of Ethiopia in under two years?
💭 Why is The US protecting, aiding and trying to save the unsavable genocidal regime that has become a global pariah?” Why? Is America behind the genocide against Orthodox Christians of Ethiopia, Egypt, Armenia, Syria, Iraq, Serbia, Russia and Ukraine?
😈 This Antichrist Jihad started 1,400 years ago. In the seventh century, followers of the fake prophet Mohammad ‘migrated’ from Arabia to Axumite Ethiopia. Evil Mohammad wanted to exterminate Orthodox Christians of Axum, Ethiopia.
This Jihad continued throughout the time of the Ottoman Turk expansion and the Protestant reformation.
European interest in Ethiopian Christianity already existed in Luther’s era. Before and after 1517, Erasmus, Thomas More, Pope Clement VII, and others mentioned the Church in Ethiopia. Ethiopian expatriate communities existed in Rome, Venice, Cyprus, and Jerusalem. Luther himself mentions Ethiopia at least 85 times. Among these are references to ancient places and issues, while at least 15 refer to the then-contemporary empire of Christian Ethiopia.
Luther held the Ethiopian Church in great esteem. Uncorrupted by the Roman papacy, Ethiopian Christianity, according to Luther, possessed apostolic practices which were absent in Roman Catholicism and which Protestants would “adopt” through their own reading of Scripture: communion in both kinds, vernacular Scripture, and married clergy. Absent, meanwhile, within the Church in Ethiopia were European practices then under critique by various Protestant reformers: the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, indulgences, purgatory, and marriage as a sacrament.
For Luther, the Church of Ethiopia had more fidelity to the Christian tradition, and the practices mentioned above were marks of this fidelity. Thus, the Church in Europe needed to be reformed in the direction of the Church of Ethiopia. Possibly for Luther the Church of Ethiopia was proof that his reform of the Church in Europe had both a biblical and a historical basis.
But what we have seen and what we are currently seeing is the continuation of the Islamic Protestant Jihad on Orthodox Christianity.
— NATO is helping and aiding nazis in Ukraine in massacring Orthodox Christians of Ukraine and Russia
— NATO is helping and aiding Muslims of Turkey and Azaierbjain in massacring Orthodox Christians of Armenia.
A few days ago, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh rightly noted: “”Ukraine War Will Be Over Depending On How Many People Zelensky Wants To Kill”
This is exactly what happens in Ethiopia (The fascist Oromo regime exterminating may be up to three million Orthodox Christians) and what will happen in Ukraine (the Nazi regime of Zelensky exterminating upto 10 million Orthodox Christians of Ukraine, Russia and Moldova.)
💭 ‘Bolshevist’ Congressman Jamie Raskin Calls to Destroy ‘Orthodox Christian’ Russia by Jihad
💭 Anti-Orthodox Conspiracy: NATO ‘Ready to Act’ in KOSOVO if Tensions with SERBIA Escalate
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 27, 2023
The government of Ethiopia and the World Bank Thursday signed two grant agreements amounting to a total of $745 million. Finance Minister Ahmed Shide and World Bank’ s country director Ousmane Dione signed the two financial agreements following the approval of the grants by the World Bank’ s directors in mid-December. Of the total, the $445…
APA-Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) The government of Ethiopia and the World Bank Thursday signed two grant agreements amounting to a total of $745 million.
Finance Minister Ahmed Shide and World Bank’s country director Ousmane Dione signed the two financial agreements following the approval of the grants by the World Bank’s directors in mid-December.
Of the total, the $445 million grant will finance the implementation of a program to strengthen Primary Health Care Services in Ethiopia.
The program aims to improve access to and equitable provision of high-quality primary health care services and to further strengthen the country’s health system.
More than 22 million women and children, including those in conflict-affected areas are expected to benefit from the program.
“It will also restore facilities that were damaged by conflict, enabling millions of Ethiopians to get access once again to the services they direly need,” Ousmane said when the bank approved the fund last month.
