A rare look inside a region still reckoning with the toll of war crimes, even as new conflicts roil the nation.
By Alexis Okeowo
Alexis Okeowo spent almost two weeks in Ethiopia for this article, visiting Amhara, Tigray and other areas with limited access to foreign journalists.
Before war broke out in Ethiopia, in late 2020, Mehari could take the bus home from her work as a doctor at a public hospital in Axum, a town in the country’s northern region Tigray. But then fighting between its ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, and Ethiopia’s federal government shut down public transportation, and Mehari was forced to walk 40 minutes between home and the hospital. After federal troops took the town and imposed a 6 p.m. curfew, Mehari would leave the hospital at the last possible moment, staying as long as she could to care for her patients. “I had to run from work to home almost every day,” she recalled. She was afraid soldiers would find her alone after curfew. “Maybe being killed could be the easiest thing that happens to you,” she said.
Mehari, who was 25, lived with friends at the time and worked in her hospital’s department of internal medicine. “I was on duty the day the war broke out,” she told me earlier this year, when we met in Mekelle, Tigray’s capital. “In the middle of the night, there was a blackout, and patients started coming. It was shocking. At my age, I’ve never seen war, so it was my first time seeing somebody who’s been hit by a bullet.” She was used to treating the victims of traffic accidents. The stories her patients told her of relatives and neighbors killed by soldiers and airstrikes, of fleeing the violence in their villages and seeking refuge in Axum, were “too much to process,” she said. “It was chaos. It wasn’t clear at first what was going on.”
It was the beginning of a civil war. Ethiopia is a vast and diverse country, with dozens of distinct ethnic groups, many of which want some degree of autonomy. The current prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, was elected in 2018 on a wave of optimism following nearly three decades of repressive minority dominance by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in the ruling coalition. (The Tigrayan ethnic group makes up only 6 percent of Ethiopia’s population.) Under its leadership, the country had economic growth, but the T.P.L.F. brutally suppressed political opposition and free speech, leading to festering resentment among Ethiopians from other ethnic groups. Abiy, who is Oromo, the country’s largest ethnic group, which has been historically underrepresented in national leadership, removed Tigrayans from their government posts and later referred to the T.P.L.F. as a “cancer” and as “weeds” that needed to be eradicated.
Tigray’s leaders balked at ceding power. After they held regional parliamentary elections in 2020, in defiance of Abiy’s orders, Abiy severed relations with the state. The T.P.L.F. then attacked an Ethiopian military camp in Tigray, claiming it was a pre-emptive strike before the federal government’s planned invasion. Abiy immediately sent more troops into Tigray. Only a year earlier, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for normalizing long-hostile relations with Eritrea, on Tigray’s northern border. Now the Ethiopian government was able to enlist the help of Eritrean troops, as well as thousands of fighters from the security forces of other Ethiopian states.
The efforts to weaken the T.P.L.F. extended to the Tigrayans as a people. Radio stations were no longer banned from broadcasting hate speech directed at them. Fighters and civilians alike were labeled “junta” by people in the federal government and Ethiopians of other ethnicities. Tigrayans were regarded as traitorous, unwilling to participate in the hopeful and unified country of Abiy’s promises.
The resulting civil war would last for two years and lead to accusations of war crimes against both sides. Human Rights Watch and other groups have documented rape and mass summary executions of civilians by the T.P.L.F. The Ethiopian government has been accused of mass rape and extrajudicial killings and detentions in Tigray.
But while both sides have been accused of crimes, their atrocities differ in scale. The U.S. State Department has described “ethnic cleansing” in Tigray. Ethiopian and Eritrean troops destroyed fields, crops and grain stores while the government imposed a communications blackout and blocked humanitarian aid. Ninety percent of Tigray’s population faced famine, according to the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator in 2021. As Mark Lowcock, a former U.N. relief coordinator, has said, the Ethiopian government “basically wanted to starve the Tigrayans into submission or out of existence.”
