This is Popular Front, a podcast focused on the niche details of modern warfare and underreported conflict with me Jake Hanrahan. Today we're speaking to journalist Sean Williams. You

might know him from the Underworld podcast. He's just got back from Tigray, the region currently under siege and at

war with Ethiopia and also Eritrea. It's a horrific conflict. Ethiopian and Eritrean troops have been raping

women as a weapon of war. It's absolutely horrific. Sean has just got back from there.

He's going to tell us about his reporting.

If you like what we're doing here at Popular Front, please do consider supporting us at

Patreon.com slash popular front.

So you've just been in Tigray, you've been there reporting.

So you've just been in Tigray you've been there reporting obviously on the

conflict there maybe just explain to us a little bit about the current situation

there on the ground I guess when I was looking into it

was probably when it came into the news like a few months ago and there was kind of

the brewings of a conflict going on and there have been some human rights abuses in various cities and towns all over the region.

I was out in T-Gray for what, week and a half, maybe a bit longer than that,

and over the course of that time even, so that's a couple of weeks ago,

or even less than that, it's changed a bit, the conflict.

So when I was there, I flew into Meckley, which is the kind of regional capital,

and then went about sort of organizing a trip up through, there's only a few sort of paved roads in the region and going towards

Axum and Shiller which is two of the biggest cities affected by the violence.

Now by the time I got there the TDF the Tigray Defence Forces which is the kind of guerrilla fighting

force of the TPLF which sort of ran the region for a long long. They had been pushed out of the major cities pretty early on by Eritrean and Ethiopian troops.

And they were kind of fighting pitched battles out on these huge plains surrounded by canyons.

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