Newsletter block in header
Languages
- English
- Kiswahili
Many of Tigray’s six million people live in mountainous and rural areas where they are all but invisible to the outside world. While teams of aid workers have been deployed to the main cities of this northern Ethiopian region over recent months, aid is failing to reach more remote communities, where the impact of the conflict has often been severe. Many people have been unable to access healthcare and other basic services for the past six months and are still living in fear.
Survivors describe being shot by soldiers in Adwa, Tigray on April 12, 2021
In recent weeks, tens of thousands of displaced people have arrived in cities in the conflict-hit region of Tigray, northern Ethiopia. They join others who arrived earlier and are staying in schools and empty buildings, in poor conditions and without basic services. Many have already been displaced multiple times since November.
Before March, Shire in Ethiopia’s North-West region of Tigray already hosted a large number of people who have been displaced by the conflict. Many live with the host community, while about 17,000 lived in three informal IDP sites. In the past few weeks, there has been a massive influx of new arrivals in Shire, where the situation was already dire.
MSF Statement after staff witness extrajudicial killings in Tigray on March 23, 2021.
MSF is deeply concerned by the scale of deliberate attacks on health facilities that our teams routinely witness across Tigray region. Health centers appear to have been deliberately vandalized to render them non-functional.
Fighting in Ethiopia’s Tigray region has uprooted hundreds of thousands of people. Inside Tigray, most of the displaced people stay with the host community, while tens of thousands live in informal sites or are still hiding in the bush or the mountains. MSF is deeply concerned about the humanitarian situation of hundreds of thousands of people who have been deprived of medical care for months and have received little humanitarian assistance
Albert Viñas has been involved in almost 50 emergency responses with Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors without Borders (MSF) over 20 years. He has just returned from his sixth mission in Ethiopia, where his role was to prepare the way for medical teams to access areas of eastern and central Tigray and assist people affected by the current crisis. Since violence broke out in this northern Ethiopian region in early November, some 60,000 people have taken refuge in Sudan and hundreds of thousands have been displaced within Tigray. He describes what he found.
People have been left without healthcare and tens of thousands have been displaced across Ethiopia and Sudan, following fighting that broke out in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, in November 2020.
MSF teams are working on both sides of the border, providing assistance to people in refugees camps in Sudan, and to the displaced and host communities within Tigray in Ethiopia.
