Amnesty: Hundreds of Women, Girls Raped in Ethiopia’s Tigray

WASHINGTON - Amnesty International says Ethiopian government forces, Amhara region’s militia group and Eritrean forces have been systematically raping and abusing hundreds of women and girls in the conflict in the country’s northern Tigray region. We have received the report back from our Taskforce team on the ground in the Tigray region, they have unfortunately established rape has taken place conclusively and without a doubt. #Ethiopia 1/6

As part of a new report, Amnesty spoke to 63 survivors of rape and sexual violence from Tigray, in addition to health professionals working with the survivors. Among the survivors, 38 said the rapes were perpetrated by Eritrean soldiers. Sorry, but your browser cannot support embedded video of this type, you can download this video to view it offline. “The victims were detained for more than 24 hours, and in some cases for weeks, while they were being raped by the soldiers,” said Fisseha Tekle, an Amnesty International researcher for the Horn of Africa speaking to the Associated Press. “We can see that soldiers were brutalizing the survivors, they were beating them, they were using demeaning words or ethnic slurs against the victims, which shows that sexual violence was used to dehumanize the Tigrayan women in the ongoing conflict.”