‘I’m scared to think what Ethiopia will become’: Tigray war refugees fear return

A fragile peace has been restored but for tens of thousands of displaced people who fled to Sudan there is no prospect of going home

When she remembers the corpses on the asphalt, the bodies of her neighbours and of the boy who used to play with her children, Lemlen Abraha breaks down in tears.

“They just shot him,” she says of 14-year-old Kalayu Mebrahtom, killed by government soldiers in the first weeks of Ethiopia’s civil war and left to be buried by his grandmother. “I’d left my home to buy sugar – I saw it on the street, I saw it with my own eyes.”

Since the war began two years ago, Lemlen has been living in a refugee camp in Sudan with two of her teenage children, and four others whose parents are missing.