Ethiopia: Tigray Crisis

The conflict between the Ethiopian military and the Tigray rebels group has been raging on for 10 months now and still counting. Many people in the Tigray area of Ethiopia have been affected immensely, some have managed to escape the area, and some have died along the way.
This war began last year after months of disagreement between the Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s government and leaders of the TPLF, the main political party in the region. The Prime Minister sent troops to Tigray to overthrow the regional government after accusing the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), of capturing military camps.
According to the BBC World News, thousands have recently been reported dead due to the clashes in the northern region of Ethiopia as the conflict between the two goes on. For the past ten months, the war has been raging on and many families are now suffering severe poverty conditions as a result of this conflict.
A source confirms that on Sunday the rebel forces said it had killed 3,073 “enemy forces”, with 4,473 injured as well. This comes after the military said it had killed more than 5,600 rebels without giving a detailed time frame. The Senior Army general Bacha Debele also said another 2,300 rebels were wounded and 2,000 captured. It is not certain when all these happenings could have taken place as a result of communication blackout in the region.
The rebels their figures were from Afar and Amhara regions that boarder Tigray. Behane Gebrekristos, the former Ethiopian Ambassador to the United States, and now a supporter of the rebel Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) group, described the government’s claims that they are fake and that they were just saying so to give a morale boost to their forces.
The government has labelled the TPLF as a terrorist group while it also says it is the legitimate government of Tigray which just makes it even more confusing what they are actually trying to say or prove. People have been killed and some forced to leave their homes, others have managed to escape into Sudan, some have died along the way to the boarder. Both the government of Ethiopia and the TPLF have been accused of committing atrocities, including rape and mass civilian killings.
Whenever there is a struggle for power, it is always the ordinary civilians that are immensely affected with the conflict. In the past two weeks the army and its allies have managed to push back the Rebel forces and regained control of some strategic areas. But key areas within Afar and Amhara, including the town of Lalibela with its UNESCO world-heritage rock hewn churches, remain under the TPLF control.
On Friday, last week, the United Nations accused the government accused the Government of purposefully blockading aid supplies to Tigray, warning that millions of people were being put at risk. According to a statement by the UN, 5,2 million lives need urgent assistance if ‘the world’s worst famine decades’ is to be avoided. It also stated that, 400,000 were already living in poverty stricken conditions. On Saturday the government said 500 trucks with aid had entered the region, including 152 in the past two days. They also said the number of security checkpoints had been reduced. There has been no verification of this claim.