Terrorist TPLF Driven Displacement Reaches over 300,000 in Afar

February 11, 2022

•Five districts under TPLF attacks

ADDIS ABABA— TRTWORLD stated that terrorist TPLF forces “massacred innocent people, looted and destroyed various institutions as well as forced over 300,000 people in Afar to be IDPs since December.

In an article entitled “Ethiopia blames TPLF for Afar region ‘massacres’, 300,000 displacements” Afar administration said Afar is under attack while the UN calls for end fighting which it says is blocking aid to neighboring Tigray state.

It was learnt that terrorist TPLF groups were advancing towards a checkpoint at Serdo, on the highway that links landlocked Ethiopia to Djibouti, the region’s main port. Fighting was raging in five districts and in the town of Abala, it said.

“People are fleeing in absolute fear in all directions,” said an aid worker in Afar, who preferred anonymously attributed said that one of her colleagues had been killed in the fighting and two were missing.

The Afar Pastoralist Development Association, a local aid group, supplied pictures of wounded children in Dubti hospital, including a badly burned boy, whose father told aid workers his two sons aged 9 and 11 had been wounded when artillery fire hit their home in the town of Abala on 15 January.

The aid worker said she did not believe Ethiopian soldiers were involved.

Five Afar districts adjacent to Tigray are under TPLF attack, according to Borken citing Afar state Chief administrative, Awol Arba.

For a couple of weeks now, the TPLF has been intensifying a renewed military campaign in Ethiopia’s Afar state. Despite well over 300,000 residents from the state are said to have been displaced.

The House of People’s Representative (Parliament) dispatched the Foreign Relation and Peace Standing Committee to the state for fact finding mission on what has happened to the state.

Dima Negawo, a former Oromo Liberation Front official and now a parliamentarian, led the mission to Afar, and visited displaced people currently residing in temporary shelter in Afdera.

Afar state authorities, including Awol Arba himself, have confirmed that TPLF has been shelling areas where there are no military targets, at least in three of the five districts that came under the military attack.

A report from EBC, state media, indicated even more perplexing news. It said the whereabouts of many residents from the affected area is “unknown.” It is presumed that the TPLF might have kidnapped many more from the five districts. TPLF has been employing a human wave military strategy during its military expansion in the Afar and Amhara states of Ethiopia.

Meanwhile, Awol Arba called upon the United Nations to provide humanitarian support to those affected in the region to rescue people before severe damage.

BY MULATU BELACHEW

THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD FRIDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2022