A study by Kiros Berhane, a biostatistician at Columbia University, found that more than 100,000 women in Tigray may have been raped by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers and their allies. “When they raped them, they told them that they came to destroy their wombs so that Tigrayan women will not give birth to Tigrayan children,” Yirgalem Gebretsadkan, who heads the research center on gender-based violence for the Tigray government’s Commission of Inquiry on Tigray Genocide, told me. More than 80 percent of the women who reported being raped told the commission they had been gang-raped. Eritrean soldiers who were H.I.V.-positive were ordered to rape H.I.V.-negative women. Boys and men were raped, too. Some 600,000 people have been killed in the conflict and millions more have been displaced from their homes.
Both sides agreed to stop fighting in 2022. As part of the peace deal, the Tigray Defense Forces were required to surrender their arms and send 270,000 fighters to makeshift rehabilitation camps, which were supposed to help reintegrate them into society. But those forces have said they will not fully disarm until Eritrean forces withdraw. Two years on, Abiy has yet to ask them to leave parts of western Tigray, an indication, perhaps, that he does not trust Tigrayan leadership to keep the peace.
During most of the war, the federal government didn’t allow foreign journalists to enter Tigray. Afterward, the world seems mostly to have forgotten about what happened there. But earlier this year, the photographer Malin Fezehai and I, together with an Ethiopian guide and translator, visited Tigray to witness a crisis that never really ended. And in the neighboring state of Amhara we saw a new and related war breaking out. Militants there, like those in other nearby states, had eagerly joined the conflict to support Abiy, but now they were unsatisfied with the peace deal.
As war raged in and around Axum — once part of a trading empire dating back to the first century A.D. and a UNESCO World Heritage site because of its obelisks, royal tombs and palace ruins — Mehari was reassigned to her hospital’s emergency room. Though she loved her work there, she no longer felt capable as she watched patients end up in septic shock, dying of curable conditions. And she found it hard to endure her own vulnerability. The town was shelled indiscriminately by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces. A good friend, a fellow doctor, was killed by the federal military. “At some point, whatever is happening, you’re going to be a victim of it,” Mehari told me. “The waiting for it was intolerable.”
So she handed off her duties and, with a friend, took a bus to eastern Tigray. There she joined the Tigray Defense Forces, learned how to use a gun and went to work as a medic. As a member of the medical teams, which had to carry the wounded on stretchers through active battlefields, she watched as people she had grown up with died right in front of her. “I just turned 26 when I joined,” she said, “and many of them were younger than me.”
Mehari didn’t think she would survive the war. But having done so, she told me, she still didn’t feel comfortable outside Tigray, in Ethiopia at large. (Because she fears retribution, I have used her middle name. For the same reason, I have used first names or nicknames to protect the identities of others in this article.) Things have seemed to only get worse. “It’s not over,” she said. “It has to be over for everyone, if all of us are going to feel at peace. We are still vulnerable, unprotected. The war hasn’t finalized, so somehow we are still in it. And I am still in it.”
Mekelle is a city of 500,000 people, located high above sea level. The capital is busy and modern, home to the sprawling Mekelle University as well as cafes, hotels and bookshops. Just outside the city, near the airport, we visited a refugee camp, a ramshackle place of tin-roof structures and flimsier tents of thick, white tarp. It was located in a big construction lot, with sand and stacks of bricks everywhere. Dirt devils swirled in the distance. The mood was desolate. The people I met there had once worked as lawyers, teachers and civil servants; they now begged for food. They were all from the town of Ab’ala, just over Tigray’s border in the mostly Muslim state of Afar. Ab’ala had been ethnically mixed: Almost 70 percent of its people were Tigrayan Christians; the rest were Muslim Afars. In December 2021, several thousand Tigrayans in Ab’ala suddenly had to flee their homes when their Afar neighbors turned on them and killed hundreds of people.
The refugees told me that Afar residents went around town marking the houses that had Tigrayans living in them. Roving civilian militias, working with the Afar Special Forces, then went to these houses, killing Tigrayans and looting their possessions. Tigrayan churches were set on fire. “It was like hell — there were heavy artillery sounds, there were mortar sounds,” an elderly man named Hailu told me. “They killed my cousin with his two family members. I barely escaped, jumping over their dead bodies.” He said he had come to Mekelle with nothing. “Everything there — our grain, cattle and mule carts — we don’t know their whereabouts.”
