The United Nations says it’s been delayed in sending much-needed aid to Ethiopia’s Tigray region amid reports of continued fighting there.
Saviano Abreu, a spokesman for the U.N.’s humanitarian coordination office, told the Washington Post that security concerns were keeping the organization from carrying out its mission.
“We have not, indeed, been able to send personnel or relief items to Tigray [yet],” he told the outlet.
On Wednesday, the U.N. announced that it had reached a deal with the Ethiopian government to provide “unimpeded” access to at least the parts of the region under government control.
The government of Ethiopia has claimed that the internal conflict is over and that the Tigray People’s Liberation Front no longer has control of Mekele, Tigray’s capital city. But people in Mekele told the BBC on Thursday that “fighting is still going on in places near the city.”
Claims about advances on the part of either side have been difficult for news outlets to verify independently as phone and internet communications in Tigray have been largely cut off by the Ethiopian government for much of the conflict.
Even before the conflict began, 600,000 people in Tigray were already dependent on food aid, according to Reuters.
“Those displaced by this conflict are living on borrowed time,” Nigel Tricks, regional director for the Norwegian Refugee Council, told the Washington Post.
Tens of thousands in the region have been forced to flee to neighboring Sudan.
Fighting between the two sides began on Nov. 4, when the nation’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed accused the TPLF of attacking federal forces and launched a military offensive in the region. The TPLF was the ruling party in Ethiopia for many years before Abiy became prime minister in 2018.
