🇪🇹 International community must intervene to help. This Ethiopian Road Is a Lifeline for Millions. Now It’s Blocked. #Tigray
Aid workers say the Ethiopian government has effectively cut off the lone route into the conflict-torn region of Tigray, leading to a risk of mass starvation.
A U.N. convoy leaving Tigray along a road that passes through some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth in Ethiopia.Credit...Declan Walsh/The New York Times
AFAR, Ethiopia — The road, a 300-mile strip of tarmac that passes through some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth, is the only way into a conflict-torn region where millions of Ethiopians face the threat of mass starvation.
But it is a fragile lifeline, fraught with dangers that have made the route barely passable for aid convoys trying to get humanitarian supplies into the Tigray region, where local fighters have been battling the Ethiopian army for eight months.
Aid workers say the main obstacle is an unofficial Ethiopian government blockade, enforced using tactics of obstruction and intimidation, that has effectively cut off the road and exacerbated what some call the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in a decade.
In the past month, just a single United Nations aid convoy of 50 trucks has managed to travel this route. The U.N. says it needs twice as many trucks, traveling every day, to stave off catastrophic shortages of food and medicine inside Tigray.
On Tuesday, the World Food Program said 170 trucks loaded with relief aid were stranded in Semera, the capital of the neighboring Afar region, waiting for Ethiopian permission to make the desert journey into Tigray.
The crisis comes against the backdrop of an intensifying war that is spilling out of Tigray into other regions, deepening ethnic tensions and stoking fears that Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous nation, is tearing itself apart.
Inside Tigray, the needs are dire, and rapidly rising. The United Nations estimates that 400,000 people there are living in famine-like conditions, and another 4.8 million need urgent help.