A 55-year-old doctor named Hagos, whose eyes frequently teared up, told me he was at home in Ab’ala with his wife and children when intruders came, seven of them, with guns and machetes. “You can’t describe the shock,” he said. Until that day, he said, Christian Tigrayans and Muslim Afars lived side by side: “We farmed together, we were working together, and we were together at funerals and weddings.”
Hagos recognized some of the intruders. Even the local police seemed to be helping as the group forced him outside. As his abductors led him away, past dead bodies on the street, they ran into an Afar man he knew. “He asked them where they were taking me, and they replied, ‘We are going to kill him,’ ” Hagos recalled. “He argued with them, and I survived.”
Hagos and his wife and their six children ended up in a detention camp in Semera, Afar’s capital. They were detained there for nine months. He said the guards beat them and gave them barely any food; a package of biscuits had to last for days. “You don’t know whether you are alive or not,” he said. “You don’t think anything.”
Eventually, after aid organizations pressured the Ethiopian government over the camp’s conditions, many of the detainees were released. Their relief at returning home to Ab’ala was short-lived. “After we were there for four days,” Hagos said, “they started killing. They started it again.” He and his family sought refuge in Mekelle. More than a year after the war’s end, he was too afraid to return home, unable to stop thinking about “the things they have done to us.” The people who did those things still moved around freely. Another man told me, “Our killers come to Mekelle and go as they please.” The Commission of Inquiry on Tigray Genocide estimates that more than 500 Tigrayans were killed in Ab’ala, as well as the surrounding area and Semera, based on interviews with survivors and the number of bodies found. In Ab’ala, bodies were abandoned on the streets, in bushes, in empty houses and in mass graves. They were eaten by dogs.
Surprisingly, we found Tigrayans still living in Ab’ala. The town, at the base of the Ethiopian Highlands, is vulnerable below the mountains that loom over it, where Tigrayan snipers were once stationed. Its main roads are lined with small businesses, cafes with plastic stools and stalls and vendors, but on some of their doors and walls, pro-Afar and pro-T.P.L.F. graffiti still lingered.
Kahsay, who is 50 and has family at the refugee camp in Mekelle, told me that he and his children expected to be killed during the violence in Ab’ala. “My friend who is Muslim, he was a good person, he got me out,” he said. Kahsay and his wife were sent to the detention camp in Semera for nine months, after which they returned to Ab’ala, despite its dangers. He was back at work, but he felt numb — his brother had been one of the victims of the violence in December 2021, taken from Kahsay’s house and executed. Kahsay saw men who participated in the killings on the street: “No one can touch them. They became rich, they bought cars.”
While we were talking at a cafe, a 23-year-old woman named Berkti was listening to us and crying. A Tigrayan, she had been in Ab’ala during the killings. Three men had come to her house, she said, and beat her with a gun, then raped four of her female relatives; Berkti knew all three men. They killed her uncle in front of her and stole her savings. Berkti had also been sent to the camp in Semera. She came back to Ab’ala after being unable to find a living elsewhere. But she regularly saw around town the men who beat her and tried to rape her. “I cry when I see anyone,” she said.
Afar residents told me they were not the perpetrators of such violence. They claimed to be victims of the Tigrayans. Ali, a 45-year-old civil servant who is ethnic Afar, said that once the Tigrayan forces entered Ab’ala after the original massacre, they burned one of his family houses and then looted his possessions. “They slaughtered the Afar people,” Ali went on, visibly upset. He estimated that dozens were killed in revenge. “They burned Afar houses and religious places.”
Ali denied that townspeople had participated in the violence against Tigrayans. “The killers are not from us,” he said. They came from other parts of Afar, he said, and they had been motivated by grudges against the former Tigrayan-led national government. A local religious leader and businessman named Mohammed also told me that the killers were not from Ab’ala. Both men claimed that more Afars had been killed than Tigrayans. “We are not like before,” Ali said. “There is a lot of tension.” Mohammed added, “There are still dead bodies everywhere.”
As tends to be the way in Ethiopia, as one conflict wound down, another began. In 2022, the Ethiopian government, apparently wary of the power of the militias that Abiy used to help fight the war in Tigray, began arresting thousands of people in Amhara. In the spring of 2023, it tried to force regional special police forces to disband and to be integrated into the national security forces. Armed groups in Amhara resisted. Now the federal government is actively fighting a powerful militia in Amhara, known as Fano.
