A
witness is still suffering from the agony of a November 30 drone attack that
murdered five villagers in the town of Wegel Tena in Ethiopia's Amhara region,
roughly 570 kilometers (350 miles) north of the capital, Addis Ababa.
"It's
extremely difficult to even describe the scene of the aftermath," said
Gebeyehu, who asked to be identified only by his first name for security
reasons. "Bodies had been burned so badly that they had turned to
dust." I spotted one of the victims' finger bones still formed as if it
were still grasping a cell phone."
Several
witnesses informed Al Jazeera that a drone shot and smashed an ambulance as it
neared the Delanta Primary Hospital in Wegel Tena. Hospital employees,
including a doctor and an ambulance driver, as well as workers from a
neighboring construction site, were killed instantaneously.
"In
Wegel Tena, surveillance drones are still hovering in the skies. Because
everyone is scared, we avoid walking in large groups," Gebeyehu remarked.
The
strike was the latest in a wave of lethal drone activity in the Amhara region,
where the Ethiopian army, the only operator of armed drones in the Horn of
Africa country, has been fighting Amhara insurgents in open warfare.
The
rebel militiamen, known as Fano, were formerly allied with the Ethiopiangovernment, but the two sides fell out after the former refused orders to
disband in April. Instead, in August, they overran a slew of major towns in the
region.
In
response, the Ethiopian government declared a state of emergency and deployed
the army to “restore order” and crush the rebels. Despite lacking a formal
command structure and largely relying on volunteers, the Fano fighters are
still actively fighting across the Amhara region, where they are widely
popular.
The
Ethiopian Human Rights Commission revealed numerous civilian killings in the
fighting in August, including air strikes and artillery. Within days, medical
officials in Finote Selam reported that at least 26 people had been killed in a
suspected air strike by federal forces.
Regionwide
communications outages have made it difficult to verify the mounting reports.
But the United Nations managed to document two other incidents, including the
killings of seven people at a primary school in the region’s Wadera district on
November 6 and the killing of more than a dozen people at a bus terminal three
days later in the town of Wabirr.
The
incidents highlight what UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Seif Magango
referred to as the “devastating impact of drone strikes and other violence on
the population in the Amhara region”.
Source: Al Jazeera
.jpeg)
0 Comments