TPLF’s Child Soldiers

Recent Twitter commentaries by Alastair Thompson are revealing. They highlight the multilayered deceits by the “international community”, particularly the UN institutions which continue to ignore some of TPLF’s most egregious violations of international norm, while paying scant attention to peripheral abuses of the group. One such case is the unabated conscription of children for war.

It is obvious the TPLF is once again leading a human wave strategy in its most recent offensive. Poorly trained Tigray youths, many of them children below the age of 15 are being made to run towards guns to control territory, which leaders hope to use as bargaining chip in an imagined future negotiation with the government of Ethiopia.

Based on last year, they are likely drugged up and not in uniforms, which makes things even more difficult or defending soldiers of the Ethiopian army. Think about the phycological stresses of shooting at drugged and bewildered youths sent to attack positions. Behind them is of course TPLF’s more experienced fighters who are using these youths as human shields and who will not even recover their bodies when they fall. Yet again, another column is behind them to clean up the mess, as some witnesses testify.

For its part, the Western mainstream media is presently so outraged at Dr. Tedros Adhanom’s alleged video of atrocities in Mekelle, which is most likely a PR concoction, that they are ignoring a monumental crime which is now being committed again. Nobody has a clear idea how many Tigray youths died in the human wave attacks orchestrated by TPLF generals last year. But it is likely to be in the tens of thousands. Locals in the Amhara and Afar regions have reported trucks were observed loading up the slain and taking them back to Tigray, some of these bodies were likely same ones found on the banks of the Blue Nile in Sudan. In Twisted TPLF fashion, the dead have a dual use, one as cannon fodder and another as propaganda dummies.

In the buildup to this current new phase of TPLF’s secessionist war, the leadership expressed a desire to build a million-person army. By their logic the reason that they failed to take Addis Ababa in 2021 was because they did not have enough unarmed children for cannon fodder. Even the New York Times’ great white reporter, Declan Walsh of course can’t report on any of this because he was so braindead that when he saw legions of marching child soldiers during operation Alula he saw motivated young soldier, and not a war crime, as did Dr. Tedros of the World Health Organization who expressed his “Pride” on Twitter.

No doubt there are a lot of Western editors and media managers who do not like the northern Ethiopia war, too savage, too ghastly, too difficult to get at the facts. But that is an abdication of responsibility and to justice. Reliance on poorly sourced and concocted stories is perpetuating the conflict further.

In the end, the reason the TPLF is so popular in the West is because it is so connected. It spent 27 years at the helm in Ethiopia siphoning off great health and using the loot to build a network. Its former leaders held great parties and were articulate and charming. Its supporters are well known figures. But they were also monsters who built an organization which prefers to kill its own children than give up its quest for power.