When we visited, much of the recent fighting between the federal government and Fano had taken place outside the town of Lalibela, in Ethiopia’s highlands. A site of pilgrimage, Lalibela is famous for its huge ancient churches carved into red volcanic rock. Most of the residents, who number 20,000, depend on tourism. But the tens of thousands of international tourists who used to visit every year are mostly gone.
Fano refused to give up its arms following the peace deal between the Ethiopian government and the T.P.L.F. An Ethiopian senior official accused them of trying to overthrow the government — and, indeed, some Fano fighters told me they were trying to do just that. Many of them felt betrayed by the Tigray peace agreement and by a government that had promised them that if they fought against the T.P.L.F., they would be given land to expand their territory and more influence in the nation’s leadership.
Our first day in Amhara, as we were driving north of Lalibela, we happened upon a Fano checkpoint. The militia members who pulled us over greeted us warmly after they recognized our driver, who was from the local community. When we asked to talk with them, they invited us to a bar across the road. Uniformed fighters poured into the outdoor seating space. They were communicating through walkie-talkies because the federal government had cut cell service. At one point, some of them flagged down two approaching passenger buses. Several people got off and started excitedly taking selfies with the militants, asking them to hold up their guns and the Amhara state flag — evidence of the immense support for Fano in the area. After the flurry of picture-taking, the passengers got back on the buses. As they did, the fighters asked them for donations.
Most of the Fano fighters at the bar were young; this was their first experience of war. Two women, named Fenta and Lasta, joined me behind the bar in a small room with a single chair and a mattress on the ground, where we sat and talked. They were shy but certain, and they behaved like sisters. Lasta, who wore three delicate earrings in one ear, was 18, and Fenta, with curly hair cropped short, thought she was 19 but wasn’t sure of her age. Fenta said being a guerrilla fighter was the first time she had felt free in a long time. “I was forced into marriage with someone I don’t like,” she told me. Her uncle had arranged the ceremony several years earlier, and Fenta, whose mother was dead, had agreed to it in order to be able to take care of her younger sisters. After three years, Fenta left her husband, with whom she shared some cattle and farm produce. “I sold it all and gave the money to my aunt, who is looking after my younger sisters,” she said. “Then I immediately joined Fano.” She believed that the government was “working to pull apart and weaken Amhara.” She continued: “They made us fight with Tigray. They are like us. Young people, like us.”
Lasta had finished her final year of high school but decided against taking the leaving exam. “My school results were good,” she said. But she was pessimistic about her chances of success. “There is no peace in the country,” she explained. The women believed their Amharan identity and their religion — they were Orthodox Christians who carried with them into battle pages from the Book of David in small lockets — were under threat.
Both of them held their guns as they talked. “I am not trying to brag, but mostly the enemy soldiers are the ones dying a lot,” Lasta said, referring to the federal government’s troops. “They don’t fight and they run away. They are always nervous and fearful. They are big in numbers, but they are not effective. They just shoot blindly,” she said. “Some of the enemy soldiers are Amharas. They don’t want to fight us.” During one battle, Fenta was shot in the stomach, she said, and rolled down a hill: “I didn’t even feel the wound because I was furious.” The leader of their division, Wagnew Aderaw, estimated that more than a thousand government soldiers had surrendered to Fano.
Aderaw, who is in his 50s, had been a police officer and then business owner working in transport and construction before he joined Fano. Soft-spoken, with salt-and-pepper hair, he was married and had two children in the fight; another lived in England. “Ever since the current government took power, there have been killings and massacres targeting the ethnic Amhara,” he said, referring to the war against the T.P.L.F., among other conflicts. “And now its army is invading our province. The army retaliates in places where we don’t have control.” He went on to tell me that “mothers are being raped. Daughters are being raped. Children were a victim of mortar and heavy artillery attacks. I have never seen this kind of cruelty in my life.”
Fano didn’t have a “secession agenda,” he said. But, he went on, “when power is taken by others outside Amhara, which is the pillar of Ethiopia, they tend to promote the supremacy of their ethnic group at the expense of other ethnic groups.” Fano had to fight for survival.
