Revealed: Ethiopian forces throw children, women into concentration camps, dig mass graves

Report citing witnesses claims that Ethiopian forces occupying a major city in the northern Tigray region are engaging in the ethnic cleansing of natives, including kids and women, by throwing them into makeshift concentration camps and dumping mutilated bodies into mass graves. According to the Telegraph, ethnic Amhara forces have been going door-to-door to round up anyone who is ethnic Tigrayan in the latest harrowing incident of population cleansing in Ethiopia’s civil war.

An innocent woman, Feven Berhe, owned a small shop. She was shot at Tekeze River, the Telegraph quoted a resident who knew the 40-year-old. ‘They removed her eyes and cut off her legs before killing her, and they didn’t let anyone remove her body and bury it,’ the resident claimed. An ethnic cleansing occurred following a war between Ethiopian federal troops and forces loyal to the Tigray People`s Liberation Front (TPLF), which controls the Tigray region. More than two million people have been displaced, and thousands have died.

Ethiopia’s Humera city has approximately 50,000 residents near its border with Eritrea and Sudan. In November, Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Eritrea’s dictator launched a pincer attack on Tigray’s regional government because of their strategic location. While Tigray forces reclaimed much of the region from Ethiopian and allied forces in June, western Tigray is still under the control of Ethiopia’s neighbour, the Amhara region, which has driven out many ethnic Tigrayans while claiming the land is historically theirs. It was ethnic Amhara forces allied with the Nobel Laureate who have controlled Tigray, along with much of the city, since last year.

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According to reports by the Telegraph, the occupying forces in Humera began purging ethnic Tigrayans after the Tigrayan Defence Forces won a series of stunning victories late in June. Amhara forces held a public meeting in Humera’s main municipal hall on July 15 to decide the fate of Tigrayans under their control. ‘We should exterminate all Tigrayan residents in the city’, they said. ‘We must cleanse them all,’ said one man who claims to have attended the public meeting. 43 bloated and bloodied bodies were found floating down the Tekeze River, which separates the area from Sudan, at the beginning of August.