Shell-shocked Survivors Describe Brutal Tigray Rebel Advance

(@FahadShabbir)

Shell-shocked survivors describe brutal Tigray rebel advance

Dessie, Ethiopia, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 26th Aug, 2021 ) :After seizing the farming village in northern Ethiopia, the rebels roamed the streets searching for young, able-bodied men who had fought alongside government forces.

Anyone with a militia ID was a suspect. So were men with marks on their shoulders left by rifle straps, even though it is common for farmers in Ethiopia's Amhara region -- militia fighters or not -- to carry Kalashnikovs.

Before the day was over, the rebels had fatally shot two men in their homes and marched a third to a nearby river where they fired rounds into his back, according to 49-year-old Adisse Wonde, who told AFP he buried all three.

"They want to suppress and rule us. Their deed is ethnic cleansing," Adisse said of the rebels who hail from Ethiopia's northernmost region of Tigray.

The alleged killings earlier this month in the village of Hara are just one example of gruesome abuses described by witnesses of Ethiopia's widening war.

Long confined to Tigray, the conflict has recently spread to two neighbouring regions, Afar and Amhara, with heavy weapons fire killing an untold number of civilians and displacing hundreds of thousands more.

The rebels, known as the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), have dismissed allegations they have committed atrocities as "groundless" pro-government propaganda.

Yet newly displaced civilians in Amhara tell a different story.

They blame TPLF fighters for killings, widespread looting and the indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas.