Sexual violence is present wherever conflict erupts, according to the UN. Adolescent girls are particularly at risk. Survivors trudge on, though, amid a shocking increase in sexual crimes committed as weapons of war.
The United Nations estimates that in conflict zones, for every one rape that is reported, between 10 and 20 rapes are notImage: Nariman El-Mofty/AP/picture allianc
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Warning: This story includes graphic accounts of sexual violence, which some people may find disturbing. Please exercise caution before reading on.
At just 14, a young Ethiopian girl whom we will call "Sunshine" recalls a horror that she can barely describe without breaking out in tears.
It occurred in November, when she was living with her aunt and sister in northern Ethiopia. The war with the Tigray People Liberation Front (TPLF) was raging, and fighters were in her village.
They raided her home. But it was what Sunshine experienced next that causes her to shake visibly even months later.
"One of them said 'I will take one of you, and I will kill one' then my sister fainted," she said while recounting the November 2021 ordeal to DW.
Sunshine believes that the man who had raided their home was a fighter loyal to the Tigray People Liberation Front (TPLF) in Ethiopia.
Rape as a weapon
The TPLF are rebels alleged to be involved in crimes, including murder and rape, against other ethnic groups.
Sunshine's aunt begged for their lives to be spared. "He said 'no, I will kill you and I will take one of you'." She recalled the exact chilling words to DW.
Tigray: War at the expense of women
As the death toll rises and crimes abound, the civil war in Tigray is becoming ever more of a humanitarian disaster — particularly for women, who are being sexually assaulted en masse.
Image: Ben Curtis/AP/picture alliance
Hundreds of thousands on the run
The civil war between the Tigray regional government and the central government of Ethiopia under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed continues to escalate. Hundreds of thousands are now on the run, living in hunger and threatened by war crimes. After the self-proclaimed Tigray Defense Forces (TDF) recaptured Tigray's regional capital Mekele, many are fleeing from the contested areas to Mekele.
Image: YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP
Threat of famine
According to the United Nations, more than 400,000 people in the region are affected by famine, while another 1.8 million people are on the brink of famine. Abiy is denying this, and has blocked deliveries of aid. UNICEF commented in August 2021: "This malnutrition crisis is taking place amid systematic destruction of the food, health, nutrition, water and sanitation infrastructure."
Image: AP
Scorched earth
The Ethiopian army is fighting side by side with soldiers from Eritrea — targeting not only the separatist fighters, but also the civilian population of Tigray. For Prime Minister Abiy, this is a means to break resistance in the Tigray region. Reports of war crimes and massacres are piling up. Burned-out cars and destroyed houses are part of the daily picture.
Image: GIULIA PARAVICINI/REUTERS
Rape as a weapon
A new report by Amnesty International (AI) confirms that rape and sexual violence against women are apparently being used to deliberately destabilize the situation. According to AI, soldiers from Eritrea are also heavily involved in these acts. "They talked to each other. Some of them: 'We kill her.' Some of them: 'No, no. Rape is enough for her,'" recalled the woman pictured.
Image: Ben Curtis/AP/picture alliance
Massacres and makeshift graves
The bodies of fighters from both sides are everywhere. Sometimes they are buried at makeshift sites; sometimes they are dumped in rivers, or simply left on the spot. This picture shows the makeshift grave of an Ethiopian soldier.
Image: GIULIA PARAVICINI/REUTERS
Youth fighters
Ever more young people are signing up for the resistance to oppose the combined forces of the central government and Eritrea. Many of the new TDF fighters are just teenagers. They face an unsure and possibly bloody future.
Image: YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP
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The 14-year-old chose to pay the utmost price in order that her sister and aunt live.
"So, I told him to leave them, and do whatever he wants to me."
Her tone was softer as she struggled to hold back her sobs.
"I was scared I'll be killed or raped. I didn't expect to come back. I feared I'd die."
He didn't kill her.
He raped her all through the night.
426 million children living in conflict zones globally are prone to sexual-related violence Image: Shewangizaw Wegayehu/DW
Upward trend
Sunshine is one of the 426 million children living in conflict zones globally who are vulnerable to sexual violence.
In its Weapon of War report, Save the Children estimated that no fewer than 72 million kids like Sunshine — that's 1 in 6 — live 50 km (31 miles) or closer to conflicts where armed groups or forces have perpetrated sexual violence against children.
