The Guardian 02 -28 -2022
As government officials downplay the fighting in Afar, families are separated, children killed and young people ready to take up arms, while hopes of peace talks fade.
When the bombs started to fall on Afar, people scattered. In the chaos and panic families were ripped apart. A young father lost two of his children, killed by ricocheting rocks. A grandmother had to leave behind her dying son-in-law, a bullet wound in his back; his wife still hasn’t heard the news. A 28-year-old woman doesn’t know if three of her five children are alive or dead.
All of them are nomadic people from Ethiopia’s north-east Afar region, and survivors of the latest round of bloodshed in the country’s devastating civil war. In makeshift shelters that have sprung up around Afdera, a hardscrabble merchant town beside a volcanic salt lake, they talk about homes destroyed by shelling and villages looted bare. Afar’s authorities estimate that more than 300,000 people have fled the fighting since January.
The war’s tremors were first felt in northern Afar in late December, when volleys of gunfire and artillery shells flew across the border with Tigray, the rebel region fighting the central Ethiopian government. Both sides accused the other of firing first. But in January, troops led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) mounted fully fledged incursions into multiple Afar districts. TPLF forces now occupy five of them.