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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – A university official says the latest Ethiopian army airstrike hit the school in the capital of the challenging Tigray region and caused significant damage, while the United States says neither side to the conflict he is attending the escalation requests.
The senior official described Thursday’s airstrike in an email shared with The Associated Press. It was not immediately clear if anyone was killed or injured in the airstrike on Mekele.
“How the hell?” Can a government bomb its own people, asked the senior official. The AP does not name the official because he could not be located directly.
There was no immediate comment from the Ethiopian government, which has been fighting regional forces in Tigray since the November 4 attack on a military base there. The Ethiopian government has acknowledged carrying out air strikes. The Tigray regional government has acknowledged firing missiles.
Each side considers the other to be illegal and the other to be illegal, as a result of a fight between the Nobel Peace Prize winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the leaders of Tigray, who once dominated the country’s ruling coalition.
With communications with the region cut off, no one knows how many people have died, and verifying the claims of either party is challenging.
“At this point, from what we hear, neither party is interested in mediation,” top US diplomat in Africa, US Under Secretary of State Tibor Nagy, told reporters Thursday night.
Nagy said of the airstrike: “From what you say, I certainly hope it’s not true.”
Alarmed by the possibility of a disaster in Ethiopia and beyond, 17 US senators urged Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a letter Thursday to engage Abiy directly to press for an immediate ceasefire.
The Ethiopian government has said it is marching in one last push towards Mekele, the capital of Tigray, with the aim of stopping the region’s ruling “clique” of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front. The TPLF enraged the Abiy government when it opposed the pandemic-related postponement of the national elections until next year and held its own elections in September.
Now, deadly fighting continues in a heavily armed region of some six million people, a clash some observers have likened to interstate warfare in the heart of the strategic Horn of Africa.
While the Abiyan government rejects urgent international calls for dialogue, a humanitarian disaster is unfolding as food, fuel and medical supplies are desperately short in the Tigray region. Roads are blocked and airports are closed.
More than 30,000 refugees have fled to Sudan, and fighting has moved nearly 100,000 Eritrean refugees to camps in northern Tigray.
“The electricity is still cut. The generators have run out of fuel. That leaves 96,000 Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia without safe drinking water, “United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters.
“A staggering number of people are crossing from Ethiopia to Sudan. Each. Single. Day, ”the UN refugee agency tweeted.
Refugees in Sudan said clashes broke out so quickly that they hardly knew what they were fleeing from.
“We didn’t know about the war or when it started,” said one, who gave her name as Terhas. She said that on the way to Sudan with her children, “we saw many corpses”, while when they arrived tired, “we did not find food.”
Almost half of the refugees are children, and the United Nations described the conditions they face as “extremely harsh”.
When asked about efforts to open humanitarian corridors, the US Ambassador to Ethiopia, Michael Raynor, told reporters that the TPLF “didn’t really commit to that possibility.” Meanwhile, a senior Ethiopian official, Redwan Hussein, said the government plans a fact-finding mission on the humanitarian situation that “will not take more than a week.”
The fighting also threatens to drag out or destabilize Ethiopia’s neighbors, which include Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea, whose capital was hit with TPLF rockets over the weekend. Eritrea has remained largely silent as the TPLF accuses it of entering the conflict at the request of Ethiopia.
Nagy, the undersecretary of state for African affairs, told reporters that the United States has been in contact with Eritrean officials to urge their “continued restraint.”
“The internationalization of the conflict is an absolute danger that we are doing the best we can, that the entire region is doing everything possible to avoid it,” he said.
Ethiopian refugees gather in the Qadarif region of eastern Sudan on Wednesday, November 18, 2020. The UN refugee agency says the escalating conflict in Ethiopia has caused thousands of people to flee the region of Tigray to Sudan as fighting spreads beyond Ethiopia’s borders and threatens to inflame the Horn of Africa. region. (AP Photo / Marwan Ali)
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