The brutal civil war in northern Ethiopia may have killed as many as 600,000 people, making it one of the world’s deadliest conflicts of recent times, according to the African Union’s lead mediator in the peace talks that ended the two-year conflict.“The number of people killed was about 600,000,” former Nigerian president and African Union envoy Olusegun Obasanjo told the Financial Times in an interview.
He recalled that on November 2 last year, the day the peace agreement was signed in Pretoria, Ethiopian officials said: “We have stopped 1,000 deaths every day.”
Fighting broke out in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region in November 2020 after Addis accused Tigrayan fighters of attacking the federal army and spread across the neighbouring Amhara and Afar regions.