The second $300 million Grant will also finance another nationwide program named Flood Management Project (FMP).
The project also is expected to enhance Ethiopia’s institutional capacity for disaster and flood risk management in selected river basins, according to the finance ministry.
Nearly 34 million people living in poor communities in the priority basins of Awash, Omo, and Rift Valley Lakes basins are expected to benefit from the project.
😈 United by their Illuminist-Luciferian-Masonic-Satanist agendas The following Edomite-Ishmaelite entities and bodies are helping the genocidal fascist Oromo regime of evil Abby Ahmed Ali:
☆ The United Nations
☆ The World Bank
☆ The International Monetary Fund
☆ The European Union
☆ The African Union
☆ The World Economic Forum
☆ The United States, Canada & Cuba
☆ Russia
☆ Ukraine
☆ China
☆ Israel
☆ Arab States
☆ Southern Ethiopians
☆ Amharas
☆ Eritrea
☆ Djibouti
☆ Kenya
☆ Sudan
☆ Somalia
☆ Egypt
☆ Iran
☆ Pakistan
☆ India
☆ Azerbaijan
☆ Amnesty International
☆ Human Rights Watch
☆ World Food Program (2020 Nobel Peace Laureate)
☆ The Nobel Prize Committee
☆ The Atheists and Animists
☆ The Muslims
☆ The Protestants
☆ The Sodomites
☆ TPLF
💭 Even those nations that are one another enemies, like: ‘Israel vs Iran’, ‘Russia + China vs Ukraine + The West’, ‘Egypt + Sudan vs Iran + Turkey’, ‘India vs Pakistan’ have now become friends – as they are all united in the anti-Christian, anti-Zionist-Ethiopia-Conspiracy. This has never ever happened before it is a very curios phenomenon – a strange unique appearance in world history.
💭 80-000 rally in Berlin in support of Iran protests
Thousands of people took part in demonstrations in Europe and the U.S. Saturday to show solidarity with protesters in Iran who are calling for an end to Iran’s authoritarian regime.
In Berlin, Germany 80,000 people showed up to show solidarity with the Mahsa Amini protests in Iran.
👉 The Ukraine war shows us:
😈 United by their Illuminist-Luciferian-Masonic-Satanist agendas The following Edomite-Ishmaelite entities and bodies are helping the genocidal fascist Oromo regime of evil Abby Ahmed Ali:
☆ The United Nations
☆ The European Union
☆ The African Union
☆ The United States, Canada & Cuba
☆ Russia
☆ Ukraine
☆ China
☆ Israel
☆ Arab States
☆ Southern Ethiopians
☆ Amharas
☆ Eritrea
☆ Djibouti
☆ Kenya
☆ Sudan
☆ Somalia
☆ Egypt
☆ Iran
☆ Pakistan
☆ India
☆ Azerbaijan
☆ Amnesty International
☆ Human Rights Watch
☆ World Food Program (2020 Nobel Peace Laureate)
☆ The Nobel Prize Committee
☆ The Atheists and Animists
☆ The Muslims
☆ The Protestants
☆ The Sodomites
☆ TPLF
💭 Even those nations that are one another enemies, like: ‘Israel vs Iran’, ‘Russia + China vs Ukraine + The West’, ‘Egypt + Sudan vs Iran + Turkey’, ‘India vs Pakistan’ have now become friends – as they are all united in the anti-Christian, anti-Zionist-Ethiopia-Conspiracy. This has never ever happened before it is a very curios phenomenon – a strange unique appearance in world history.
✞ With the Zionist Tigray-Ethiopians are:
❖ The Almighty Egziabher God & His Saints
❖ St. Mary of Zion
❖ The Ark of The Covenant
💭 Due to the leftist and atheistic nature of the TPLF, because of its tiresome, imported and Satan-influenced ideological games of: „Unitarianism vs Multiculturalism“, the Supernatural Force that always stood/stands with the Northern Ethiopian Christians is blocked – and These Celestial Powers are not yet being ‘activated’. Even the the above Edomite and Ishmaelite entities and bodies who in the beginning tried to help them have gradually abandoned them.
