ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) — Skinny, hungry, fleeing threats of violence, thousands of people who have been hiding in rural areas of Ethiopia’s Tigray region have begun arriving in a community that can barely support them — and more are said to be on the way.
For months, one great unknown in the Tigray conflict has been the fate of hundreds of thousands of people in vast rural areas beyond the reach of outside aid. With the region largely cut off from the world since November, fears of violence and starvation have grown.
Now those people are starting to arrive, many by foot, in the community of Shire, aid workers who are there and who have visited say. The Associated Press obtained permission to use rare photos largely from the International Rescue Committee of the dire conditions facing these displaced people. Photos from the region have been hard to come by, with electricity cut for much of the conflict and ethnic Tigrayans telling the AP that being caught with photos endangered their lives.
Some 5,000 people had arrived between last Wednesday and Sunday, and humanitarian teams are being sent to find those said to be on the way, Oliver Behn, general director for Doctors Without Borders-Holland, told the AP.
“They are coming in very bad conditions … very exhausted, dehydrated, skinny,” Behn said after a visit. “It’s becoming a desperate situation very quickly.”
The people arriving bring an idea of the deprivation gnawing at the Tigray countryside. Aid workers say some describe surviving by eating leaves — or the seeds they had put aside for planting, in a sign of even worse hunger to come.
It is not clear exactly what new threats of violence caused these thousands of people to flee western Tigray, where U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday said “acts of ethnic cleansing” have been seen. Some people from Ethiopia’s neighboring Amhara region are accused of occupying communities. In speaking with humanitarian workers, the ethnic Tigrayans described hiding in the hills for weeks after the fighting erupted between Ethiopian and allied forces and those of the Tigray regional leaders who once dominated the country’s government but were sidelined under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
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