source photo: https://www.vox.com/

By Kabakura Jean Bosco Ceusi

At least 20 civilians have been killed and tens of thousands displaced in "heavy fighting" between rebels and pro-government forces in Ethiopia's Afar region, which neighbours war-hit Tigray, an official said on Thursday. 

The sustained clashes in Afar highlight the potential for Ethiopia's eight-month-old conflict to expand well beyond Tigray, where thousands of people have already been killed and hundreds of thousands pushed into famine, according to the United Nations. 

Tigrayan rebels at the weekend carried out what spokesman Getachew Reda described as a "very limited action" in Afar targeting special forces and militia fighters from the Oromia region, Ethiopia's largest. 

But Mohammed Hussen, an official with Ethiopia's national disaster response agency based in Afar, told AFP Thursday the operations were wider in scope and that civilians had been caught in the crossfire.  

"The heavy fighting is still continuing. So totally about 70,000 are affected directly and they are displaced... More than 20 civilians are dead," he said.

"They (the rebels) are trying to subjugate the Afars. So now the federal forces are joining the Afar special forces, the Afar local communities, the Afar militias. In the last days the Afars were fighting and protecting themselves."