Survivors of the Tigray war in Ethiopia have bravely spoken out on the systematic violence perpetrated against civilians by both sides in the conflict, alleging harrowing accounts of gang-rape, torture and mutilation during and after the fighting.
Tseday, a mother-of-two who had been living in the Oromia region with her husband when the war broke out, told French newspaper Le Monde that she was stopped and raped by ‘soldiers from the federal army’ as they fled into exile in the months following the ceasefire.
‘They raped me first, then my two-year-old daughter. After that, they killed my husband and cut up his body in front of us. They forced us to watch,’ she recounted in a harrowing testimony published on Wednesday.
Nigist, a 17-year-old, told the outlet that ‘armed men’, of no stated affiliation, found her during an invasion of her village in the Kafta Humera area of western Tigray at some point before June 2023. Read more…