"The number of children at risk of sexual violence committed by conflict actors is almost ten times higher today than in 1990," the NGO stated.
Save the Children said the number of kids at risk fluctuates from year to year, but the upward trend is very clear.
"In the most recent years we also see that a bigger share of armed actors who commit sexual violence in conflict also perpetrate it against children," the report stated.
It indicated that Somalia and South Sudan are among the six countries with the highest share of children living in conflict zones with reports of sexual violence perpetrated by conflict actors against children.
Others in the global rating are Colombia, with 24% of all children in the country facing this risk, Iraq with 49% of all children at risk, Syria with 48% and Yemen at 83%.
Ethiopia's Amhara region scarred by conflict
The widespread destruction, displacement and suffering in strategic towns in Amhara came as Tigrayan fighters and Ethiopian government and local Amhara forces wrestled for control over the region.
Image: Maria Gerth-Niculescu/DW
Fighting in the hills
Tigrayan fighters are believed to have suffered defeat in the hills around Mezezo in the Amhara region in early December. They had been advancing toward the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. The fighting lasted five days, according to local eyewitnesses. People stayed indoors during heavy fighting, terrified by the sound of artillery. In the area, bodies are decaying along the road and in fields.
Image: Maria Gerth-Niculescu/DW
Destruction in Mezezo
Ayu Berhan hid in a forest for nine days in late November as Tigrayan fighters occupied her village of Mezezo, some 200 km (125 miles) northeast of Addis Ababa. The 55-year-old found her house destroyed by artillery when she returned. "[In the forest] we were hungry and thirsty. There were also children. We lost everything and when we came back to our home, we lost a place to stay," she told DW.
Image: Maria Gerth-Niculescu/DW
Life is slowly resuming
The TPLF had controlled the strategic towns of Kombolcha and Dessie for several weeks before retreating. Life in those places is slowly resuming, but there are shortages of food items, fuel and other essential items. Electricity and running water have yet to return.
Image: Maria Gerth-Niculescu/DW
Destroyed hospital
The hospital is a referral center for about 8 million people. It was used as a military hospital by both the Ethiopian army and Tigrayan fighters at separate times. Locals sad Tigrayan fighters looted it before leaving. "The medicine they didn't take, they made it unusable," said Melaku Sete, who runs the now destroyed oxygen center at Dessie hospital. The region faces a shortage of oxygen.
Image: Maria Gerth-Niculescu/DW
Wollo University badly damaged
The institution in Dessie was badly damaged by heavy artillery and looted. "It's really devastating," said Menagesha Ayele, the campus director. He attributes the damage to Tigrayan forces. "I didn’t expect it. This is the university where their children used to study for their bachelor's and master's." Eyewitnesses said soldiers from both sides of the conflict used the campus at different times.
Image: Maria Gerth-Niculescu/DW
Aid warehouses looted
In Kombolcha, dozens of warehouses used for storing international and local humanitarian aid were heavily looted. Local officials have accused Tigrayan fighters, but humanitarian sources said the community played a major part in taking food and other items. Other armed groups are also believed to have later participated in the looting.
Image: Maria Gerth-Niculescu/DW
Mass grave in Teraf
In the village of Teraf, 21 unarmed civilians and four fighters were buried in this mass grave. Teraf is located within the Oromo special zone in the Amhara region. Residents said Oromo and Tigrayan rebels targeted Amharic-speaking people, a minority in the area. Children aged 8 and 12 are said to be among the victims.
Image: Maria Gerth-Niculescu/DW
Shot by soldiers
Arabie Hassen, 17, said she was home with her mother and siblings when a fighter entered and shot at her. "It is better to die than living with this wound because it makes me suffer me a lot," Arabie told DW. Her cousin (pictured on the phone) was killed in an adjacent house on that day. Arabie's mother, Fatima, said her children still have nightmares as a result of the shooting.
Image: Maria Gerth-Niculescu/DW
Displaced in Debre Berhan
Schools in Debre Berhan, three hours by road from Addis Ababa, are now shelters for some of the hundreds of thousands of people who fled the fighting. "There's nothing to eat. There are children here... people have left their homes without anything," said Mamito Belachew, who came from Ataye. "We are told now it's peaceful there but if we go, there is nothing. The houses are burned down."
