Ethiopia: Afar region the new front in the civil war as Tigray violence subsides

Her family are among the 300,000 people who have been displaced by an offensive launched in late December by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) into Afar, an arid region of stony deserts and saline lakes in Ethiopia’s northeast. Heavily pregnant, Fatuma walked for five days to safety, as did most of her neighbours.

She is now staying in Afdera, a ramshackle shantytown of tin shacks that sits within the Danakil Depression, a low-lying expanse of land that ranks as the hottest place on earth. It is a punishing place. In the summer, temperatures can soar past 50 degrees Celsius, and hot winds whip up swirling dust devils. The British explorer Wilfred Thesiger, who visited in the 1930’s, described it as a “veritable land of death.”

“We have nothing to eat and nothing to drink,” says Fatuma, 20, whose family is living on a thin tarpaulin sheet outside her relative’s home, with no cover from the sun. “I’m worried about my baby – we need help.”