'Where is humanity?' ask the helpless doctors of Ethiopia's embattled Tigray region
One of the greatest casualties of the brutal civil war in Ethiopia has been its health care. With the country's northern Tigray region under blockade and cut off from most communications, a disastrous humanitarian crisis has been unfolding in a war that has become the world's unseen war.
Dr. Fasika Amdeslasie, a surgeon at Tigray's Ayder Comprehensive Specialized Hospital, says, "Our patients are not getting basic medicines like antibiotics, IV fluids, [and] oxygen." Without these kinds of supplies, he's watched patients die.
"Seeing the hopelessness in their eyes," he says, "and being the one to tell them that you cannot help them, that they are going to die soon, as a firsthand witness as a physician is very heartbreaking."
"You cannot do anything for them and you tell them to pray," adds Fasika, who was dean of Mekele University's medical school before the war. (Per the Ethiopian custom, we are using first names for subsequent references.)
"This conflict has truly decimated the health system," says , a senior program