Aderaw estimated that there were 15,000 to 20,000 Fano militants in the area. “One thing I can tell you is that all the people of Amhara are Fanos,” he said. “The people of Amhara are 100 percent with us.” (Outside experts note that the government still has supporters in the state.) He added that “the children are warriors, and they are skillful fighters, and they are fully dedicated.” A 21-year-old fighter named Mekdes, whose gun nearly dwarfed her, said her family supported her decision to join the militia.
Aderaw sent a comrade to fetch one of their prisoners, a baby-faced government soldier named Leta. “I surrendered myself voluntarily,” Leta, who was 22 and from the state of Oromia, told me. “I heard they don’t kill you if you surrender.” Several Fano militants watched him carefully, with smiles on their faces. Leta said he was “tired and fed up” of serving in the military after a year and a half, going without enough food and suffering in the intense heat. He had sent money back to his family in Oromia and eventually hoped to make his way to Addis Ababa to find work. I asked him where he got the money. “I sold my gun,” he said. The Fano militants laughed.
The unrest persists — out of the world’s sight, for the most part. As Laetitia Bader, the deputy Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said earlier this year, “Foreign governments and international organizations have sought to return to ‘business as usual’ with the Ethiopian government despite the absence of normality on the ground.” Much of Tigray is experiencing a hunger crisis, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. The federal government, meanwhile, is obstructing outside efforts to uncover the extent of the human-rights abuses that occurred during the civil war. A recent report from the New Lines Institute, an American think tank, cited evidence that both sides in the conflict had committed war crimes; members of Ethiopia’s and Eritrea’s militaries and the Amhara Special Forces also appeared to have committed acts of genocide against Tigrayans.
In May, Tigray’s leaders announced plans to return hundreds of thousands of Tigrayans to territories that Amhara fighters captured during the civil war, a provision of the 2022 peace deal. Some Amhara leaders say those plans could lead to war between the two regions. In July, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights noted that more than 2,000 civilians had already died in Amhara this year amid the fighting between Fano and the Ethiopian military.
The conflict extends to other countries too. Experts have found mounting evidence that the United Arab Emirates has been providing military support to Abiy, as well as providing arms to the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group in Sudan, where civil war has turned the country into a battlefield. (The U.A.E. denies this.) “Abiy’s big error, and the error of those who so uncritically welcomed him, was not to see that Ethiopia is a very breakable vessel, and that you need to balance all of these political, economic and ethnic factors to keep it going,” Alex de Waal, the executive director of the World Peace Foundation and an expert on the Horn of Africa, says. “He thought he could promise everything to everybody.”
Abiy won’t be delivering on any promises of accountability. All sides — Abiy, the T.P.L.F., Fano, the people and militias of other involved states — deny guilt and claim to be victims, and Abiy’s government has failed to take the lead in redressing injustices. “What has happened remains fundamentally unaddressed by the Ethiopian government and certainly the Eritrean government,” Steven Ratner, a member of the United Nations International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia, says. “There’s still no process in place to deal with the victims, whether that’s some kind of reparations or psychosocial support, whether it’s apologies or acknowledgment or any accountability by the forces of what they did.” And while it may be unrealistic to expect an unrepentant government responsible for abuses to publicly hold itself to account, Ethiopian leadership could take other crucial steps, like demanding the Eritrean military fully withdraw from Tigray. “The conflict isn’t over,” Ratner says. “There’s still Eritrean troops there, there’s still ongoing violations of human rights.”
In September, the White House announced that it would be extending sanctions against Ethiopia because of the ongoing “emergency,” an action that gives the U.S. government the authority to impose punitive measures on individuals and entities from Ethiopia, Eritrea, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and the regional government in Amhara.
Days after leaving Amhara, I received a message on WhatsApp from an unknown British number. It took a while before I realized I was messaging with Wagnew Aderaw’s son, Bereket, who lives in England. He had emigrated as a refugee and now attends school there. He told me that he helped raise money, with donations from people in the Amhara diaspora in Britain, to send to his father, the Amhara community and Fano militants every few months.
Bereket had watched his father go from working in local law-enforcement, to joining the war in Tigray, to now helping lead the Amhara rebellion. “It’s the one thing that is haunting me every day,” he said. “He’s been fighting his whole life.”
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