ADDIS ABABA – Rockets from Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region hit the capital of neighbouring Eritrea yesterday, said diplomats, the latest indication that Ethiopia’s internal conflict is spreading beyond its borders.
“The reports we’re getting indicate that several of the rockets hit near the airport” in the Eritrean capital of Asmara, said one envoy.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, announced on November 4 that he has ordered military operations in Tigray, in a dramatic escalation of a long-running feud with the region’s ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
Hundreds of people are reported to have been killed in the conflict in Africa’s second-most-populous country, some in a gruesome massacre documented by Amnesty International.
Thousands have fled fighting and air strikes in Tigray, crossing to neighbouring Sudan.
TPLF accuses Abiy’s government of enlisting military support from Eritrea, a claim that Ethiopia denies.
Earlier yesterday, Getachew Reda, a senior TPLF member, threatened retaliatory “missile attacks” on Asmara and the Eritrean port city of Massawa.
It is not immediately clear how many rockets were fired, where in Tigray they were fired from, whether they hit their targets, or what damage they inflicted.
Radio Erena, a Paris-based diaspora station sympathetic to the Eritrean opposition, cited Asmara residents who reported “four explosions in total”.
Tigray has been under a communications blackout since the conflict began, and calls to Asmara were not going through yesterday.
There has been no immediate response from Eritrea or TPLF, which are bitter foes.
The party dominated Ethiopian politics for nearly three decades, and in that time, fought a brutal 1998-2000 border war with Eritrea that left tens of thousands dead.
Abiy came to power in 2018 and won the Nobel prize the following year in large part for his efforts to initiate a rapprochement with Eritrea. – AFP, November 15, 2020
