Tigray: Fleeing War
Nariman El-Mofty
The Associated Press
He still dreams each night of people being slaughtered, still screams in his sleep. The scars slope across the right side of his face and neck. Abrahaley Minasbo, a 22-year-old dancer who once used his body for self-expression, now lives with a partially amputated hand. Members of an Amhara militia dragged him from his home in the town of Mai-Kadra on November 9, 2020, and beat him in the street with a hammer, an axe, sticks and a machete – then left him for dead.
Now, in this fragile refugee community on the edge of Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict, those who fled the deadly fighting have brought accounts of horror. Some walked for days to reach the border, and once they did, were packed into buses or trucks for an arduous, 11-hour journey to a camp. As one vehicle left, a baby cried hysterically, and his brother held the infant toward the window for fresh air, saying the child was hungry and dehydrated, and the bus too crowded.
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Once they arrive at the camp, they wait. For food, for word from loved ones, for water. Some crowd around a tap for hours before they can fill their buckets. Children as young as seven struggle to lift the heavy jugs onto their backs.
Many arrive malnourished. One woman, who is 9 months pregnant, weighed just 45 kilograms (100 pounds). She wept when she saw the number on the scale. Another received a nutrition packet but couldn’t manage to eat it.
“Ethiopia is dying,” says doctor-turned-refugee Dr. Tewodros Tefera, repeatedly. He has been examining the wounds of war since it started: rape victims who only confide in him, dehydrated children, weak pregnant and lactating women. Slashes from axes and knives, broken ribs from beatings with weapons: Tefera is collecting a dossier of evidence, visualizing himself traveling one day to The Hague to support his people’s case.
It is not known how many thousands of people have been killed in Tigray since the fighting began on November 4, 2020, but the United Nations has noted reports of rape as a weapon of war, artillery strikes on populated areas, burnt crops, civilians being targeted and widespread looting.
The war broke out at the worst possible time for Abraha Kinfe Gebremariam and his family in Mai-Kadra. His wife Letay went into labor as violence surrounded them. To their surprise, Letay gave birth to not one, but two twin girls, Aden and Turfu. But the family was robbed of their joy, as Letay experienced complications from her labor and died 10 days later. Now, Abraha is left to raise the two newborn girls and his young sons in a refugee camp near the border in Sudan.
More than 62,000 refugees from Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region are in Sudan fleeing what most Tigrayans are calling “genocide.”
Nariman El-Mofty