“Do not be afraid of what you are about to suffer. I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you life as your victor’s crown.”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on October 21, 2022
😲 Another Form of Indirect Technology Transfer?
Iran’s military on Friday is boasting that it has seized a pair of unmanned US vessels in the Red Sea at a moment tensions with Washington are at boiling point over arms transfers between Tehran and Moscow.
Iran’s Navy Chief, Admiral Shahram Irani issued a statement describing that the sea drones posed safety issues to area maritime navigation, as quoted in semi-official Tasnim news agency. According to the Iranian navy statement, “Where maritime safety was threatened by the unjustified forces in the region, Iran’s Army Naval Forces were able to seize 2 American unmanned vessels.”
“The US should know it must comply with international laws if it is shipping somewhere,” the admiral added. “The Islamic Republic of Iran, with its powerful presence in the region, will deal decisively with any move that endangers the security and safety of shipping, he stressed.”
Little is as yet confirmed of the incident, which an initial statement from the US Navy calling the Iranian claims “not true”. However, it appears something did happen, given other international monitors say they are tracking an incident unfolding.
According to Bloomberg, “The British Navy’s UKMTO said it is aware of reports of an incident in the vicinity of Ash Shihr, Yemen, according to a post on its website.”
Both the US and Israel have of late stepped a joint naval presence in the Red Sea region, citing both threats from Iran and Yemeni Houthi rebels, which are backed by Tehran have at various times attacked Saudi Arabia.
“Why this, all of a sudden, is now a big violation of 2231 when you didn’t call it out as such before? There was nothing done in terms of action on the drones being used in Ethiopia, in Syria… No action on Ethiopia.”
But now, they call it out as ‘a big violation of 2231’ because these Iranian drones are being used in ‘their beloved’ Ukraine.
By the way, Tehran got these drone technology ‘inadvertently’ from the US (remember the US drones ‘lost’ flying over Iranian airspace in 2011 & 2019?). In April 2012 (Re-election year of Barack Hussein Obama – and the drone + the billion dollars Obama & Biden given to Iran as a present ), Iran claimed it had copied technology ( reverse-engineering) from a US drone brought down in December 2011 on its eastern borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Israel has also ‘inadvertently’ contributed to Iran’s drone technology. When the Shahed-129 was unveiled in 2012, some noted similarities to the US MQ-1 Predator. It is a large drone able to carry eight missiles. However, analysts believe that its design can be traced back to a crashed Israeli Hermes 450 drone — two were apparently lost over Iran in the 1990s.
Furthermore, Iran gets more drones from China.
👉 The Ukraine war shows us:
😈 United by their Illuminist-Luciferian-Masonic-Satanist agendas The following Edomite-Ishmaelite entities and bodies are helping the genocidal fascist Oromo regime of evil Abby Ahmed Ali:
☆ The United Nations
☆ The World Bank
☆ The International Monetary Fund
☆ The European Union
☆ The African Union
☆ The United States, Canada & Cuba
☆ Russia
☆ Ukraine
☆ China
☆ Israel
☆ Arab States
☆ Southern Ethiopians
☆ Amharas
☆ Eritrea
☆ Djibouti
☆ Kenya
☆ Sudan
☆ Somalia
☆ Egypt
☆ Iran
☆ Pakistan
☆ India
☆ Azerbaijan
☆ Amnesty International
☆ Human Rights Watch
☆ World Food Program (2020 Nobel Peace Laureate)
☆ The Nobel Prize Committee
☆ The Atheists and Animists
☆ The Muslims
☆ The Protestants
☆ The Sodomites
☆ TPLF
💭 Even those nations that are one another enemies, like: ‘Israel vs Iran’, ‘Russia + China vs Ukraine + The West’, ‘Egypt + Sudan vs Iran + Turkey’, ‘India vs Pakistan’ have now become friends – as they are all united in the anti-Christian, anti-Zionist-Ethiopia-Conspiracy. This has never ever happened before it is a very curios phenomenon – a strange unique appearance in world history.
