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04-08-2025
Warning: this news contains graphic and distressing testimony and images
ADDIS ABABA/ MEKELLE: 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 weaponized 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.
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.”
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 paralyzed 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 sterilization, Shah said. (Int’l News Desk)
