The Ones We Left Behind: The Forgotten Women of Tigray
“They could not eliminate everyone. So they destroyed the most respected pillars of society: the mothers. To break us as Tigrayans, they knew they had to ruin the women of our society.”
THE BEFORE
Four years ago marked the official end of the Tigray conflict, a war fought between the Ethiopian Federal government and the regional government of the northern region Tigray. The roots of the conflict can be traced back to a major political shift caused by the election of Abiy Ahmed as prime minister in 2018, which broke with the decade-long tradition when the nationalist Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) hold political power in the country. What followed was a grave power struggle and the will for political reform that finally culminated in the beginning of the war on 4 November 2020, when Abiy Ahmed ordered a military offensive against regional forces in Tigray.
While the conflict formally found an end in November of 2022, an all’s well that ends well is hardly fitting here. Aside from the fact that the political situation between the two parties worsened once more during this year’s June prime minister elections, the real tragedy is portrayed in leaving citizens behind to tend to their own wounds.
The Tigray conflict, and consequently no exception to most wars, counted civilians as the biggest casualty group. That alone might not seem particularly surprising and can be observed in almost every conflict around the world. What was shocking, however, was the primary target group of the Ethiopian army and militias that slowly crystallised after months of fighting: women and girls had become victims of sexual violence and rape on a scale rarely seen before. The number is said to be around 120,000 victims, though the actual figure is estimated to be much higher.
“They tied my legs together and crushed them. They also stepped on my neck to stop me from moving. When they were done, they mutilated my genitals.
It’s a miracle I survived.”
THE DURING
The actions of the Ethiopian National Defense Force and Eritrean soldiers were perfidious. Women in campsites were used as sex slaves and raped for weeks or even months without providing them with any medical care. Their goal? Inflicting permanent reproductive harm on Tigrayan women. Reports show soldiers gang-raping women and later mutilating their reproductive organs by forcing foreign objects into their wombs, such as screws or nail clippers. To render them infertile, soldiers would inflict injuries on their victims or inject them with unidentified drugs, all meant to inflict not only physical, but lasting emotional harm on the Tigrayan people.
And that is not all: the rape was often paired with the deliberate intention of wiping the women out by having them raped by HIV-positive men.
But what has made women and girls the targets of such brutality in this war? Why them? How is it elevating to heap on the weakest and most affected by the war?
The goal remains the same in every conflict: it is precisely to take away any remaining shred of a woman’s dignity that will no doubt outlast the length of the actual conflict by far.
In war, a house may be destroyed by a missile, but, eventually, new foundations can be laid to restore what was damaged. But here, we are not talking about damage to objects. We are talking about human dignity, about women as the backbone of society, the ones bearing the burden of a functioning civilization on their shoulders. Breaking them meant breaking Tigrayans as a whole.
In rural Ethiopia, a woman who is raped and sexually abused loses her reputation, her status, her humanity. And even though many rightly consider this view wrong and ultimately misogynistic, it does not change the internalized self-view of women and their lived realities.
And the perpetrators’ calculations seem to be paying off:
“We swim in shame. Our husbands hate us. They believe we are the waste of Eritrean soldiers. They say we carry diseases. We are thrown out with our children. We are rejected and ignored by every politician.”
THE AFTER
The harm done to Tigrayan women is now theirs alone to bear. They feel it, victims report, even to this day. It shows through chronic pain, infertility, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Many were forced to move into communities designated for those whofell victims to rape and cast out. Burdened by the social stigma they now live with, the political obstruction only adds to their desperation. The Ethiopian government largely denies and downplays the scale of the crimes committed.
The country’s courts are testimony to the minimal interventions used to bring justice to victims. Back in 2021, military prosecutors convicted four soldiers of rape and charged 25 other soldiers with rape and other forms of sexual violence. A comparatively low number of convictions, which is not nearly enough to provide justice that would at least provide Tigrayan women with the needed assurance that what was done to them is profoundly inhumane, wrong, and punishable.
On 2 November 2022, the Tigray conflict (at least officially) found an end with the Pretoria Agreement signed by the Ethiopian federal government and the TPLF. The agreement sought to establish a permanent cessation of hostilities and facilitate humanitarian access within Tigray.
Four years later, however, it seems as though the political climate has not been able to recover, with renewed fighting between federal forces and Tigrayan fighters near the Ethiopian-Eritrean border as of November 2026.
In the end, the question one is left with is whether the region’s rising tensions mean a harbinger of further human rights abuses against the women of Tigray, with the promises enshrined in this fragile agreement slowly fading into the background.
And so, in the end, they remain the ones we left behind.
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