Calm is deceiving.
A crater with stubble attests to a recent artillery barrage, but with its bustling streets and shops, the mountain town of Mekelle, in Ethiopia, has an air of relative peace.
Then the stories start to spread.
The hospital that begins its days with an influx of bodies with gunshot or knife wounds – dead people, relatives and Red Cross officials say, for violating the night curfew.
The young man who made the mistake of getting into a heated argument with a government soldier in a bar. Hours later, friends said, four soldiers followed him home and beat him to death with beer bottles.
From an overnight battle between government forces and local militia fighters in a nearby city and its aftermath, when soldiers returning to collect their dead invaded nearby houses, shooting indiscriminately.
“I’m lucky to be alive,” said Alefesha Hadusha, her head wrapped in bandages, as she gave a whispered account in a hospital ward. Her parents and two brothers died instantly in the attack, she said. An X-ray next to his bed showed the bullet lodged in his head.
When Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, launched a wide-ranging military operation in the bustling Tigray region on November 4, he launched his goal in narrow terms: to capture the leadership of the region’s ruling party. The party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, brazenly challenged its authority for months and then attacked a federal military base.
But four months later, the operation degenerated into a bitter civil conflict marked by reports of blatant rights violations – massacres, sexual violence, ethnic cleansing and fears that hunger is being used as a war tactic – that set off the alarm throughout the world.
In Mekelle, the largest city in the region, many Tigrayans say they feel that they, and not their leaders, are the real targets of Abiy’s military campaign.
Hospitals are filled with victims of the fighting raging in the countryside, many of them terrified civilians who arrive with serious injuries.
Schools are home to some of the 71,000 people who have fled to the city, often bringing reports of horrific abuses at the hands of pro-government forces.
A palpable stream of fear and resentment runs through the streets, where hostilities between residents and government patrol soldiers often explode in violence.
“We don’t say that everything was perfect under the TPLF,” said Assimee Misgina, a philosophy professor at Mekelle University, referring to the Liberation Front. “But this is a war against the people of Tigray. Basically, we are under an existential threat. “
Abiy, who won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, denies responsibility for any atrocities, and United Nations officials say that all sides, including the TPLF, may have committed war crimes.
But most serious accusations target government troops and their allies – the ethnic Amhara militias who moved to western Tigray and soldiers from Eritrea, a neighbor of northern Ethiopia and a longtime enemy.
Abiy’s spokeswoman and head of an Ethiopian government task force dealing with the crisis in Tigray did not respond to a list of questions or repeated requests for comment on this article.
In Mekelle, captured by government troops on November 28, residents learned to follow the government line, even though the nearest battlefield is 60 miles away.
Restaurants and bars no longer play certain songs in the local Tibetan language, fearing retaliation. A TV station that previously broadcast local news now offers the government’s perspective.
Tigray’s interim president, Mulu Nega, holds court in a luxury hotel where federal soldiers stand guard at the entrance. The internet has been closed since November.
In late February, when the authorities allowed a rare visit by international reporters to Mekelle, the Tigrayans flocked to the hotels where the journalists were staying, desperate for news from the outside world – and to tell their own stories.
In the lobby of the Northern Star hotel, Berhane Takelle, manager of a clothing factory, produced a video showing the remains of his company in Adwa, 160 kilometers to the north – charred machines, a destroyed roof and clothes scattered on an empty factory floor. . It was all that was left, he said, after a series of violent attacks by Eritrean soldiers.
“They took everything,” said Berhane, shaking his head.
At the city’s main hospital, Ayder Referral, authorities said they received the bodies of 250 men, aged 20 to 35, between 28 November, when Ethiopian soldiers seized Mekelle, and 9 March. Four-fifths of the bodies had gunshot wounds, and the rest were wounded with knives, said a senior official who requested anonymity to avoid reprisals.
Most of the attacks appear to have been carried out by government soldiers, he added.
One morning, three young men gathered at the morgue to identify the body of Getachew Tewolde, 26, the friend the soldiers beat to death with beer bottles.
The soldiers who killed Getachew the day before accused him of supporting the opposition. “They said he belonged to the military junta,” said Kidanu Gidey, using an understatement for the TPLF
But Getachew was a worker, not a political leader, his friends said.
Even more distressing reports came from outside the city.
