On Friday, DW television reported that Eritrean troops had continued their deadly campaign in Tigray, with the latest reports coming from Amber. Witnesses and families of the bereaved have given testimonies of killings that took place in the small town.
After reaching out to a woman in the town of Amber, DW was able to get first-hand testimony of what took place in a small village in western Tembien. The woman – not named for safety reasons – claims that both her brother and uncle were taken from their home by Eritrean and Ethiopian military, whose troops are virtually indistinct with both donned in ENDF uniforms to ease calls for their withdrawal.
The woman identified the victims as Haphtom Mamo, her 26-year-old brother, who sold beans on the town streets to sustain the family, and Mewcha Haile, an uncle who had come to the town for a visit at his sister’s.
She told DW that her brother had been a teacher in the community and had supported her and his mother through a time of great collective difficulty in the whole Tigray region. As a teacher, Haphtom is one of the thousands of Tigrayan teachers out-of-work and unemployed in the Tigray region, as schools have been closed since early 2020 due to COVID-19 restrictions and the eruption of conflict in November of last year.
And just like Haphtom, Mewcha was also a man whose family had relied upon for financial support. His mother being ‘a poor woman from a nearby town’ and his father a blind man living in impoverished conditions like much of the region’s population, he had to toil to put food on the table for his family.
Whimpering on the phone, the woman talks about losing her brother and uncle on the same day, which made her life ‘gloomy’ by the trauma caused by the circumstances of their death.
‘Mother didn’t even cry when we took their bodies to the house with the help of the neighbors. We had done so behind the veil of darkness because they [Eritrean and Ethiopian troops] had told us not to pick their bodies’. One of the awful things both invading forces are committing In Tigray: preventing locals from taking the bodies of their community members. This particular unconscionable act has made the ghastly sight of a decaying corpse inescapable across the whole of Tigray.
The neighbor, also not named for safety reasons, told reports that she had been on her way to the victims’ residence when she saw dead bodies scattered on the streets. When the unnamed woman reached the house of Ms. Mamo, she shared the ghastly sights she had witnessed while making her way to their home, which prompted the women to the streets to at least corroborate their neighbor’s account.
As Ms. Mamo and her daughter crossed the threshold of their homes, their lives were soon to be impacted with unimaginable grief as they were just about to see their beloved Haphtom and Mewcha lying dead on the streets of Amber.
‘She just collapsed on her son’s body screaming and wailing,’ the unnamed neighbor continued telling DW reporters ‘while I tried to console her. ‘
‘I came to understand that the men I had seen on the streets were Haphtom and Mewcha, as I saw the poor lady crying for her dead son and brother.’
‘I just tried to console her as she screamed with the anguish of loss, but I was also trying to nudge her back inside the house so as not to get noticed by the soldiers,’ she continued, ‘and I kept telling her to stop crying or they would shot at us.’
Later in the night, the women quietly went to the street where Haphtom and Mewcha had been laying and carried the men to the house where it was now safe from the scourge of wild animals.
As the conflict in Tigray rages on, the civilian population continues to bear the brunt of deadly attacks. Reports keep surfacing that paint a bleak reality in the embattled region. Haphtom Mamo and Mewcha Haile are now the latest additions to a long list of war causalities since November.
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