Zegabi

Tigray’s federally appointed caretaker administration said on Tuesday that civil servants who have reported back to work will start receiving their salaries on Wednesday, Nov. 11, two days after the date it first set. The administration’s economy chief said on Monday that fuel loaded in Djibouti should reach the region’s towns by Friday. Read more ›

Kenya’s Prime Cabinet Secretary, Musalia Mudavadi, said on Monday that he had spoken with his Ethiopian counterpart about the roughly 40,000 people from Ethiopia now sheltering in the Kenyan border town of Moyale and that the Ethiopian Government had promised to do its best to restore calm so they can go home, as the International Organization for Migration appealed for money to help families it says are short of food, water and health care. Read more ›

Eritrea’s Ministry of Information said in a Tigrigna commentary on Monday that the country’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity are not open to bargaining and that Eritrea will not make concessions or hold talks on them “under any circumstances,” two days after Ethiopia’s navy commander was reported as saying that Ethiopia would win back sea access “through diplomacy, law, or other alternative.” Read more ›

Egypt’s foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty, told his Somali counterpart in Libya on Saturday that the security and management of the Red Sea remain the exclusive responsibility of the countries that border it, according to Egypt’s Foreign Ministry, as Ethiopia’s water and energy minister told the state news agency that it was “a contradiction” for Egypt to claim rights in the Red Sea while insisting that Ethiopia stay landlocked. Read more ›

Residents of three districts in western Oromia’s Wollega area told BBC Afaan Oromoo that Fano forces have killed civilians, burned homes and looted livestock in raids over the past two weeks, and the head of the Oromia Communication Bureau has confirmed attacks on civilians there while claiming that they are the work of an alliance of what he called Amharic-speaking and Afaan Oromo-speaking “Shene,” a term the government uses for the Oromo Liberation Army. Read more ›

Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry and military showed foreign diplomats and military attachés a large display of weapons in Addis Ababa on Friday that officials said had been captured from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, and a senior ministry official claimed the arms had come from Egypt, Eritrea and Sudan. Read more ›

The police commissioner of Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region says armed men killed 52 people in a dawn attack on Daleti kebele in Bilidigilu woreda on Thursday, and he has blamed the Oromo Liberation Army, which has not publicly responded to the accusation. Read more ›

Two Chinese envoys held separate talks on Nov. 4 and 5 with Ethiopia’s foreign minister in Addis Ababa and Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki in Asmara amid tensions between the neighboring countries. Read more ›

The Ethiopian National Defense Forces announced a nighttime vehicle curfew, daytime house-to-house searches and an order to surrender unlicensed firearms in Mekelle, according to reports from several outlets. Read more ›

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said reports of attacks on civilians in Ethiopia’s Amhara and Tigray regions are deeply disturbing and warned that renewed fighting is pushing an already fragile northern health system closer to collapse. Read more ›

Fighting between forces tied to Ethiopia’s Oromia and Somali regions around the border town of Moyale has driven tens of thousands of people into Kenya since late October, United Nations and Kenyan officials say, while stray bullets and rocket-propelled grenades have wounded and killed people on the Kenyan side. Read more ›

Ethiopia has ordered six staff members of Sudan’s consulate in Assosa, the capital of the Benishangul Gumuz region near the Sudanese border, to leave the country within 48 hours, a senior Ethiopian official told Reuters on Wednesday, without giving a reason. Read more ›

A former US government contractor has pleaded guilty to conspiring to pass classified American intelligence to senior officials of the Ethiopian Government, including information he hoped would help them target and kill fighters in the war in Tigray, the US Justice Department and the BBC reported. Read more ›

The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission says fighters of the armed group that calls itself the Oromo Liberation Army killed 41 people when they stormed Birbo Chole kebele in Oromia’s Shirka district on Oct. 24, and that informal armed men in the same area killed seven more civilians on the same day. Read more ›

Residents of Wuchale, a town in the Ambassel district of South Wollo, told DW Amharic on Tuesday that the town was calm and under the control of the Ethiopian National Defense Force after a day of heavy fighting with heavy weapons and air power, while fighting with Fano forces had moved outside the town to the Robit area, where they said many people had been harmed. Read more ›

Ethiopia’s media regulator has suspended The Reporter, one of the country’s oldest independent newspapers, for an indefinite period, accusing its Amharic and English papers and their websites of publishing content that it says runs against Ethiopia’s “national interests.” Read more ›