The attack in which Hadusha’s family was killed occurred near the city of Abiy Addi in central Tigray on 10 February.
A 26-year-old man, Berhe, gave a similar account of that day, saying that his brother and seven other men were arrested, taken to a military camp and executed. He asked to use only the first name, fearing reprisals.
A surgeon who treated the wounded showed a photo of a young man with craters in his eyes – shot in the temple at close range, apparently in an attempt to execute, the surgeon said.
A humanitarian worker from an international group working in that area, speaking on condition of anonymity so as not to compromise the work, confirmed that the attacks on civilians occurred near Abiy Addi on that date.
Violence, the aid worker said, is typical of a conflict in which the worst atrocities tend to occur after the battle.
Last month, Amnesty International accused Eritrean soldiers of massacring hundreds of civilians in Axum, in northern Tigray, in late November, hours after Tigrayan militants attacked an Eritrean military post in the city.
In western Tigray, American officials found evidence of ethnic cleansing led by Amhara officers and militia fighters, according to an internal US government report obtained by The New York Times.
An Ahmara regional government spokesman told Bloomberg this week that he was pushing to officially incorporate western Tigray into Amhara.
In late February, Prime Minister Abiy said that he took “the safety and well-being of all Ethiopian citizens very seriously” and that he was ready to cooperate with any joint investigation of abuses with “relevant human rights bodies” . On Wednesday, the opening of an investigation was approved by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
In testimony to Congress last week, US Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken called the situation in Tigray unacceptable and reiterated calls for Eritrean troops to withdraw immediately.
“They need to leave,” said Blinken.
Mr. Mulu, the interim leader of Tigray, is a lonely figure in Mekelle. An ethnic Tigrayan installed by Abiy nine days after the start of the war, he lives and works in a suite at Hotel Axum, where he is trying to restart Tigray’s war-torn bureaucracy.
Unlike Mr. Abiy, Mr. Mulu does not deny Eritrea’s presence in Tigray. And in an interview he said he started his own investigation into the reported atrocities.
“It is not acceptable for people to die like this,” he said. “But we need evidence. We ask our security forces to investigate. “
Tigray’s health services, which were once among the best in Ethiopia, have been devastated. On Monday, Doctors Without Borders said dozens of clinics across the region were destroyed and looted by soldiers, often deliberately.
Berhanu Mekonnen, head of the Ethiopian Red Cross in Tigray, said in an interview that Eritrean soldiers killed seven of their workers, including a driver who was dragged from his ambulance and shot.
The Red Cross fleet of 254 ambulances in Tigray has been reduced to 30, Berhanu added. Most were apprehended by soldiers or destroyed in fighting. Those still in use are often hidden behind churches or dense vegetation to prevent Eritrean soldiers from stealing them, he said.
The battle is also one of narratives.
The government often accuses foreign critics and news agencies of falling for TPLF propaganda, an accusation made by supporters of Abiy, who recently demonstrated in New York in front of The Times offices.
In Washington, a day earlier, a senior diplomat at the Ethiopian Embassy resigned over reports of atrocities in Tigray, accusing Abiy of leading Ethiopia “on a dark path towards destruction and disintegration.”
Inside Tigray, soldiers detained Ethiopian translators and reporters working for four international vehicles, including The Times, last month. The men were released without charge days later, but by this time most foreign reporters were forced to leave Tigray.
In such a tense environment, even massacres are contested.
Abiy officials often cite a massacre in Mai Kadra, a city in western Tigray, on November 9, as an example of TPLF war crimes. Witnesses cited in an Amnesty International report blamed Tigrayan fighters for the deaths.
But in a camp in Mekelle, eight residents of Mai Kadra said the killings were indeed committed by the Fano, an Amhara ethnic militia group with a reputation for brutality, and insisted that the majority of the victims were Tigrayans.
Solomon Haileselassie, 28, said he had seen the massacre of his hiding place in a garbage dump. “I saw them cut people’s legs and arms with axes,” he said.
Fisseha Tekle, a researcher at the Horn of Africa from Amnesty International, said the group had received credible new evidence of Tigrayan’s deaths, but maintained the conclusion that most of the victims were amharas.
Restricted access and “high politicization of violence” make it difficult to establish the truth about almost everything in Tigray, added Fisseha.
An employee of The New York Times contributed reports from Mekelle, Ethiopia.