✞ With the Zionist Tigray-Ethiopians are:
❖ The Almighty Egziabher God & His Saints
❖ St. Mary of Zion
❖ The Ark of The Covenant
💭 Due to the leftist and atheistic nature of the TPLF, because of its tiresome, imported and Satan-influenced ideological games of: „Unitarianism vs Multiculturalism“, the Supernatural Force that always stood/stands with the Northern Ethiopian Christians is blocked – and These Celestial Powers are not yet being ‘activated’. Even the the above Edomite and Ishmaelite entities and bodies who in the beginning tried to help them have gradually abandoned them.
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – Dozens of women and girls have been raped and hundreds of civilians killed during fighting in Ethiopia´s Tigray region, according to an official document seen by The Associated Press.
Roughly 40 girls and women between the ages of 13 and 80 were raped in the town of Sheraro in northwestern Tigray, according to the document prepared by Tigray´s regional Emergency Coordination Centre. The center includes regional government bureaus, U.N. agencies and nongovernmental organizations.
The document reports eight more rapes, “including gang rape,” in the district of Tselemti, also in northwestern Tigray.
Issued Oct. 14, the document did not state who was responsible for the sexual violence. Nor did it state the time frame in which it occurred.
According to diplomatic sources, Eritrean and Ethiopian forces took control of Sheraro last month. Eritrean troops have fought alongside Ethiopia´s federal military since hostilities resumed in Tigray on Aug. 24 after a lull in fighting.
Diplomats have expressed alarm over reports of civilian casualties in the region as Ethiopia´s federal military this week took control of the major town of Shire and the federal government expressed its aim to capture Tigray´s airports and federal institutions.
A humanitarian worker based in Shire told the AP the town´s airport is now manned by Eritrean forces. Ethiopian and Eritrean forces have captured warehouses belonging to NGOs there, and Eritrean forces are specifically looting vehicles, according to the aid worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of safety fears.
U.S. officials have called on Eritrean forces to withdraw from Tigray and urged the parties to agree to an immediate cease-fire. The administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Samantha Power, has described the human cost of the conflict as “staggering.”
The internal document seen by the AP said 159 individuals have been “shot dead” in the Tahtay Adiyabo, Dedebit and Tselemti areas of northwestern Tigray, adding that others were maimed by gunshots and shelling.
A further 157 people were “taken by Eritrean forces” in Tselemti, Dedebit and Sheraro, according to the document, which said there is “no information (on their) whereabouts.”
The latest fighting has halted aid deliveries to Tigray, where around 5 million people need humanitarian help. A lack of fuel and a communications blackout are hindering the distribution of aid supplies that were already in the region.
Ethiopia´s federal government said Thursday it would participate in African Union-led peace talks expected to begin in South Africa next week. Tigray’s fugitive authorities are yet to confirm their attendance but have previously committed to participating in talks mediated by the African Union.
Both the U.N. Security Council and the African Union’s Peace and Security Council were due to discuss the conflict on Friday.
A World Food Program spokesperson told the AP “an armed group” entered its warehouse in Shire on Oct. 18, a day after Ethiopia´s federal government announced the town’s capture.
“WFP is actively working to confirm if the armed individuals remain and if any humanitarian stocks or assets have been taken or damaged,” the spokesperson said.
All sides have been accused of atrocities since the conflict in northern Ethiopia began almost two years ago.
Last week a report by the Amhara Association of America advocacy group said the Tigray forces had killed at least 193 civilians and raped 143 women and girls since August in the Raya Kobo area of the Amhara region, which borders Tigray.
