Ethiopian woman says she was raped by a man in Amhara

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Ethiopian woman says she was raped by a man in Amhara

A new sign that reads Amhara national regional government, Wolkait Tsegede administration Northern Zone Bakar town is seen on the road leading to the town of Humera, Ethiopia, March 3, 2021. REUTERS Baz Ratner admonishes.

DESSIE, Ethiopia, 18 Oct Reuters - The pictures on her phone are all the Ethiopian mothers Habtam Akele left about her three-year old daughter Saba. The girl died of malnutrition last month before the family was able to flee into Ethiopia's Amhara region.

They told me they have severely affected the girl with malnutrition and they cannot help. Then they gave me some syrup and tablets. Habtam passed away exactly a week later, Reuters said earlier this month, clutching her surviving nine-month-old baby.

Habtam is among the thousands of Amhara families fleeing from fighting further north to dessie from the town of Habtam. Officials warn the already massive makeshift camps, where displaced people sleep in rows in school classrooms, will fill after renewed clashes.

Conflict flared between the ruling party of the rebellious northwest region of Tigray - the Tigray People's Liberation Front TPLF - and the provincial government of Ethiopia in November last year.

The TPLF pushed into the adjacent region of Afar, whose forces had fought alongside the army against the Tigrayans as well as in the Amhara region.

The Tigrayan advance forced around 250,000 people to flee their homes in the Amhara, the U.N. Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in September.

On Monday, the TPLF said that the Tigrayan military had launched an offensive to try to dislodge the Ethiopian fighters from Amhara, following a barrage of air strikes reported last week.

The military and government have not answered calls seeking information about the offensive, but a post on the military's official Facebook page said they the TPLF opened war on all fronts and said the military was inflicting heavy casualties.

Diplomats are worried that renewed fighting will destabilise Ethiopia, a nation of 109 million people, and deepen hunger in Tigray and the surrounding regions.

Habtam said there was limited food in the local areas under Tigrayan control and that Tigrayan forces took scarce medicines from tiny pharmacies.

Getachew Reda, a spokesperson for the TPLF, told Reuters that Tigrayan forces had not filled pharmacies that fed local populations and had set up a generator to relieve water shortages in Habtam's area.

Reuters had no way of independently verifying Habtam's account since her home in Kobo, south of her home area, is off-limit to journalists due to fighting and phone connections to the area are down.

The United Nations has said that the Ethiopian government is only letting a trickle of food trucks and no food in Tigray despite estimates that hundreds of thousands of people are in famine conditions there, a charge the government denies. Hospitals there run out of crucial medicines.

Both sides accuse each other of committing atrocities. Reuters has previously documented mass killings of civilians in Tigray and some Amhara residents told Reuters that Tigrayans were also committing abuses in territory they control. Both sides deny the allegations. Another woman at the camps told Reuters that she had been raped by an armed man speaking Tigrinya, Tigrayan language, in an Amhara area under Tigrayan control. Saada, 28, told Reuters that she had been attacked in her house in Dessie, 80 km north of Mersa, by the armed man in plain clothes. She did not remember the exact date, but said it was around August (official date).

He said to me We left our houses both to die and to kill. I am from the jungle so, I have all the right to do whatever I want. I can even kill you and he threatened his gun to me and raised it to kill me, she said. Then he raped me. She provided a card showing she had visited Dessie Comprehensive Specialised Hospital for treatment. She asked Reuters not to use her full name for reprisals.

Leul Mesfin, the medical director of Dessie hospital declined to answer questions about personal injuries or rapes, or civilian cases because he said he did not trust foreign journalists.

When asked about the rape, Getachew of the TPLF said any reported incident would be investigated and that the actions of one man should not implicate Tigrayan forces in general.

I can't vouch for every off-breedy idiot masquerades as a fighter, he said.