International Warning: Mass rape, forced pregnancy and sexual torture in Tigray amount to crimes against humanity – report

[LeonardoBjj]

Warning: this article contains graphic and distressing testimony

Research documents ‘horrific and extreme’ attacks by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces and warns that impunity has meant such atrocities are expanding to new regions
Tess McClure
Hundreds of health workers across Tigray have documented mass rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy and sexual torture of women and children by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers, in systematic attacks that amount to crimes against humanity, a new report has found.

The research, compiled by Physicians for Human Rights and the Organization for Justice and Accountability in the Horn of Africa (OJAH), represents the most comprehensive documentation yet of weaponised sexual violence in Tigray. It reviewed medical records of more than 500 patients, surveys of 600 health workers, and in-depth interviews with doctors, nurses, psychiatrists and community leaders.

The authors outline evidence of systematic attacks designed to destroy the fertility of Tigrayan women and call for international bodies to investigate the crime of genocide.

What was the conflict in Tigray, who was fighting, and why?​

Where is Tigray?

Tigray is the most northern of Ethiopia's 11 regional states, lying along the southern border of Eritrea with Sudan to the west.

How did the war start?

Years of tensions erupted into war in November 2020. Ethiopia's prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, who had inflamed hostilities by delaying federal elections, alleged that Tigray's ruling party had attacked a military camp in the state capital, Mekelle. He sent in troops to oust the state government and ordered a communications blackout.

Who is involved?

The invasion became a joint effort between three parties: Ethiopia, Eritrea, and regional forces from Tigray's neighbouring state of Amhara. Ethiopia's prime minister denied the presence of Eritrean troops in Tigray for months, despite it becoming clear he had formed an alliance with the country's former enemy to mobilise both nations' armies. Amhara has long-standing territorial disputes with Tigray and its own tensions with the federal government – they, too, sent troops. On the other side, the ruling party in Tigray's regional government, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), founded and mobilised its own army when the war began, the Tigray Defence Forces, and was joined by militias from the ethnically marginalised Oromo people.

Why are they fighting?

Each party has a complex history of disputes. Ethiopia has a federal system, and historically its states have maintained a high level of autonomy. Tigray's ruling party, the TPLF, had been a dominant force in national politics, and led the coalition which ruled Ethiopia for three decades until 2018. The group lost much of its power when Abiy Ahmed was elected prime minister in April 2018, and a political rift began to grow between the TPLF and Abiy's administration. Eritrea and Amhara both have long-standing territorial disputes with Tigray. Eritrea brought violence along Tigray's border during the two decades of the Ethiopia-Eritrea war, a conflict which saw Abiy awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for ending in 2019.

What happened during the conflict?

The war resulted in massive civilian casualties, with atrocities and crimes against humanity committed by all parties. As troops moved into Tigray, Ethiopia blockaded the region, preventing journalists, UN agencies and aid from entering and limiting information getting out. Tigray quickly descended into an acute hunger crisis. By the time the ceasefire was signed in November 2022, academics estimated that between 300,000 and 800,000 people had died from violence or starvation as a result of the blockade. The capital Mekelle was decimated. Rates of sexual violence were extreme: surveys indicate that around 10% of Tigrayan women were raped during the conflict.

Is the conflict over?

The war formally ended in 2022, but violence in the region has continued and is reported to be again escalating. By mid-2025 Eritrean troops were still occupying chunks of Tigray, according to the UN, and continue to be accused of mass rape, arbitrary detention and looting. Large-scale sexual violence by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces in the region continues: NGOs have documented hundreds of cases of rape since hostilities ended, and concluded that "the scale and nature of these violations has not materially changed". Now, there are fears the region could descend into war again, after fresh conflicts erupted between Eritrea and Ethiopia, and between Ethiopia's federal government and Amhara state.

The attacks described by healthcare workers are extreme in their brutality, often leaving survivors with severe, long-term injuries.

“Having worked on gender-based violence for two decades … this is not something I have ever seen in other conflicts,” said Payal Shah, a human rights lawyer and co-author of the report. “It is a really horrific and extreme form of sexual violence, and one that deserves the world’s attention.”

A rape survivor (left) is helped by an assistant at a safe house in Mekelle, February 2021. She has difficulties walking after being attacked by Eritrean soldiers.
Photograph: Eduardo Soteras/AFP/Getty Images
Survivors treated by health professionals ranged from infants to elderly people. The youngest was less than a year old. More than 20% of health workers said those they treated for sexual violence included very young children (1-12 years); and 63% treated children under the age of 17.


