Medical workers, who are primarily government employees, haven't been paid in months. "And they dispersed all the drugs to the ground, crushing it under the tire of their military vehicle. Kibrom Gebreselassie, a surgeon and chief executive director at Ayder Hospital in Mekele, the capital of Tigray. "They took away ambulances, they dismantled solar panels," says Dr. Rural clinics and health facilities are mostly non-operational. But now, according to the Tigray Health Bureau, more than 80% of its hospitals have been destroyed or damaged. A medical system that's been decimatedįor years, the medical system in Tigray was a capable network of urban and rural facilities servicing nearly 7 million people. "The scale of human suffering really has few parallels," says Thomas McHale, a deputy director with PHR. report has faulted all sides for what it believes to be "violations amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity," including extrajudicial killings, rape, sexual violence and starvation of civilians. Both sides blame the other for starting the conflict, which has claimed up to 600,000 lives, displaced millions and caused rampant starvation and poverty, according to researchers at Ghent University in Belgium.Ī September U.N. It's a power struggle fraught with ethnic tensions. The violent war between the Tigray People's Liberation Front - the party that controls Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, and the Ethiopian government forces and their allies, including neighboring Eritrea, has been raging for almost two years. "This conflict has truly decimated the health system," says Lindsey Green, a senior program officer who researches sexual violence and other human rights violations at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). (Per the Ethiopian custom, we are using first names for subsequent references.) "You cannot do anything for them and you tell them to pray," adds Fasika, who was dean of Mekele University's medical school before the war. "Seeing the hopelessness in their eyes," he says, "and being the one to tell them that you cannot help them, that they are going to die soon, as a firsthand witness as a physician is very heartbreaking." Fasika Amdeslasie, a surgeon at Tigray's Ayder Comprehensive Specialized Hospital, says, "Our patients are not getting basic medicines like antibiotics, IV fluids, oxygen." Without these kinds of supplies, he's watched patients die. With the country's northern Tigray region under blockade and cut off from most communications, a disastrous humanitarian crisis has been unfolding in a war that has become the world's unseen war.ĭr.
One of the greatest casualties of the brutal civil war in Ethiopia has been its health care. Elsewhere, "they are stopped because there is no supply, there is no electricity, and there is no fuel," says one Tigray doctor.
It's the only place in Tigray currently conducting surgery. An injured Tigray People's Liberation Front fighter who was shot in the cheek recovers after surgery at the Ayder Comprehensive Specialized Hospital in Mekele, the capital of Ethiopia's Tigray region.
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