The Red Cross voiced alarm Thursday over “horrific” accounts of sexual violence in Ethiopia’s conflict-hit Tigray region, amid fears that rape was being used as a weapon of war.
Robert Mardini, director-general of the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross, said the organisation’s staff in hospitals and clinics in the region were hearing first-hand of extreme sexual violence.
Five months into the Tigray war, stories of rape have become common, with doctors and nurses in Ethiopia’s northernmost region speaking of treating numerous women after gang rapes by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers.
The United Nations’ humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock warned earlier this month that sexual violence was being used in the Tigray conflict as “a weapon of war, as a means to humiliate, terrorise and traumatise an entire population today and into the next generation”.