Dr Abraha Gebreegziabher, chief clinical director of Ayder hospital in Tigray, told the Guardian his hospital treated thousands of rape survivors, at times admitting more than 100 a week.

“Some [trends] stand out during the war,” he said. “One is gang raping. Second is the insertion of foreign bodies, including messages and broken rocks or stones … Then, the intentional spread of infection, HIV particularly,” he said. “I am convinced, and see strong evidence, that rape was used as a weapon of war.”

In June, the Guardian revealed a pattern of extreme sexual violence where soldiers forced foreign objects – including metal screws, stones and other debris – into women’s reproductive organs. In at least two cases, the soldiers inserted plastic-wrapped letters detailing their intent to destroy Tigrayan women’s ability to give birth.

*
The new research included interviews with a number of healthcare workers who independently reported treating victims of this kind of attack.

Many of the survivors said soldiers expressed their desire to exterminate the Tigrayan ethnicity – either by destroying Tigrayan women’s reproductive organs, or forcing them to give birth to children of the rapist’s ethnicity.

One psychologist who treated a teenage girl said: “Her arm was broken and became paralysed when the perpetrators tried to remove the Norplant contraceptive method inserted in her upper arm, and this was aimed to force pregnancy from the perpetrator. [They said]: ‘You will give birth from us, then the Tigrayan ethnic[ity] will be wiped out eventually.’”

Other women were held at military camps, some for months or years, and gave birth to the children of their assailants while in captivity.

Legal analysis of the medical record data and health worker testimony found conclusive evidence of crimes against humanity, including mass rape, forced pregnancy, and enforced sterilisation, Shah said.

In attacks designed to destroy fertility, foreign objects such as these nail clippers were inserted into women’s wombs, usually after rape. Photograph: Ximena Borrazas

The new research included interviews with a number of healthcare workers who independently reported treating victims of this kind of attack.

Many of the survivors said soldiers expressed their desire to exterminate the Tigrayan ethnicity – either by destroying Tigrayan women’s reproductive organs, or forcing them to give birth to children of the rapist’s ethnicity.

One psychologist who treated a teenage girl said: “Her arm was broken and became paralysed when the perpetrators tried to remove the Norplant contraceptive method inserted in her upper arm, and this was aimed to force pregnancy from the perpetrator. [They said]: ‘You will give birth from us, then the Tigrayan ethnic[ity] will be wiped out eventually.’”

Other women were held at military camps, some for months or years, and gave birth to the children of their assailants while in captivity.

Legal analysis of the medical record data and health worker testimony found conclusive evidence of crimes against humanity, including mass rape, forced pregnancy, and enforced sterilisation, Shah said.

Women were frequently assaulted in public, by multiple attackers, and in front of family. The attacks included significant breaches of taboo in Tigray, including anal rape and attacks on menstruating women. The resulting stigma meant that some survivors were divorced by their husbands, rejected by families, or socially excluded.

“This form of violence is being imparted in a way that is intended to cause trauma, humiliation, suffering and fracture and break communities,” Shah said. “This is going to have generational impacts.”

Many survivors are still living in displaced persons’ camps. A number of clinics providing for survivors have shut due to the closure of USAID.


“The very fabric of these women’s personalities and sense of self has been shattered,” one psychiatrist said.

A significant portion of health workers had treated children. Many were too young to understand what had happened, one nurse said: “Most of them don’t know what rape is. They do not know what the consequence is.”

For girls who became pregnant, some as young as 12, the health risks were significant. “Their bodies are not fully developed to handle the demands of pregnancy,” a reproductive health coordinator working with child survivors said.

Ayder hospital treated a number of children, Abraha said, many of whom developed long-term conditions, including fistula.

As well as direct victims of sexual attacks, health professionals described treating children who had experienced “forced witnessing”, where they were made to watch parents and siblings being raped or killed, causing severe psychological trauma.

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Health workers in Tigray face significant risk for speaking publicly about sexual violence by government-affiliated forces. One surgical worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told the Guardian that the youngest patient he had treated for sexual attacks was three years old.

“It is very difficult to think of the worst [cases],” he said. At Ayder hospital, Abraha said medical staff experienced acute psychological distress and nightmares as a result of what they had witnessed.
“We hope that many people will hear [about this] across the surface of the Earth. If justice can be served, maybe consolation will follow.”


