This pogrom has been principally catastrophic. Local Oromo residents and the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) surrounded our villages from all directions. They carried out the racial killing in the villages relentlessly for eight consecutive hours. I witnessed two Amhara peasants named Ahmed Sherif and Ahmed Ali get shot dead cruelly with a heavy weapon called Dishqa from a distance. My family members together with six other individuals were murdered with close range gunshots in an empty room located near my house. Their corpses were then inhumanely mutilated using machetes. Twelve innocent civilian ethnic Amharas were burnt to death inside a house located in the center of Gutin Sefer. Fifty-Five other people, residents of Silsaw village were mass slaughtered at once in a jungle located in Chefie village.
Among the dead only two were adult men whereas the remaining fifty-three were children and women. Forty-Eight other Amharas were also blood bathed at the backyard of Jafar Mosque found in Silsaw Village where they were hiding to escape the massacre. With this disregard for the mosque and human life however, the killers turned a sacred place into a mass homicidal playground. It was the local Oromo vigilant youths who showed shortcut paths to and from the villages to the OLA militias, cutting the last breath of suspected gunfire survivors using machetes, demolishing, and robbing the properties of the Amharas. I identified thirty-one people who were slaughtered in mass from Ahmed Yusuf’s family alone: comprising his children and grandchildren. Another individual whom I cannot name right now has also lost his twelve family members.
On the other hand, the entire family members of Ahmed Sherif (Man who got shot dead using Dishqa) who were seven in number were annihilated altogether. Accordingly, we have buried four hundred fifty dead bodies thus far all over the villages. I even anticipate more dead bodies will be found in the jungle and other areas where we have not yet visited. I have never suspected such genocide to happen on us in my lifetime. The killers were acting by far as wild animals. I do not think they belong to the human race. Even wild animals like the Hyenas do not kill human beings in a way the OLAs did. I am more than certain if they were to come back again, they would kill all of us who survived by miracle. There is nothing remaining that attaches and connects me to live together anymore. I only need the responsible body to get me and the other survivors out and let us live in our parents’ land in Wollo, Amhara Region. Please help us get relocated before we totally vanish, and our race (Amhara) gets exterminated without a new generation to replace and continue after me. Please, please, please.”
For more detail, refer Amhara Association of America (amharaamerica.org)
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