HAMDAYET, Sudan (AP) – One survivor arrived on broken legs, others on the run.
In this fragile refugee community on the brink of the Tigray conflict in Ethiopia, those who fled nearly two months of deadly fighting continue to bring new horror stories.
At a simple clinic in Sudan, a refugee doctor, Tewodros Tefera, examines the wounds of war: children injured in explosions. Scratches from axes and knives. Beaten ribs. Raw scratched feet from hiking days to safety.
On a recent day, he treated the broken legs of his fellow refugee Guesh Tesla, a recent arrival.
The 54-year-old carpenter came with news of about 250 young people abducted for an unknown fate in a single village, Adi Aser, in neighboring Eritrea by Eritrean forces, whose involvement denies Ethiopia. Then, in late November, Guesh said he saw dogs feeding on civilian bodies near his hometown of Rawyan, where he said Ethiopian soldiers beat him and took him to the border town of Humera.
There, he said, he was taken to a court, which he said was turned into a “slaughterhouse” by militia in the neighboring region of Amhara. He said he heard the screams of the people killed and managed to escape by crawling at night.
“I would never return,” Guesh said.
These accounts remain impossible to verify, as Tigray has remained almost completely sealed by the world for more than 50 days since fighting broke out between Ethiopian forces, backed by regional militias and those in the Tigray region that had dominated the country’s government for nearly three decades.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner for political reforms that marginalized Tigray leaders, continues to reject global “interference” amid calls for unhindered humanitarian access and independent investigations. The conflict has shaken Africa’s second-largest country, with 110 million people, and threatens to break Abiy’s peace in Africa’s turbulent Horn.
“I know the conflict has caused unimaginable suffering,” Abiy wrote last week, but said “the heavy costs we have incurred as a nation were necessary” to keep the country together.
No one knows how many thousands have been killed in Tigray since the fighting began on November 4, but the United Nations has seen reports of artillery strikes in populated areas, with civilians being targeted and widespread looting. What happened “is as heartbreaking as it is awful,” UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said last week.
Now, refugees are arriving from deeper areas inside Tigray, amid reports that fighting continues in some locations. These newer arrivals have more severe trauma, Dr. Tewodros said, with signs of hunger and dehydration and some with gunshot wounds.
The stories of refugees such as Tewodros and Guesh and the civilians who remain in Tigray are the ones that will eventually reveal the scope of the abuses that are often perpetrated on the ethnic line.
“Everyone looks at you and shows you the part of you that doesn’t belong to them,” said Tewodros, who has both Tigrayan and Amhara origins. “So if I go to Tigray, they would say I am Amhara, because Amhara is not part of them. When I go to Amhara, they raise the Tigray side because Tigray is not part of them. “
Such differences have become deadly. Many ethnic Tigrinya refugees have accused Amhara ethnic fighters of targeting them, while survivors of a massacre last month in the town of Mai-Kadra say Tigrinya fighters targeted Amhara. Other attacks followed.
Abrahaley Minasbo, a 22-year-old trained dancer, said members of the Amhara militia dragged him from his home in Mai-Kadra on November 9 and beat him on the street with a hammer, ax, sticks and a machete, then they left him for dead. The scars now tilt to the right side of his face and neck. He was treated only six days later by Tewodros in Sudan.
Another patient, 65-year-old farmer Gebremedhin Gebru, was shot while trying to flee Amhara militia in his hometown of Ruwasa. He said he stayed there for two days until a neighbor found him. People “will be hit if they are seen helping” the injured, Gebremedhin said.
For Tewodros, the conflict has been one civilian victim after another since the bombings began in early November while he was working at a hospital in Humera. Some bombings came from the north, he said, in the direction of nearby Eritrea.
“We didn’t know where to hide,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Fifteen bodies arrived at the hospital on the first day and eight the next day, he said. Then, as the bombing continued, he and his colleagues fled, transporting the injured patients on a tractor to the nearby community of Adebay. They abandoned that city when the fighting intensified.
Tewodros and colleagues hid in the forest for two days, hearing gunshots and shouting, before marching for more than 12 hours, hiding from military convoys and crossing a river in Sudan. There, he accepted a volunteer position with the Sudan Red Crescent Society, which treated fellow refugees.
“Where we are now is extremely uncertain,” he said of the reception center near the border, citing Amhara fighters approaching the riverbank and threatening refugees. The militias “are more dangerous than the Ethiopian national forces,” he said. “They’re crazier and crazier.”
He does not know what is next for his wife and two small children in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. He hasn’t seen them in 10 months, and the kids always ask him when he can come home.
Ethiopia’s prime minister often speaks of “medemer” or national unity, Tewodros said in a country with more than 80 ethnic groups. “It simply came to our notice then. Medemer would have been my children. “But he doesn’t know if his children, also of mixed ethnicity, have a future in the country.
Guesh, the father of three children, knows even less about what will happen next. He left his wife and three children a month ago in the village of Adi Aser, where a farmer offered them shelter. Now, like many refugees torn from their families, he does not know if they are alive or dead.
Every time he sees a new refugee arriving in Sudan, he spreads photos of his family, so emotional that he can barely speak. In this conflict that remains so long in the shadows, he now relies on strangers to know their fate.
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Hadero reported from Atlanta. Cara Anna from Nairobi contributed.