The report covered the conflict and post-conflict period to 2024, and concluded that weaponised sexual violence has continued since the ceasefire, and expanded to new regions.

“The perpetrators must be punished, and the situation must be resolved,” one health worker said. “True healing requires justice.”

Anbassa*, a human rights worker in Ethiopia who helped conduct the surveys, said: “No one is accountable.” The failure to hold perpetrators to account meant human rights abuses continued, he said, with atrocities now being committed in the nearby regions of Amhara and Afar.

“If this conflict continues, this impunity that happened in Tigray, the aftermath of this one will continue, [and] conflicts are going to erupt to other regions.”

https://www.theguardian.com/global-...ritrean-forces-crimes-against-humanity-report

- I didnt have the guts to post some pics. Those guys are less than animals.
Honestly i question if the world wondt be better served of Azrael runing around those parts

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Warning: this article contains graphic and distressing testimony

Rusted screws, metal spikes and plastic rubbish: the horrific sexual violence used against Tigray’s women​

Tess McClure
For two years, Tseneat carried her rape inside her. The agony never faded. It attacked her from the inside out. The remnants of the attack stayed in Tseneat’s womb – not as a memory or metaphor, but a set of physical objects:

Eight rusted screws.

A steel pair of nail clippers.

A note, written in ballpoint pen and wrapped in plastic.

“Sons of Eritrea, we are brave,” the note reads. “We have committed ourselves to this, and we will continue doing it. We will make Tigrayan females infertile.”

The objects, revealed by X-ray and surgically extracted by doctors more than two years later, were forced inside Tseneat as she lay unconscious after being gang-raped by six soldiers.

She is one of tens of thousands of Tigrayan women subjected to the most extreme forms of sexual violence, in attacks designed to destroy their fertility. Medical records and X-rays obtained by the Guardian and reviewed by independent medical specialists show a pattern of cases where women have had foreign bodies forced into their reproductive organs, including nails, screws, plastic rubbish, sand, gravel and letters. Under international law, it is genocide to destroy fertility or prevent births with the intention of wholly or partly destroying an ethnic group.

The letters – written by their rapists, wrapped in plastic and inserted into the women’s uteruses – make their intentions clear. Several mention bitter border disputes with Tigray in the 1990s, and promise vengeance.

In another note, extracted by the hospital from a different woman, is written:

“Have you forgotten what you did to us in the 90s? We did not forget. From now on, no Tigrayan will give birth to another Tigrayan.”

Tseneat had given birth to twins seven days before the attack, and was breastfeeding when the men arrived. She lived in eastern Tigray, in Zalambessa, a town bordering Eritrea. The soldiers arrived at her home on 25 November 2020, shortly after the war began. After questioning her about the whereabouts of her husband, the men dragged Tseneat outside.

“I tried to resist and I cried and they beat me,” she says, weeping. They kicked her in the head with their military boots until she bled out of her ears. “Then they all raped me.”

At some point during the attack, she says, a soldier injected something into her leg, and she lost consciousness.

As she came to, the soldiers were talking. “I heard one saying, ‘She has given birth to twins, who are like her. Kill her.’” Another replied. “‘No, she is already dead. Leave her and she will die herself. She does not need a bullet.’”

Tseanat did not die. For six months, her mother nursed her. There were no medical facilities functioning in the area but she knew something was terribly wrong: she was in constant pain, and fragments of plastic and debris would occasionally pass from her vagina. It was almost two years before Tseneat finally approached a medical clinic for help.
“I was stressed, I had a bad smell and the other women were not willing to be with me. I was crying outside the clinic. The sister asked me, ‘If you are willing, let’s check your womb.’”

After removing the materials visible through her cervix, the staff performed X-rays to check for more foreign bodies. The image they produced is difficult to comprehend: at the centre of Tseneat’s uterus, between her hip bones, lies a pair of metal nail clippers. When they were removed, they were rusting, says Sister Roman, who treated her.

Tseneat says she thinks often of ending her life. “I think of dying,” she says. “I think of committing suicide.”

She says she has one enduring desire: “Justice must be served and those who are responsible must be accountable. I would be happy then.”

