Tue 10 August 2021:
Hundreds of thousands of civilians face “emergency levels of hunger” in two regions that were recently drawn into the violent conflict in northern Ethiopia, the UN said Monday.
The warning from the World food Programme (WFP) came as the war continued to expand and officials reported fresh civilian casualties in the two regions, Amhara and Afar.
Northern Ethiopia has been wracked by fighting since November, when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sent troops to topple the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the then-ruling party of the northernmost Tigray region.
The move came in response to TPLF attacks on army camps, said Abiy, the 2019 Nobel Peace prize winner.
Although he promised a swift victory, the war took a stunning turn in June when Tigrayan forces recaptured Tigray’s capital Mekele and the Ethiopian army largely withdrew.
Since then the TPLF has pushed east into the neighbouring Afar region and south into Amhara.
Civilians in those regions are “falling deeper into hunger as a result of the conflict,” Michael Dunford, WFP’s corporate response director for Tigray, said Monday in a statement that put the total number of people facing “emergency levels of hunger” in those regions at 300,000.
In Tigray itself, the UN has previously said roughly 400,000 people face famine-like conditions.
-AFP
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