The conflict, which began nearly two years ago, has spread from Tigray into the neighboring regions of Afar and Amhara as Tigray´s leaders try to break the blockade of their region.
“Calling out the atrocities for what they are would at least put Ethiopia and Eritrea on notice that the world is watching, and the long arm of international justice could ultimately prevail. Offenders in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, to name a few, ultimately faced justice after all.”
While the world’s eyes are trained on the war in Ukraine and whether Vladimir Putin is unhinged enough to use nuclear weapons, another war rages mostly unseen some 3,000 miles away in Ethiopia.
The war is centered on the northern region of Tigray, where a long-standing political conflict between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) turned violent in 2020. The region has been under a near total blockade for most of the time since, cut off from humanitarian aid, electricity, telecommunications and banking, leaving 5.3 million civilians in dire straits. The Ethiopian government’s renewed offensive has escalated the crisis even further.
Accurately estimating the dead while war continues is difficult, but the best estimates available suggest at least half a million people have died so far from direct violence, starvation and lack of access to health care. Starvation seems to be a feature rather than a bug in the government’s battle plan. More recent estimates suggest that this number have died in combat alone, possibly bringing the overall deaths closer to a million.
To put it in perspective, the United Nations estimates about 6,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine so far, and estimates put military deaths in the tens of thousands. Even if these estimates are low, the best available numbers suggest that the scale of death in Ethiopia exceeds that in Ukraine many times over. And yet Ethiopia has received a small fraction of attention, both from policymakers and the media.
The U.S. and others must take a more direct approach before the worst fears of the Tigrayan people are realized.
Those fears include a genocide of the people of Tigray. In response to the latest offensive, the United Nations, African Union, United States and other countries have called on all sides to cease hostilities. But generic calls for everyone to stop fighting and quiet behind-the-scenes diplomacy that has been the favored approach so far are a woefully inadequate response.
Tigrayan authorities have indicated that they would respect a cease-fire, but Ethiopian government officials have instead doubled down to lambaste the “evils” of its enemy. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian government has reportedly dropped leaflets in Tigray stating that anyone remaining behind would be considered a combatant, raising clear concerns that all Tigrayans, a distinct ethnic group, would be targets in an assault.
Sources from the area claim Ethiopian and Eritrean forces (their allies) have been instructed to kill three Tigrayans each, including elderly and children, and that victims’ limbs and skulls are on display.
These stories are unverified given the lack of humanitarian and media access to the region. But given the language and actions of Ethiopia so far, along with the death toll and atrocities already committed, there is little reason not to take them seriously.
Eritrea’s role has complicated efforts to reach a peace, too, as few countries have any leverage to influence its actions, and the TPLF is its sworn enemy. There is no guarantee that Eritrea will stop fighting even if the Ethiopian government comes to the table.
While it’s true that all sides have committed abuses, the scale is hardly comparable, with Ethiopia and Eritrea committing the lion’s share of wanton violence and harm against civilians throughout the conflict. When one side holds this level of responsibility for continuing conflict and suffering, those who hold any sway must speak out clearly and directly against it.
At this stage, peace looks like a long shot, but that does not excuse the inadequate efforts made so far.
The U.S. and the United Nations are often loath to invite criticism by directly calling out states for violent acts against their own people when those states are friends and partners, as Ethiopia is.
It won’t likely end the war, but that is a weak excuse for not trying harder. The innocent people of Tigray deserve acknowledgment, and there is a chance that such international pressure, in combination with policy choices that reduce Ethiopia’s support, through international institutions and individual countries alike, could influence the path Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed chooses.
Calling out the atrocities for what they are would at least put Ethiopia and Eritrea on notice that the world is watching, and the long arm of international justice could ultimately prevail. Offenders in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, to name a few, ultimately faced justice after all.
We must stop shying away from uncomfortable conversations when so many lives are at stake. If U.S. leverage is inadequate, we should press the countries who arm and support Ethiopia and Eritrea, and the international financial institutions like the World Bank which keep the country afloat as its economy falters.
The time for quiet diplomacy is over. The time for alarm has long since passed. Echoing what we’ve heard repeatedly about the plight of Ukraine: If Ethiopia stops fighting, the war ends, but if Tigray stops fighting, in the absence of international oversight and an inclusive peace process, the impoverished people of Tigray might end instead.
Just a quick, brief statement. The Security Council just met to discuss the conflict in Ethiopia, in a closed meeting. And I want to take the opportunity to thank the A3 and the African Union for leading on this process, including the statement that was issued by the African Union today, and we were briefed by the African Union.
It is disappointing that the council did not agree on issuing a statement, which is why it’s important for me to come out here today.
As the Secretary-General said this week, “The situation in Ethiopia is spiraling out of control. The social fabric is being ripped apart, and civilians are paying a horrific price.” In the past week alone, we’ve seen a serious uptick in fighting and violence. Thousands of Ethiopian, Eritrean, and TPLF forces are engaged in active combat. The scale of the fighting and deaths rival what we’re seeing in Ukraine, and innocent civilians are being caught in the crossfire. Over two years of conflict, as many as half a million – half a million – people have died, and the United States is deeply concerned about the potential for further mass atrocities. And we all should be.
We’re also horrified by the recent death of an aid worker from the International Rescue Committee and the injuries of others. We heard today that a total of 26 humanitarian workers had been killed over the course of the past two years – that’s approximately two per month. This tragedy underscores the serious dangers facing humanitarian workers in the region. And as I told the Security Council just now, it’s past time for all of the parties to lay down their weapons and return to peace. It is past time for a cessation of hostilities and for unhindered humanitarian access to all those in need. And it is past time for Eritrean Defense Forces to halt their joint military offensive and for Ethiopia to ask Eritrea to withdraw its soldiers from Northern Ethiopia.
💭 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.
💭 Ethiopian businessman of Tigrayan origin, Samson Teklemichael gets kidnapped in a broad daylight in Nairobi.
They watched friends die in the mountains of Tigray. They survived imprisonment. They paid bribes and suffered from injuries as they fled the civil war devastating Ethiopia.
When the four Tigrayan asylum seekers made it to Nairobi this spring, at first they felt safe. Living in a one-room apartment more than 1,000 miles from the fighting, the friends — three medical workers and one journalist — said they were reassured to be in Kenya, a democracy and one of the region’s most stable countries.
But it was not long before their sense of security dissipated. Rumors abounded about intelligence officers surveilling Tigrayans on behalf of the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments.
Then, late last month, in an incident that sparked an outcry in Kenya and attracted international attention, two men dragged a prominent businessman of Tigrayan descent out of his Bentley and into a Subaru as he sat in Nairobi traffic. A traffic officer appeared in a widely shared video to be holding the door of Samson Teklemichael’s car open to assist his captors. Teklemichael could be heard pleading for bystanders to record his capture.
More than two weeks after Teklemichael was taken, it is not clear who was responsible or what their motivation was, said Kenya police spokesman Bruno Isohi Shioso. Police are still investigating, he said, and seeking tips from the public.
Mulugeta, one of the four Tigrayan friends living in Nairobi, was so shaken he did not leave the apartment for two days.
“I felt free,” he said. “But now my hope is lost.”
For more than a year, Ethiopia has been engulfed in a civil war that has claimed thousands of lives and put hundreds of thousands at risk of famine. The fighting between Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government forces and rebels led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) began as a political power struggle and is now increasingly driven by ethnic rivalries.
Human rights groups warn that Teklemichael’s disappearance is an ominous indicator of the long reach of Abiy, who just two years ago won the Nobel Peace Prize. He has referred to leaders of the TPLF, which dominated the country’s politics for three decades and is resented by many non-Tigrayan Ethiopians, as “cancer” and “weeds.”
