forces and ethnic militias, Prime Minister
Hailemariam Desalegn, who had replaced Meles
after his death in 2012, resigned. Abiy, ethnically
Oromo, took office in 2018.
At first, Abiy appeared to be taking Ethiopia
in a new direction. He released political pris-
oners, removed restrictions on the press, and
made peace with Eritrea, which won him the
Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. But he also prosecuted
Tigrayans and purged them from government,
and he reorganized the ruling coalition into a
single political party, the Prosperity Party, a
move that signaled a return to authoritarian rule.
Ascendant for nearly 30 years, the TPLF was
sidelined nationally after refusing to join Abiy’s
Prosperity Party, which it saw as an attempt to
weaken the ethnic federation it had created. But
the TPLF was still potent in Tigray, controlling
the regional government and as many as 250,000
troops. When elections were postponed in 2020
because of the pandemic, the TPLF held Tigray’s
regional election anyway, claiming it would be
unconstitutional to extend terms of office. The
federal government retaliated by declaring the
regional government unlawful and threatening
to redirect funding.
On November 3, 2020, the TPLF comman-
deered a federal military base in what it said
was a preemptive strike. The next day, the Ethio-
pian government launched an extensive military
offensive and cut off power and communications
in Tigray. Eritrean forces invaded Tigray from
the north while militias from Amhara poured in
from the south. Both held long-standing grudges
against the TPLF: The Eritreans blame the party
for their suffering during the war with Ethiopia,
while Amharas claim the Tigrayans had used
the establishment of ethnic federalism to annex
some of their most valuable land.
It quickly became clear that the TPLF wasn’t
the only target. Reports of atrocities against civil-
ian Tigrayans are rampant—including rapes,
massacres, the indiscriminate bombardment
of residential areas, and the flagrant looting of
hospitals and health clinics. “The great majority
of soldiers actually feel dirty and ashamed and
humiliated by participating in gang rape or mas-
sacres,” says Alex de Waal, director of the World
Peace Foundation. “So why do they do it? Well,
they do it because they’re told to. When they do
it on this scale, it is because there is an order.”
All sides, including the TPLF, have been
accused of war crimes, but witnesses blame
Eritreans for some of the worst abuses. The
woman who was tied to a tree for 10 days says
that the soldiers who raped her and murdered
her son were Eritreans wearing Ethiopian uni-
forms: “I could identify them by the cuts in
their faces, and they wore plastic shoes,” which
Eritrean soldiers are known for. They spoke
Tigrinya; Ethiopian troops speak Amharic.
Adiam Bahare, 19, watched Eritrean soldiers
kill three of her relatives in May Kinetal, in cen-
tral Tigray. “They gathered them along with
other men from a nearby village and shot them
execution style,” she says. “I was at home, and I
heard the gunshots and saw them falling one by
one.” She picked up a relative’s child and fled to
nearby caves in the hilly region. Eventually she
made her way to the Maiweini Primary School
in Mekele, which had been transformed into a
shelter for displaced people.
Medical centers often aren’t able to treat the
wounded adequately because facilities haveA WAR ON ITSELF 93