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The dead have been seen on “every street” in the town of the Afar region as Al Jazeera gains exclusive access to the first line of escalating conflict.
The Ethiopian state broadcaster said government forces controlled the town of Chifra in the Afar region, as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said earlier this week that federal troops would go to the front lines to fight northern fighters. Tigray region.
Since the outbreak of war between Ethiopian federal and allied troops and Tigris forces in November 2020, tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions displaced.
Tigris forces captured Chifra, on the border between North Afar and Amhara regions, after fighting escalated last month.
“The Ethiopian Defense Forces and the Afar Special Forces have controlled the figure,” the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation said on its Twitter account on Sunday, without giving further details.
Tigris forces did not comment immediately.
“Dead corpses everywhere”
Much of northern Ethiopia is in the shadow of communications and access to journalists is severely restricted, making it difficult to verify battlefield claims. Al Jazeera, however, was able to gain exclusive access to Chifra, the first international news organization.
Reporting from the “heart” of the town, Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent Mohammed Taha Tewekel said the Tigris forces had been “expelled from this strategic area” by pro-government militias in the Afar region, but said “shots were heard from all over”. instructions ”.
“That [Chifra] it has been the epicenter of military operations for the past 40 days, ”Tewekel said in a live broadcast, the shooter in the back.
“The scenes we’ve seen are very awesome. The dead are on the streets everywhere. It is a living proof of the toughness of the struggle. There are clear signs of inhumanity in this conflict. The commercial shops of the village were completely destroyed, even the mosques were not saved. All the residents have fled for their lives and the town has become a military barracks for the Dinner Fighters, ”he added.
The dinner fighters have “taken over the city” and are now on their way to the villages of Bati and Kombolcha, the reporter said.
Chifra is located west of the town of Mille, where Tigris forces have been trying to capture for weeks, as landless Ethiopia is on the highway that connects Djibouti and the main port of the Horn of Africa.
State-affiliated Fana Broadcasting reported on Friday that Abiy was on the front line as the army fought Tigris forces in Afar.
“The morale of the army is very exciting,” he said in a statement on Friday, ordering that the figure be captured “today”.
After months of tension, Abiy sent troops in November 2020 to the Tigraira regional government party to remove the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). The TPLF dominated for almost three decades in the federal government until Abiy took office in 2018.
The prime minister promised a swift victory and government forces seized the capital of Tigray, Mekelle, in late November. By June, however, Tigris forces had recaptured most of the region and pushed it into the neighboring Amhara and Afar regions.
Recently, Tigris forces reported large territorial gains, which they noted this week, taking over a town 220 km (135 miles) from the capital Addis Ababa.
The growing international alarm has escalated, with several foreign countries urging citizens to step aside because mediation attempts by the United Nations and the US have so far yielded no results.
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