Image: Maria Gerth-Niculescu/DW
Militias on patrol
Local volunteer militias are still on the lookout for Tigrayan fighters. The militias are often farmers or civil servants with little military training. "We use this hill to watch for remaining TPLF militias, and when we find them, we will apprehend them," said Bahere Kefele, who joined a militia group in Shewa Robit. "We can't assume they've left our area. We must be alert."
Image: Maria Gerth-Niculescu/DW
Shewa Robit economy shattered
Shewa Robit, a town of about 50,000 people on the highway between Dessie to Addis Ababa, was occupied by Tigrayan fighters for several days. They destroyed several banks and hotels, leaving behind a shattered economy. Local officials said it could take years for the town and the region to recover from the damage.
Image: Maria Gerth-Niculescu/DW
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Some 56% of Somali children in the country face this risk, as do 19% of South Sudanese kids. For children, their age and gender play a significant role in their vulnerability. Adolescent girls are particularly at high risk of sexual violence in conflict settings. And the gruesome acts come with devastating consequences.
Since being raped, Sunshine often misses school for medical appointments — but also to avoid gossip and bullying.
"I prefer not to go to school; the people I used to play with then, now, when I greet them, they don't want to play with me," she revealed.
Sexual violence happens whenever conflict erupts, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
But no statistics will ever depict the true scale of the problem, because conflict affects the work of police and legal authorities.
As a result, rape and sexual violence often go unreported.
Adolescent girls are particularly at high risk of sexual violence in conflict settingsImage: Shewangizaw Wegayehu/DW
Fearing for the future
The UN estimates that in conflict zones, for every one rape that is reported, between 10 and 20 rapes are not. Perpetrators can be military officers, militants, civilians, or workers in displacement camps.
Esther Omam, executive director of Reach Out Cameroon told DW that conflict aggravates the phenomenon of sexual violence and births a huge uncertainty.
"As serious as the word serious means, sexual violence is growing in so large proportions, we fear for the future," she said.
Omam added that perpetrators include the military, drug addicts and men who want to satisfy their sexual urges.
Horrific trauma
Worldwide, sexual violence is fundamentally rooted in unequal power dynamics while people of all genders and ages are victims.
Just a few streets away from Sunshine is an adult victim of the TPLF violence.
When four men came to her garden, Janet had no chance to run. Her name has been changed for her privacy.
Several women have been raped by soldiers, with many survivors hospitalized with rape injuries Image: Maria Gerth-Niculescu/DW
"One put a gun to my ear, the other one put a gun to my ribs," Janet cried uncontrollably as she recounted her ordeal to DW.
"And they took me into my house."
Her experience seemed like a scene from a horror movie.
They picked me up and threw me down. One of them put his feet on my shoulder and burnt me. While one of them burnt me with a cigarette, another was forcing me to have sex with him."
The four men raped her for several hours. They left her with HIV and other infections. And a deep fear.
Ethiopia: Tigray crisis one year on
The yearlong war shows no sign of abating, with both sides blaming each other for the deepening humanitarian crisis.
Image: AP Photo/picture alliance
A city burns
Residents of Tigray's capital Mekele sift through wreckage following an airstrike by government forces on October 20. The military said it was targeting a weapons manufacturing facility operated by the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF), which the rebel Tigray forces have denied.
Image: AP Photo/picture alliance
The haze of war
Smoke from a recent military airstrike billows above the streets of Mekele. Tigrayan fighters have accused the government of killing civilians, while the federal government maintains it is targeting arms depots. Locals have confirmed that at least one major industrial compound in Mekele has been destroyed.
Image: Million Haileselassie/DW
Captured troops
Ethiopian government soliders captured by Tigrayan forces sit in rows and wait to be taken to a detention center on October 22. The soldiers were paraded through the streets of Mekele in open-top trucks in a show of force following the fourth day of airstrikes on the capital.
Image: picture alliance/AP
Help on the way
An Ethiopian Red Cross Society vehicle makes its way through Mekele following government airstrikes. The Red Cross has been working to provide medical treatment and basic shelter in the Tigray region. Amid a regional telecommunications blackout, the organization is also key to helping reconnect families separated by the conflict.
Image: Million Haileselassie/DW
Rare aid
A cargo plane from the aid organization Samaritan's Purse unloads supplies at Mekele Airport back in March. The flow of humanitarian aid into Tigray has since been severely disrupted, with roadblocks on key routes stopping convoys from getting through and airstrikes forcing aid flights to be aborted.