Tigray is often described as a forgotten war. If it has been forgotten, it is not by those who endured it, but by the global powers that looked away from one of the most brutal conflicts of this century. It began in November 2020, after Ethiopia’s prime minister, the Nobel peace prize laureate Abiy Ahmed, sent in the army to oust Tigray’s regional ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which he alleged was a threat to national security. The Ethiopian military invaded, joined by forces from the country’s then-ally, Eritrea, and militias from the nearby Ethiopian region of Amhara.
In the months that followed, Ethiopia imposed a blockade on Tigray, prohibited foreign journalists from visiting and stopped aid, plunging the region into an escalating hunger crisis. Even with a near-total information blackout, reports of human rights abuses emerged, including massacres of hundreds of civilians and the widespread rape of Tigrayan women by government-affiliated forces.

By the time a ceasefire was signed in November 2022, between 300,000 and 800,000 civilians had been killed, researchers from the University of Ghent estimate – either directly in the violence, or by starvation as a result of the blockade. There is evidence of abuses committed by all parties, but by far the largest number of alleged atrocities were by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces. Randomised surveying conducted by BMJ found that about 10% of Tigray’s women were subjected to sexual violence. About 70% of those were gang-raped.

When the war broke out, Dr Abraha Gebreegziabher was the head of pediatrics at Tigray’s largest hospital, Ayder in Mekelle. Abraha began working with colleagues in gynaecology and obstetrics as women and children who had been raped by Ethiopian and Eritrean forces began to arrive. The first were a group of six girls – all under 18, he says. “That was very painful.”

When they detected their first case of a woman with objects inserted into her womb, Abraha says staff were shocked. “To us, it was a very painful new phenomenon: we had never heard of this gang-rape and insertion of foreign bodies into women,” he says. “Even witnessing one case was too painful to bear.”
But the women continued to arrive. Abraha, now the hospital’s chief clinical director, recalls treating three, and says the clinic attached to the hospital was able to produce medical records for at least five who were operated on.

The true number will be many, many times higher. Large numbers of women would not survive the initial attacks, or their aftermath, he says. “When they have sharp ends, [these objects] are known for migration,” Abraha says. One woman treated in the hospital told staff that nails and screws had been pushed into her uterus. When the medical team performed X-rays, they found the nails in her gastrointestinal tract. “They may perforate large vessels – bleeding of which can be fatal automatically,” he says.


For the survivors, rape remains extremely stigmatising, and women avoid seeking medical care or disclosing their injuries. Many were told by soldiers they would be killed if they sought help. Of those that did make it to hospitals, a significant proportion are unrecorded: medical notes were destroyed in the conflict, or not kept at all in clinics where health workers were threatened for treating survivors of rape. “The combined invaders during that period were threatening any healthcare providers assisting such women – any healthcare worker assisting the survivors in any way was assumed a traitor. So there was an attempt to hide scared survivors,” Abraha says.

Raped women told hospital staff how “Ethiopian National Defence Forces soldiers warned them not to visit healthcare facilities, otherwise they would find them and kill them”, Abraha says. “Some didn’t finish basic lab tests and post-exposure prophylaxis. They just went out and disappeared.”

 

[LeonardoBjj]

At a clinic in Mekelle, a team of nuns who provided medical care during the war maintained a single, locked cupboard where they kept a cache of evidence of the crimes against these women: X-rays, medical records, and even the objects themselves. “These foreign bodies are documented and also held in our storage – a lot of foreign bodies, anything, either plastics, metal objects, anything around them are introduced into their reproductive organs,” says Sister Mulu, who led the clinic. She leafs through X-rays, pulling out imaging of yet another abdomen – bisected by a sharp, curved metal spike and a thick bolt.

“This was intentional,” Sister Mulu says. “Intentionally they make them carry [these objects], for the suffering.”

This tiny clinic, in a single-storey, four-room house, received 7,000-8,000 survivors of sexual violence, cases extreme in their brutality. Those being interviewed by the Guardian include women who were wrapped in plastic and set on fire, shot in the genitals, mutilated with scissors or disfigured with acid.

“I’m very traumatised,” Sister Mulu says. “Thousands of these stories are in my head, in my mind. I’m psychologically disturbed. I can’t sleep, and my appetite is very poor because in the night, I see and I hear their stories. I have a big scar in my mind.

“They need justice. We need justice throughout the world.”
*
https://www.theguardian.com/global-...tigray-women-abuse-gang-rape-ethiopia-eritrea

 

[The_Renaissance]

Checks to see if any western outrage.....

Oh no, course not, white people aren't involved. As you were.

 

[Flower2dPeople]

Kill them all.