Residents of Tulu Gena, a town in the Abe Dongoro district of western Oromia, have told BBC Amharic that armed men they describe as Oromia regional government forces killed as many as 40 civilians there in two days of attacks on Oct. 25 and 26, among them people who had already fled earlier violence in the area. Read more ›

Eight people, among them children as young as two, were killed in the Tigray town of Yechila when unexploded ordnance that residents had carried from an abandoned arms depot to sell as scrap metal blew up outside a family home, relatives, residents and the head of the local hospital have told BBC Tigrinya. Read more ›

People have begun dying of hunger in Sahala Seyemt, a district of Wag Hemra in northern Amhara, where drought has wiped out the harvest after years of war, residents and a district agriculture official told DW Amharic in a report published on Saturday. Read more ›

The United States said on Saturday that it is “deeply concerned about recent reports of targeted killings of civilians in Arsi zone, Oromia region, Ethiopia,” and called on the Ethiopian Government to investigate the killings and bring those responsible to justice. Read more ›

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said on Saturday that the leaders of what he calls the Medemer government, among them cabinet ministers and state ministers, are taking military training at the Hurso military training center, and he shared photos of himself running and sitting with them in trainee uniforms. Read more ›

A drone strike on Friday morning killed at least 12 people in Rama, a town in Tigray’s Central Zone near the Eritrean border, as they gathered sorghum spilled from a truck that a drone had hit the night before, two witnesses and a hospital source told BBC Amharic. Read more ›

Since the night armed men killed dozens of people in Arsi’s Shirka woreda on Oct. 24, security forces have been detaining residents who had answered calls for help, carried away the wounded and buried the dead, and more than 20 of them have been held, five residents and other sources told BBC Amharic. Read more ›

A drone strike on a camp in South Wollo that has sheltered Amhara families driven out of Oromia’s Wollega for about four years killed 18 people, among them children and pregnant women, on Thursday, three people living in the camp and a hospital source told BBC Amharic. Read more ›

Sudan’s government said on Wednesday that it had evidence that drones used in a wave of attacks on its power stations, fuel depots and other civilian sites were launched from inside Ethiopia, including from Bahir Dar Airport in the Amhara region, and a senior Sudanese diplomat accused Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates of aggression against his country. Read more ›

The Tigray Central Command, the military leadership of the forces loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, has accused Maj. Gen. Yohannes Woldegiorgis, the senior commander widely known as John Medid, of betraying the people of Tigray and its fallen fighters by secretly linking up with the enemy, a day after the Tigray Peace Force said he had surrendered to federal troops in Central Tigray. Read more ›

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said on Wednesday that Ethiopia has taken delivery of its first 12 Russian Su-35 fighter jets under an earlier agreement with Moscow and that the country will also receive four batteries of Russia’s S-400 air defense system, an announcement he made in Moscow as African leaders gathered for the third Russia-Africa summit. Read more ›

The Holy Synod of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church said on Monday that 60 of its faithful were killed in two attacks in the Arsi area of the Oromia region, 14 in Merti woreda on Oct. 20 and 46 in Shirka woreda on Oct. 24, and it ordered memorial prayers after the liturgy in all its churches around the world on Tuesday. Read more ›

Maj. Gen. Yohannes Woldegiorgis, who led the Tigray forces’ Southern Front and is widely known as John Medid, surrendered to the Ethiopian National Defense Force and its partner, the Tigray Peace Force, in Central Tigray on Monday, a Tigray Peace Force commander and two sources close to the Ethiopian army told BBC Tigrinya. Read more ›

Fighting between government forces and Fano has spread to several parts of South Gondar zone in the Amhara region since Saturday, residents told DW Amharic on Monday, with battles going on all day on Sunday around Ambesame, Gelawdewos, Addis Zemen, Hamusit, Gaint, Guna and Kimir Dingay. Read more ›

At least 48 people were killed in Saturday’s attack on Chole and Birbo kebeles in Shirka woreda, in the Arsi area of Oromia, Addis Standard reported on Monday, adding that more than 31 were wounded and at least six children were among the dead. Read more ›

Ethiopia’s army chief, Field Marshal Birhanu Jula, claimed on Sunday that the army had defeated the seven-group rebel alliance that includes the Amhara Fano National Movement, and warned that causes framed as the survival of the Amhara, the Oromo and Tigray were hiding a threat to the country. Read more ›

About 35,000 Ethiopians have crossed into Kenya to escape the fighting between Oromia and Somali regional forces in the border town of Moyale, the county commissioner of Kenya’s Marsabit County said, according to the Kenya News Agency. Read more ›

