NAIROBI, Kenya — Ethiopia’s defiant Tigray regional government has fired rockets at two airports in the neighboring Amhara region as a deadly conflict threatens to spread into other parts of Africa’s second most populous country.
The Tigray regional government in a statement on Tigray TV said such strikes will continue “unless the attacks against us stop.” The federal government said the airports in Gondar and Bahir Dar were damaged in the strikes late Friday, asserting that Tigray regional forces are “repairing and utilizing the last of the weaponry within its arsenals.”
The deadly fighting that erupted in the northern Tigray region on Nov. 4 has reportedly killed hundreds on both the federal government and regional government sides, sent well over 17,000 refugees fleeing into neighboring Sudan and raised international alarm about a possible civil war at the heart of the Horn of Africa.
Each side regards the other as illegal, the result of a monthslong falling out amid dramatic shifts in power after Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office two years ago. The Tigray regional government, which once dominated the country’s ruling coalition, broke away last year and the federal government now says its ruling “clique” must be arrested and their well-stocked arsenal destroyed.
Fears of ethnic targeting are rising. The Tigray regional government, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, in a statement denied allegations that scores or even hundreds of civilians were “hacked to death” Monday in the regional town of Mai-Kadra. The massacre was confirmed by Amnesty International, which cited a man helping to clear away bodies as saying many of the dead were ethnic Amharas.
The statement by Tigray regional president Debretsion Gebremichael asserted that the allegations against the TPLF forces, repeated by Abiy, are “being proliferated with the intent to incite hatred toward (ethnic) Tigrayans in Ethiopia.”
“A justified risk/threat of fear of ethnic profiling and discrimination has arisen,” the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission said in a statement Saturday. It has visited 43 people in police custody in the capital, Addis Ababa, and said “some of the detained have reported that they have been arrested only because of their ethnicity.”
The international community is warning against deadly ethnic tensions. The U.N. office on genocide prevention has condemned reports of ”targeted attacks against civilians based on their ethnicity or religion” in Ethiopia, warning that the rhetoric sets a “dangerous trajectory that heightens the risk of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”
Communications and transport links with the northern Tigray region remain severed, making it difficult to verify claims on both sides of the fighting. Desperate families cannot reach relatives, and the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations warn of disaster as food, fuel and other supplies run short for millions of people.
A top TPLF official appeared to confirm the federal government’s claim that TPLF forces sparked the conflict by attacking a military base. Sekoutoure Getachew in a video discussion said pre-emptive strikes were carried out in self-defense against the Ethiopian army’s Northern Command, calling it an “internationally known practice.”
There is no sign of any easing in the fighting. Abiy has rejected growing calls by the United States and others for an immediate de-escalation.
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