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“They stormed into our house. They had machetes, knives and axes.”

Bayesh Achamu, whose husband, Dejen Wase, was attacked by a Tigrayan mob, according to witnesses

The first reports of ethnic atrocities in western Tigray surfaced two months earlier in mid-November, some 100 km to the west of the Tekeze River, in a farming town called Mai Kadra. Amharas said they’d been attacked by their Tigrayan neighbours. Tigrayans pouring into neighbouring Sudan said they’d been brutalized and driven out by Amharas.

The only thing the two sides agreed on was that hundreds died. Initial reports by human rights groups gave partial accounts of the violence. Yet with access to Tigray tightly controlled by Ethiopia’s government and phone lines down, it was almost impossible to make sense of the conflicting accounts put forward by the two communities.

But in March the government granted Reuters rare access to the region, where reporters saw burned out homes and hastily marked graves. Drawing on more than 120 interviews with Tigrayans and Amharas in Mai Kadra and other towns and villages inside Tigray, as well as in refugee camps in Sudan, they were able to build the first comprehensive chronicle of western Tigray’s descent into communal violence.

Reuters cross-checked the accounts it collected over the past six months with 44 unpublished testimonies gathered by two international aid organisations, medical records and satellite data. The timeline that emerges tells of two rounds of bloodletting in Mai Kadra and ethnic violence that spilled across western Tigray.

The first killings in Mai Kadra were committed by ethnic Tigrayans against Amharas, the reporting showed. Some were carried out by youths directed by a Tigrayan militiaman called Capt. Kassaye Mehar, said four Amhara witnesses. Reuters sent questions to Capt. Kassaye via the TPLF. TPLF spokesman Getachew Reda said of Kassaye, “I don’t know him.” He denied that the TPLF targeted Amhara civilians in Mai Kadra.

Then came revenge killings by forces from the Amhara region, which borders Tigray to the south and whose leaders back Abiy’s government. Tigrayan residents said the Amhara forces drove out Tigrayans, expunged Tigrayan names from street signs and seized Tigrayan homes, daubing some doors with letters in red paint: “This is an Amhara house.”

Amhara people took possession of Tigrayan farms – fertile lands they say were taken from Amharas during the decades of TPLF dominance. Reuters reporters saw fleets of minibuses packed with household goods and mattresses strapped to the roofs traveling from Amhara into western Tigray. New Amhara settlers were among the passengers.

In one majority Tigrayan town, called Division, Amhara forces burned many houses, Tigrayan witnesses said, leaving nothing for the Tigrayans who lived there to return to. Sensors aboard U.S. government satellites detected a series of potential fires in and around Division on Nov. 7, a Reuters analysis found.

The ultimate toll of this communal violence remains unclear. In Mai Kadra, at least 767 people were killed, according to two lists of victims - one Amhara, one Tigrayan - reviewed by Reuters.

Across the region, thousands are believed to have died in the wider war.

Professor Jan Nyssen from Belgium’s Ghent University is overseeing a project that tracks civilian deaths in Tigray by drawing on social media and witness reports, then cross checking the information with people who know the victims. He said his team has reports of more than 8,000 civilians killed and has identified 2,562 of these.

Revelations wrote: ↑

07 Jun 2021, 17:14

“They stormed into our house. They had machetes, knives and axes.”

Bayesh Achamu, whose husband, Dejen Wase, was attacked by a Tigrayan mob, according to witnesses