Abiy’s spokeswoman Billene Seyoum declined to comment for this story. Another government spokesman, Legesse Tulu, did not respond to requests for comment.
U.S. special envoy for the Horn of Africa Jeffrey Feltman said during a news conference that he would look into the alleged abduction, adding that reports of police in Addis Ababa going door-to-door arresting Tigrayans were alarming. The United States, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom on Tuesday condemned reports of mass detentions of Tigrayans by the Ethiopian government, saying arrests without charges “likely constitute violations of international law and must cease immediately.”
“The brazen daylight abduction of Mr. Teklemichael on a busy Nairobi street has left many people shaken,” said Irũngũ Houghton, executive director for Amnesty International Kenya. “The collapse of the rule of law that we have seen in Addis Ababa, with thousands of Tigrayans being arrested on the streets, that chaos, that lawlessness, must not be allowed to show up in Kenya.”
Teklemichael’s wife, Milen Haleform Mezgebo, said in an interview that she had not heard from her husband since he was taken. Fearing for the safety of their three children, she pulled them out of school.
Mulugeta and his three friends limit their interactions with new people. When they see other Ethiopians on the street, they wonder if they are spies. Citing security concerns, they spoke on the condition that they be identified only by their second names.
The men are part of what analysts say is likely a large network of Tigrayans living illegally in Nairobi, unrecognized by the Kenyan government or UNHCR, the United Nation’s refugee agency. There were only 168 refugees from Tigray officially registered in Kenya in 2020 and 2021, said UNHCR spokeswoman Eujin Byun, and they have been transferred to Kakuma, one of Kenya’s refugee camps, per the government’s policy. The pandemic has contributed to a backlog of processing requests, Byun said.
Ethiopian asylum seekers must come through Kakuma to complete the refugee registration process, said Joseph Kotolo, Kenya’s head of refugee status determination. But the men in Nairobi said they worry about their health and safety at Kakuma, where nearly 200,000 people live in often bleak conditions. They believe the thousands of Ethiopians living there could pose a threat, although spokespeople for UNHCR and Kenya’s refugee agency said they had not heard reports of any attacks targeting Tigrayans at Kakuma.
The four men acknowledged, though, that their legal limbo contributes to their fear. They have repeatedly called the U.N. hotline, trying to secure status as legal refugees.
Teklemichael was “a businessman and a legal person who had been living in Kenya for a long time,” Mulugeta said. “I am not a businessperson. I am not a legal person. I have no money. … If he was abducted, what about us?”
Getting out
After fighting broke out last November in Ethiopia’s mountainous north, each of the men experienced a different version of the terror that forced them to leave.
Mulugeta, who was in Addis Ababa, said he was repeatedly punched by a police officer and dragged to a makeshift prison where he was detained for 40 days.
Hailay and Khasay, who worked together in the Tigray region’s health department, said they watched bombs kill two pharmacist colleagues in the hills of Abiy Addi in December. Hailay, 28, and Khasay, 26, tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate the men, who had been walking dozens of feet ahead of them. There was no time to bury the bodies, they said, because more bombs were coming. They alleged the bombs were dropped by the Ethiopian government.
Teklemariam, 27, a childhood friend of Hailay, said he ran from Eritrean soldiers who repeatedly shot at him after taking control of his hometown, Enticho. Soldiers looted his family’s farm, he said, taking grain, shoes, clothes and cooking supplies.
When he traveled to Tigray’s capital last winter to pick up his paycheck, he called Hailay. With Khasay, they devised a plan.
“The only choice,” Teklemariam said, “was to escape from that horror.”
The deterioration of Africa’s second-most-populous country has been staggering. Once heralded for pursing democratic reforms and brokering peace deals in the region, Prime Minister Abiy is leading the battle on the front lines. The United Nations predicts hundreds of thousands of refugees will flee.