Image: AA/picture alliance
A desperate plea
Heath workers stage a protest outside the United Nations office in Mekele, condemning the deaths of patients due to severe shortages of food and medicine. Stocks of vital supplies are dwindling in the capital, with malnutrition rates among children skyrocketing. The UN recently announced it would withdraw half of its workers from Ethiopia.
Image: Million Haileselassie /DW
A victim of war
A victim of the Togoga airstrike is treated in hospital. On June 22, the Ethiopian Air Force launched an airstrike on the Tigrayan town of Togoga on a busy market day, killing 64 civilians and injuring 184. Ambulances attempting to reach the scene were initially blocked by soldiers before another convoy made it through and brought 25 of the wounded to a hospital in Mekele.
Image: Million Haileselassie/DW
International protests
On the other side of the world, hundreds rallied in Whitehall, London on October 19 bearing flags and slogans as they called for an end to the violence and to the aid blockade in Tigray. Many of the protesters are members of the Tigrayan, Ethiopian and Eritrean diaspora.
Image: Tayfun Salci/picture alliance/ZUMAPRESS
Anger on both sides
Demonstrators in the capital Addis Ababa gathered outside the office of the UN World Food Program in September to protest the sending of aid to the Tigray region. The TPLF has been designated a terrorist group by Ethiopia's government. Officials and rights groups have also accused Tigrayan fighters of committing atrocities, including recruiting child soldiers.
Image: Minasse Wondimu Hailu/AA/picture alliance
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Ugly consequences
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said there can be no winners among countless casualties in armed conflict, not least the women and girls victimized by militants who have weaponized sexual violence as a tactic of war, torture and terrorism.
"Every new wave of warfare brings with it a rising tide of human tragedy, including new waves of war's oldest, most silenced, and least-condemned crime," Pramila Patten, sexual violence in conflict special representative, said on the UNFPA's site.
Conflict-related sexual violence exacts an unspeakable toll on survivors, who are most likely to be civilians and not combatants.
Ever since Janet was gang-raped by the Tigrayan fighters, she has walked on eggshells.
"If they come back and take control of the town again, I have to die — I am very scared," she told DW.
Findings reveal the culture of impunity surrounds the scourge because the perpetrators remain free.
When Janet asked the Tigrayan fighters why they were raping her, they told her that government forces had done the same in their towns to their mothers and sisters.
Many conflict-related sexual violence go unpunished because perpetrators disappear immediately after they attack while the victims don't know who they areImage: DW
War crime
The act of impunity extends beyond the borders of Ethiopia to other parts of Africa.
The Democratic Republic of Congo recorded the highest number of UN-verified incidents of conflict-related sexual violence last year, according to Pramila Patten's report.
Rape has been defined as a war crime since 1919. But it took almost 80 years for rape to be prosecuted for the first time.
Rwanda was the first country to prosecute rape as a mass crime after its genocide of 1994 — in which up to half a million women and children were raped, sexually mutilated or murdered.
Omam told DW many conflict-related acts of sexual violence go unpunished because perpetrators do escape, while the victims, at times, don't know who they are.
"And some who know will not say because of fear of stigma or discrimination within the communities. Or, for fear of further threats to life," she added.
Survivors are left with lasting physical and emotional scars, robbed not only of health, dignity and peace — but of justice.
Sunshine wants justice. To achieve this, she wants to become a police officer or soldier herself and get her own form of justice.
Perpetrators of conflict-related sexual violence are no respecters of age — they rape both children and adults Image: Ben Curtis/AP/picture alliance
Trudging on
The UNFPA said sexual violence thwarts women's participation in social, political and economic life.
But Janet is doing her best now to build a future and has started a distance-learning course. She wants to set up a small business.
"I want to go to school because I didn't attend a school as a child. Now, education is good for my work; to get more knowledge and live a better life."
Other survivors of sexual violence too are trudging on and owning their voices, albeit at unquantifiable costs.
"The costs of conflict are great; the costs of conflict paid largely by women and girls are incalculable," the UNFPA said on its website.
If you are suffering from serious emotional strain or suicidal thoughts, do not hesitate to seek professional help. You can find information on where to find such help, no matter where you live in the world, at this website: https://www.befrienders.org/