 

[oldshadow]

Checks to see if any western outrage.....

Oh no, course not, white people aren't involved. As you were.

Of course people in the West are outraged by this. However do you actually want to do what would be needed to stop this.

 

[Ruke Doufus]

And western women think they have it bad because some places won't let them perform elective abortion lol.

This is absolutely disgusting and all the perpetrators should be wiped off the face of the planet.

 

[JudoThrowFiasco]

Whatever happens, don't import them to the west. Let that dumpster fire burn where it is.

 

[avenue94]

One wonders what the US offered Ethiopia when trying to get it to take in deportees.

 

[Islam Imamate]

Kill them all.

One of the tragedies of the colossal failure of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan beyond the direct consequences and human suffering they caused is that its made the voting public so against military intervention that even small scale bombing campaigns against horrendous regimes are complete nonstarters.

Imo the nefarious actors in this Tigray conflict, the RSF and SAF in Sudan, and the junta of Myanmar at the very least should be threatened with a bombing campaign like what we did to Serbia in the 90s.

 

[joy2day]

Checks to see if any western outrage.....

Oh no, course not, white people aren't involved. As you were.

There are actually multiple places in the world where there has been far worse victimization than in Gaza, including not only other places in the Middle East and Africa, but also including China's oppression of their own Muslim population. I doubt the vast majority of the population in the US even knows about these situations.

Those aren't fashionable to talk about on Tik Tok though, so who cares?

 

[GearSolidMetal]

People will hate me for it but...it's hard to feel sympathy when you see destruction and children killed in almost daily attacks in Ukraine.

Spoiler

Shout-out to @Nameless King

International Thread 'Russian woman beaten in viral Cincinnati brawl returns home as attacker’s family claims her race is driving national outrage'

Aug 1, 2025

People will hate me for it but...it's hard to feel sympathy when you see destruction and children killed in almost daily attacks in Ukraine.

Not her fault sure, all these oligarchs/elites in Russia instead of using their influence and power to change regime, they sitting on their assess in 'satanic west'. Imo all wealth should be confiscated and them sent back. None of them contributes to anything.

Russian woman beaten in viral Cincinnati brawl returns home as attacker’s family claims her race is driving national outrage

“If it was an African American woman who got knocked out… We wouldn’t have been going through all this.”

nypost.com

• Nameless King
• Replies: 74
• Forum: The War Room

• 

 

[KnightTemplar]

Kill them all.

There isn't a hot enough fire in Hell for these scum.

 

[Cajun]

This is what the UN was built for... sadly nothing was done in Darfur or Congo...and likely nothing will be done in Ethiopia.

 

[JudoThrowFiasco]

One of the tragedies of the colossal failure of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan beyond the direct consequences and human suffering they caused is that its made the voting public so against military intervention that even small scale bombing campaigns against horrendous regimes are complete nonstarters.

Imo the nefarious actors in this Tigray conflict, the RSF and SAF in Sudan, and the junta of Myanmar at the very least should be threatened with a bombing campaign like what we did to Serbia in the 90s.

Then you have to take in their refugees which actually requires your funding and support. They aren't exactly a top tier immigration target. I think this is a lesson the US learned from Somalia.

 

[Stoic1]

Demons walk among us.

 

[Islam Imamate]

Then you have to take in their refugees which actually requires your funding and support. They aren't exactly a top tier immigration target. I think this is a lesson the US learned from Somalia.

True, the alternative would be to establish a safe zone in the country where refugees can congregate but that would mean being less aggressive in bombing bad actors so as to not provoke an attack on the safe zone. And that would require boots on the ground which is even more controversial.

 

[Crazy Source]

This is what the UN was built for... sadly nothing was done in Darfur or Congo...and likely nothing will be done in Ethiopia.

C'mon, man. There isn't enough political will to do anything in Ethiopia.

The Congo is taken care of. Trump brokered an historic peace deal. Guess you missed that.

DR Congo-Rwanda peace deal: How Trump wants US companies to cash in

The US president is spearheading an ambitious but controversial deal to end a long-running conflict.

www.bbc.com

 

[oldshadow]

We are not the world police so im not going to support sending our people there. One of the main reasons is they would tie their hands which would mean ot would be a shit show for our people. Then of and mean if we did what was needed we would be seen as the bad guys. With Trump in the office if we did what wandered the left would lose their minds and the shitheads would suddenly be the "good guys".