Traveling by bus through Ethiopia, Hailay, Khasay and Teklemariam were stopped near the border by an official at a checkpoint. He asked for their identification cards and demanded to know where they were coming from, they said. Not wanting to lie, they told him Tigray’s capital. Then he brought them to a small, bug-infested house where they estimated about 50 men were being held as prisoners.
For four days, the men said they were beaten by guards who demanded money they did not have.
Eventually, Hailay reached a friend who convinced the officials to release them.
With money gathered from friends, they paid smugglers to get them to Nairobi. The nearly 500-mile journey took a week by foot, motorbike and van. They ate only a handful of times, drank water from the river; and traveled mostly at night to avoid detection. At one point, the smugglers insisted they cross a crocodile-infested river.
Mulugeta, who they met on the journey, became like an older brother.
When Mulugeta, 35, fainted in the heat at one point and badly burned his leg while falling off a motorbike at another, they helped care for him. And when Mulugeta learned his friends in Nairobi had offered to pay for a one-room apartment, he offered to share it.
‘We are not secure here’
Teklemariam walked through Nairobi’s bustling streets one October evening, collecting the ingredients needed for dinner. He bought cow meat from the butcher around the corner and injera — a spongy bread that is a staple of Ethiopian cooking — from a woman who enveloped him in a hug.
He fist-bumped a gaggle of children on the way out.
“Nice Ethiopians,” he said, explaining that the family that owned the store was from the Amhara region, which has long had tense relations with Tigray. But they had welcomed him and his friends.
Back in the room, the other three men were carefully weaving around each other in the corner that served as a kitchen, chopping onions and chile peppers, starting the gas burner on which the meat stew would be cooked and arranging stools and sleeping pads around the makeshift table.
Since arriving in March, each has had their own struggles.
When the TPLF advanced in November, Teklemariam cheered. But rounds of government airstrikes in Tigray that were reported to have killed civilians muted his excitement. He guessed that any TPLF gains would be followed by retaliatory strikes. He feared for his family, from whom he had not heard in months because of a government communications blackout.
“Many Tigrayans are in a blue mood at this moment,” said Teklemariam, who said he was too traumatized to watch footage of the strikes. “Many people have become silent.”
The current situation, the men said, is not sustainable. Unable to work, they rely on the generosity of Nairobi’s Tigrayan community. They eat only two meals a day and have started buying pasta and ugali, a stiff flour porridge, because it is cheaper than injera.
Their six-month passes acknowledging them as asylum seekers expired in October. They said their calls to the U.N. hotline have been brushed off.
Teklemariam emerged from an interview with Kenya’s refugee agency in November in tears. An official told him, he said, to report to Kakuma or go back to his country.
Friends have said the only other way to get the paperwork needed to be in Nairobi legally is to pay bribes. But they do not have the money.
They now hope to get even further away, maybe to the United States or Europe.
What they know for now, Teklemariam said, is this: “We are not secure here.”
Six countries including the United States expressed concern on Monday over reports of widespread arrests by Ethiopia of Tigrayan citizens based on ethnicity in connection with the country’s year-old conflict, urging the government to stop acts they said likely violate international law.
The United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Denmark and the Netherlands cited reports by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and the rights group Amnesty International on widespread arrests of ethnic Tigrayans, including Orthodox priests, older people and mothers with children.
The countries said they are “profoundly concerned” about the detentions of people without charges, adding that the government’s announcement of a state of emergency last month offered “no justification” for mass detentions.
“Individuals are being arrested and detained without charges or a court hearing and are reportedly being held in inhumane conditions. Many of these acts likely constitute violations of international law and must cease immediately,” the six countries said in a joint statement.
They urged Ethiopia’s government to allow unhindered access by international monitors.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s spokesperson Billene Seyoum and Ethiopian government spokesperson Legesse Tulu did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the statement.
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