The largest war in the world: Hundreds of thousands killed in Ethiopia's Tigray conflict

 

Captive Ethiopian soldiers arrive at Mekele Rehabilitation Center in Mekele, Ethiopia, in July 2021. YASUYOSHI CHIBA, AFP

Tigray, Eritrea and Ethiopia's 2-year-long civil war has killed more people than the war in Ukraine, yet nobody's talking about it.

 

For a population of over 5.5 million people, there are no operating ambulances. Lacking banking services. Thousands of deaths through conflict and starvation. Unnecessary supplies have all but been cut off due to a near total military blockade, which has compelled families to communicate orally or through handwritten notes.

 

Since the beginning of 2022, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia has been a top priority for U.S. and international officials and military strategists. Humanitarian effects have received a lot of attention, including the displacement of people, accusations of war crimes, energy prices, and concerns about international security, like as whether President Vladimir Putin would dare deploy nuclear weapons.

But there is another, bigger and deadlier conflict in which over the past two years the abject horrors of war have been all but hidden to the West because of a combination of a border blockade, a communications blackout, complex regional dynamics and few visible sustained signs of meaningful engagement from Western capitals.

 

This conflict, a civil war, is being fought in Tigray, an ancient kingdom in northern Ethiopia, on the Horn of Africa.

 

Tigray has been under assault from Ethiopian forces led by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Eritrean forces led by President Isaias Afwerki and various militias accused of extrajudicial executions, sexual violence and indiscriminate shelling. There has been widespread destruction of civilian hospitals, schools, residences, factories and businesses. Experts say Eritrea is involved in the conflict partly out of a desire to reassert itself on the regional stage and a result of long-running animosity against Tigrayans. The Ethiopian government and Tigrayan forces recently signed an agreement laying out a roadmap for a peace deal, but experts are unsure to what extent it is meaningfully being observed.

 

An estimated 383,000 to 600,000 civilians died in Tigray between November 2020 and August 2022, according to Professor Jan Nyssen and a team of researchers at Ghent University, in Belgium, who are authorities on Tigray's geography and agriculture. The estimates represent deaths from atrocities, lack of medicines and health care, and hunger. Estimates for the numbers of combatant deaths on all sides start at 250,000 and range up to 600,000.

 

Many are dying from starvation and famine.

The U.S. State Department estimated in September 2021 that more than 5 million people required humanitarian assistance and at least 1 million were living in famine-like conditions. According to Tim Vanden Bempt, a researcher affiliated with Ghent University, humanitarian food aid has not covered those needs. A U.N. World Food Program survey in June noted that 65% of the population had not received food aid for over a year.

Due to the conflict, starvation has been affecting the people of Tigray. Food supplies have not been able to reach millions of people due to the blockade and security concerns. The U.N.'s World Food Program has announced that its trucks are now beginning to distribute aid to Tigray as a result of the signing of the peace agreement. However, it's unclear whether serious shortages of necessities are reaching people who need them the fastest or at what rate.

 

Norwegian Kjetil Tronvoll, an expert on Ethiopia who has studied the wider region for decades, says that in many respects the conflict is a "perennial" one in Ethiopian history. "How strong should the center be?" he said, referring to the Tigrayan decision to revolt after Ahmed sought to centralize Ethiopian government power at the expense of regions like Tigray. A joint investigation by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and the U.N. Human Rights Office has concluded that militias loyal to Tigray have also likely committed war crimes during the conflict.

 

Tronvoll said the November signing of the peace accord between Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which controls much of Tigray, was a "significant and great step forward toward a durable peace. But we are not there yet. This is just the beginning."

 

Hospitalsand medical services are in disarray.

"We can't even communicate with our families because no cellphone services or landlines are functioning," Abenezer Etsedingl, a Tigrayan doctor who coordinates emergency medical services for the region's 40 hospitals, told USA TODAY in early November. He said that at least 12 of the hospitals have fallen to Ethiopian and Eritrean armed forces over the past two years.

 

Without physically travelling there, Etsedingl is unable to communicate with any of the hospitals' staff. In Tigray, there were around 270 ambulances before the war started. There are now only eight. None are driving because there is no petrol to be had. Horse-drawn carts are used to transport numerous patients to hospitals, according to Etsedingl. If they receive a diagnosis once there, there are no available medications to treat them. He claimed that maternal death rates have increased by 800%.

 

Etsedingl spoke to USA TODAY via WhatsApp, the messaging platform. As a government employee, he had rare access to a satellite phone that gave a patchy connection to the internet. His is the only Tigray hospital, in the city of Mekelle, that has one. It was not possible to independently verify Etsedingl's claims.