Amhara security forces are responsible for a surge of mass detentions, killings, and forced expulsions of ethnic Tigrayans in the Western Tigray territory of northern Ethiopia, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said today.
Tigrayan civilians attempting to escape the new wave of violence have been attacked and killed. Scores in detention face life-threatening conditions including torture, starvation, and denial of medical care.
"The new onslaught of abuses by Amhara forces against Tigrayan civilians remaining in several towns in Western Tigray should ring alarm bells," said Joanne Mariner, director of crisis response at Amnesty International. "Without urgent international action to prevent further atrocities, Tigrayans, particularly those in detention, are at grave risk."
Since the armed conflict began in November 2020, Western Tigray, a disputed administrative territory, has been the site of some of the worst atrocities, including massacres, indiscriminate shelling, and large-scale forced displacement of the Tigrayan population.
On December 2, 2021, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that 1.2 million people have been displaced from Western Tigray since the beginning of the conflict. A December 9 OCHA report found that between November 25 and December 1, over 10,000 Tigrayans were newly displaced from Western Tigray. It also stated that Western Tigray remained inaccessible to aid agencies due to security concerns.
In November and December, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch conducted phone interviews with 31 people, including 25 witnesses and survivors, as well as relatives of those detained and expelled, about abuses by Amhara militias and regional security forces against Tigrayan civilians in the towns of Adebai, Humera, and Rawyan.
Since early November, Amhara regional police forces and militias, including militia groups known as Fanos, have systematically rounded up Tigrayans in Adebai, Humera, and Rawyan. These forces separated families, arrested teenagers aged 15 and older, and men and women civilians. They have forcibly expelled women and younger children, as well as sick and older people from the area. Some of those expelled have since arrived in Central Tigray, while others remain unaccounted for.
"Tigrayans, regardless of [their] sex and age, were taken to a school," said one man in Rawyan who witnessed the house-to-house roundups of Tigrayans by Fano militia. "They separated the old from the young, took their money and other possessions.... Older people and parents were loaded on big trucks [going] east. They let them go with nothing, while the young remained behind."
Following roundups in Humera on November 20 and 21, two witnesses described seeing as many as 20 trucks full of people leaving on those days toward Central Tigray.
