The World's Worst War You Aren't Watching is in Ethiopia

💭 At least half a million people have died so far from direct violence, starvation and lack of access to health care.
While the world's eyes are trained on the war in Ukraine and whether Vladimir Putin is unhinged enough to use nuclear weapons, another war rages mostly unseen some 3,000 miles away in Ethiopia.
The war is centered on the northern region of Tigray, where a long-standing political conflict between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) turned violent in 2020. The region has been under a near total blockade for most of the time since, cut off from humanitarian aid, electricity, telecommunications and banking, leaving 5.3 million civilians in dire straits. The Ethiopian government's renewed offensive has escalated the crisis even further.
Accurately estimating the dead while war continues is difficult, but the best estimates available suggest at least half a million people have died so far from direct violence, starvation and lack of access to health care. Starvation seems to be a feature rather than a bug in the government's battle plan. More recent estimates suggest that this number have died in combat alone, possibly bringing the overall deaths closer to a million.
To put it in perspective, the United Nations estimates about 6,000 civilians have been killed in Ukraine so far, and estimates put military deaths in the tens of thousands. Even if these estimates are low, the best available numbers suggest that the scale of death in Ethiopia exceeds that in Ukraine many times over. And yet Ethiopia has received a small fraction of attention, both from policymakers and the media.
Calling out the atrocities for what they are would at least put Ethiopia and Eritrea on notice that the world is watching, and the long arm of international justice could ultimately prevail. Offenders in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone, to name a few, ultimately faced justice after all.