Most people know little about what happened inside the two-year siege of Tigray in Ethiopia. This young man managed the near-impossible: he got out
s a teenager Kibrom dreamed of America. His older brother had lucked out in the green-card lottery in 2010 and Kibrom longed to join him. His mother died when Kibrom was three; his father drank himself to death a year later. Raised by his uncle, Kibrom studied hard, winning a scholarship to high school and then going on to university. He used a bank loan to open a garage in Mekelle, the capital of Tigray in northern Ethiopia.
Kibrom saw patients turned away from the only hospital in Tigray still functioning; people died for lack of food or medicine. Starving refugees from remote areas of Tigray streamed into the capital. At one point Kibrom took in a refugee, but by this spring he was running out of money and realised that he was becoming more callous. “When you give to one and not to the other”, he told me, “you learn cruelty.
In the camp, you had to pay money to eat, even to use the toilet. Bribing the guards was unaffordable – Kibrom would need at least 25,000 birr – but jumping the fence and trekking for miles through the inhospitable landscape seemed equally impossible. He spent hours each day praying with an elderly Amhara church deacon whom he recognised from home and who shared his food with Kibrom and his friend and gave them a mattress.
In May, within weeks of Kibrom’s arrival, three men came to recruit fighters for an armed Tigrayan movement hostile to the. They promised a phone to new recruits, even the possibility of a government job in Tigray. Kibrom and his friend took up the offer. So did another 90 detainees.
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