‘I’m scared to think what Ethiopia will become’: Tigray war refugees fear return

Lemlen Abraha, a Tigrayan refugee, lives in a refugee camp in Sudan. Her husband and daughter have been missing since November 2020. Photograph: Tom Gardner

When she remembers the corpses on the asphalt, the bodies of her neighbours and of the boy who used to play with her children, Lemlen Abraha breaks down in tears.

“They just shot him,” she says of 14-year-old Kalayu Mebrahtom, killed by government soldiers in the first weeks of Ethiopia’s civil war and left to be buried by his grandmother. “I’d left my home to buy sugar – I saw it on the street, I saw it with my own eyes.”