HAMDAYET, Sudan – One survivor arrived with broken legs, another on the run.
In this fragile refugee community on the brink of Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict, those who have fled nearly two months of deadly fighting continue to deliver new reports of horror.
In a simple clinic in Sudan, one doctoral refugee, Tewodros Tefera, examines the war wounds: children injured in explosions. Gases from axes and knives. Broken ribs from beatings. Feet scraped raw from days of walking to safety.
On a recent day, he treated the crushed legs of fellow refugee Guesh Tesla, a recent arrival.
The 54-year-old carpenter reported that about 250 young men from a single town, Adi Asher, were abducted after an unknown fate in neighboring Eritrea by Eritrean forces, who deny Ethiopia. In late November, Guesh said he saw dogs feeding on the bodies of civilians near his hometown of Rawyan, where he said Ethiopian soldiers beat him and took him to the border town of Humera.
He said he was taken there to a courthouse which he said had been turned into a ‘slaughterhouse’ by a militia from the neighboring Amhara region. He said he heard the screams of men kill, and managed to escape by hiding at night.
“I will never go back,” Guesh said.
Such reports are impossible to confirm, as Tigray has been impossible to confirm for more than 50 days since the fighting between Ethiopian forces, backed by local militias, and those of the Tigray region that had dominated for nearly three decades.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, last year’s Nobel laureate in political reforms who also marginalized Tigray leaders, continues to reject global “interference” amid calls for unrestricted humanitarian access and independent investigations. The conflict has shaken the second most populous country in Africa, with 110 million people, and threatens to destroy Abiy’s peacekeeping force in the turbulent Horn of Africa.
“I know that the conflict has caused unimaginable suffering,” Abiy wrote last week, arguing that “the great cost we incurred as a country was necessary” to keep the country together.
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No one knows how many thousands of people have been killed in Tigray since the fighting began on November 4, but the United Nations has noted the attacks on artillery in populated areas, civilians targeted and widespread looting. What happened “is just as heartbreaking as it is horrific,” Michelle Bachelet, head of UN human rights, said last week.
Now, refugees from areas deeper inside Tigray are coming amid reports that there are fighting in some places. The new arrivals have worse trauma, Dr. Tewodros said, with signs of hunger and dehydration and some with gunshot wounds.
These are the reports of refugees like Tewodros and Guesh, and civilians living in Tigray, that will eventually reveal the extent of abuse often perpetrated along ethnic lines.
“Everyone looks at you and points out the part of you that does not belong to them,” says Tewodros, who is from both Tigrayan and Amhara. So if I go to Tigray, they will see that I am Amhara because Amhara is not part of them. If I go to Amhara, they will pick up the part of Tigray because Tigray is not part of them. ”
Such differences have become fatal. Many ethnic Tigraya refugees have accused ethnic Amhara fighters of targeting them, while survivors of one massacre in the city of Mai-Kadra last month say Tigraian fighters targeted Amhara. Other attacks followed.
Abrahaley Minasbo, a 22-year-old trained dancer, said Amhara militia members dragged him out of his home in Mai-Kadra on November 9 and hit him in the street with a hammer, an ax, sticks and a machete and him then left. for the dead. Scars now move across the right side of his face and neck. He was only treated by Tewodros in Sudan six days later.
Another patient, 65-year-old farmer Gebremedhin Gebru, was shot while trying to run from Amhara militia members in his city of Ruwasa. He said he lay there for two days until a neighbor found him. People “will be hit if they are seen helping their wounded,” Gebremedhin said.
For Tewodros, the conflict has been one civilian accident after another since shelling began in early November when he was working in a hospital in Humera. According to him, there are some shelling in the direction of nearby Eritrea.
“We did not know where to hide,” he said. “We did not know what to do.”
Fifteen bodies arrived at the hospital the first day, and eight the next day, he said. As the shooting continued, he and colleagues fled, carrying wounded patients on a tractor to the nearby community of Adebay. They left that city when fighting intensified.
Tewodros and colleagues hid in the woods for two days and heard gunfire and shouting, before walking for more than 12 hours, hiding for military convoys and crossing a river to Sudan. There he accepted a voluntary position at the Sudanese Red Sickle Society which treats fellow refugees.
“Where we are now is extremely unsafe,” he said of the reception center near the border, referring to the Amhara fighters approaching the riverbank and threatening the refugees. The militias “are more dangerous than the Ethiopian national forces,” he said. “They’re more insane and crazy.”
He does not know what lies ahead for his wife and two small children in the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. He has not seen them for ten months, and the children always ask him when he can come home.
The Ethiopian prime minister often speaks of “fellow”, or national unity, Tewodros said in a country with more than 80 ethnic groups. “I would have been a partner. Medemer would have been my children. But he no longer knows if his children, also of mixed ethnicity, have any future in the country.
Guesh, a father of three, knows even less of what is to come. He left his wife and three children a month ago in the town of Adi Asher, where a farmer gave them shelter. Like many refugees torn from their families, he does not know whether they are alive or dead.
Every time he sees a new refugee arriving in Sudan again, he keeps taking pictures of his family, so emotionally that he can barely speak. In this conflict that remains so much in the shadows, he now relies on strangers to know their fate.