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.
Siraj Ali Laad, a 60-year-old camel herder with three wives and 15 children, says the first shells landed in his home town of Berhale in January. One of his wives is missing – he believes she was captured – and five of his children are “over there”, he says, gesturing in the direction he came from two weeks earlier. “Everyone was running to save their lives,” he says. His journey to Afdera took about 15 days; all he brought with him were the clothes he wore. In the punishing desert heat he depended on the goodwill of strangers to survive.
At a busy hospital in Semera, the Afar capital, patients have similar tales. Mahdina Usman has a chest injury and one of her five children has a fractured leg after a shell hit their roadside camp in late January, several days after they were forced from their home by the fighting. On another bed, a 13-year-old girl lies huddled on her own, hands covering her face. A doctor says her mother was killed in the attack.
In the paediatric ward are children ravaged by burns from the blasts that shook their villages. Nine-year-old Tahir Dersa’s entire body and face are blistered; his older brother’s leg is similarly scarred. Their father says they were playing when a shell hit the family home early one morning about a month ago. “It happened suddenly without any warning,” he says. It took more than two weeks to reach the hospital for treatment.
Nuru Seid, a surgeon, explains that the first victims began arriving, almost daily, about six weeks ago. Most have blast injuries. Because the main roads are blocked by soldiers, it takes several days to reach the hospital, by which time many of the patients have already developed life-threatening complications. Some have had to cross through neighbouring Eritrea to the north to reach the hospital, which lacks critical medicines and intensive care facilities.
This latest episode is not the first to draw Afar, one of Ethiopia’s poorest regions, into the conflict, which at first seemed distant. What began as a war centred on Tigray – in which the occupying federal army and its allies, in particular troops from Eritrea, committed alleged war crimes – morphed last summer to include Tigray’s neighbours, Afar and Amhara.
The TPLF, which dominated Ethiopia’s central government before prime minister Abiy Ahmed took office in 2018, says its forces marched south and east to break what the UN has called a “de facto blockade” of Tigray by Abiy’s government, which has left millions hungry. The TPLF neared the capital, Addis Ababa, in December but retreated to Tigray in the face of drone strikes and popular mobilisation. The TPLF said the move was to allow for a “decisive opening for peace” and to expedite the delivery of humanitarian aid. Since then, it has justified its incursions into northern Afar as retaliation against aggression at the state border, and also as a response to alleged killings of Tigrayans in the border town of Abala.
But the foray into Afar has perplexed some observers. “It’s a bit confusing to us,” says one western government official.
The TPLF has alleged that Eritrean forces, widely seen as likely spoilers of any peace process, are active in Afar and fighting alongside Afar paramilitaries. But on 12 February, it released a statement saying fighting in the region had ceased.
Local people dispute this. “There is fighting ongoing on four fronts,” says Humed Ali Ibrahi, a militia commander in Afdera, who claims his forces are preparing a “strategic plan to liberate our land from the invaders”. He and others, including those leaving the conflict area, describe the incursions as punitive raids and complain they lack the arms to fight back. “We are defending ourselves with Kalashnikovs,” says Humed. “Nobody is supporting us.”
Notably absent is Ethiopia’s federal army, which fought alongside Afar forces in southern parts of the region last year and still has a visible presence in parts of it. Ahmed Kaloyta Qasnum, a spokesperson for Afar’s regional government, says the Ethiopian air force has conducted some airstrikes in the north, but little else.
A spokesperson for the central government downplayed the conflict, saying TPLF forces had retreated. This sparked accusations that Abiy was ignoring Afar, treating it as a distraction from his government’s bid to move on from the war and rebuild the country’s image. Moussa Adem, an Afar opposition politician, says: “[federal] government officials keep saying there is no war in Afar. This is at the same time as the regional government is saying more than 300,000 have been displaced.”
Afar and Tigray are regions with long histories of intermarriage, migration and trade. Though some Afar politicians have sided with the TPLF against Abiy – including a former regional president – others are backing the Afar government, reinforcing a sense that this is becoming a war between two ethnic groups.
“We have a just cause, we didn’t deserve to be attacked,” says Ali Holale, a former rebel who last year commanded several thousand Afar militias and paramilitaries. “As long as there is one metre of Afar under their [TPLF] control, there will not be peace.”
Hostilities have also made the prospect of national peace talks seem more distant. “We believed that we were getting to a point where people were willing to talk with each other,” says a western official. “But it was at that moment [when the Afar conflict erupted] that the people who were willing to talk with each other started pulling back from that idea.”
In Afar, young men and women are angry at the bloodshed and say they want to take up arms. Usman Humo, whose children were killed last month, says all he needs is a gun. “Before this they [the TPLF] were our brothers,” he says. “Now I want revenge.”
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