Eritrea’s Ministry of Information on Saturday accused Getachew Reda, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s adviser on East African affairs, of “putting forward false narratives and accusations” and being “busy agitating for war,” a day after he told a security forum in Bahir Dar that Eritrea keeps fomenting crisis in the region and, according to one account of the panel, set out what Asmara would have to do before any talks. Read more ›

Drone strikes in the eastern part of Ethiopia’s Amhara region killed at least 15 civilians and wounded several others, including children, between Oct. 15 and Oct. 21, the UN humanitarian office said on Friday, citing reports from its partners, as residents of North and South Wollo told DW Amharic that drones had circled their towns from Thursday morning until midnight. Read more ›

A drone strike on Sana Elementary School in Dera woreda, South Gondar, on Tuesday morning killed at least six schoolchildren and wounded more than 20, according to preliminary reports cited by Addis Standard, which spoke to a teacher who said there were no armed men in the school or anywhere near it. Read more ›

Fighting between security forces from Ethiopia’s Oromia and Somali regions spread from the border town of Moyale into three more districts of southern Oromia on Thursday and was still going on Friday morning, Ethiopian and Kenyan media reported, as hundreds of Ethiopians, most of them women and children, crossed into Kenya and the Kenyan army sent troops to the border. Read more ›

Ten of the 16 mobile health and nutrition teams still working in the Amhara region are expected to stop by the end of this month because the money has run out, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Wednesday, in a region that needs 57 of them. Read more ›

Fresh clashes broke out on Thursday morning in Moyale, the town that straddles Ethiopia’s border with Kenya, with possible casualties and buildings set on fire, Kenyan and Swiss media reported, four days after a 13-year-old girl was killed in a dispute over the raising of the Somali Region’s flag. Read more ›

Several eyewitnesses told DW Amharic that a drone strike hit Sana Primary School in Dera woreda, South Gondar zone, at about 10 a.m. local time on Tuesday, while casualty figures from a command of the Amhara Fano National Movement (AFNM) and accounts on X conflict and have not been confirmed. Read more ›

Brigadier General Gebre-Egziabher Beyene, a Tigray Peace Force commander who now holds the peace and security post in the federal government’s caretaker administration for Tigray, told residents of Mekelle on Tuesday that leaders of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) had crossed the border into Eritrea, a claim that Eritrean Information Minister Yemane Gebremeskel dismissed as “lies,” in AFP’s words. Read more ›

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed warned Eritrea’s leaders on Monday that ignoring Ethiopia’s calls for peace would bring what he called “very, very, very severe consequences,” in a Tigrigna-language interview with the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation (EBC) in which he also accused the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) of breaking the 2022 Pretoria agreement and urged armed young people in Tigray to give up their weapons. Read more ›

The Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, the coalition of armed and political groups fighting the federal government, has rejected U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s description of the forces attacking inside Ethiopia as “separatists” and of strikes on government military sites as terrorism, and has asked Washington to take what it called a balanced position on the war. Read more ›

The new mayor of Mekelle, appointed by the federal government in Addis Ababa last week, told AFP on Monday that the caretaker administration now running Tigray will hold elections within six months, and that the dispute over Western Tigray will be left for a later date. Read more ›

Residents of Adigrat, the northern Tigray city about 40 kilometers south of the Eritrean border, told AFP that Eritrean soldiers who came into their area this month have left after federal drone strikes, but one man said the police and security system has collapsed, some prisoners have been released and robberies and stabbings are now common. Read more ›

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday that the Ethiopian Government is facing “separatists” who attacked inside the country, and he described drone strikes on Addis Ababa as terrorist attacks, while warning that troops massing on both sides of the Ethiopia-Eritrea border could turn the fighting into a broader war. Read more ›

Hundreds of former Tigrayan fighters lined up in Mekelle on Friday to register for a program meant to help them return to civilian life, the Associated Press reported, and one of them, a 33-year-old day laborer, said he had turned down a TPLF call to rejoin his old unit because he wanted to raise his children. Read more ›

A one-page Tigrigna statement signed “Government of Tigray,” dated Friday, Oct. 16, and attributed to the TPLF-led authorities who ran Tigray until federal forces retook Mekelle this month, rejects the six-month caretaker administration named by the Ethiopian federal government and warns against “any kind of movement” at Mekelle’s Alula Aba Nega Airport. Read more ›