Ethiopian forces have recaptured key towns on the road to Tigray

BURNT-OUT TANKS and fresh trenches. Makeshift fortifications cobbled out of fieldstone. And litter, everywhere, strewn by two armies: bullets, bottles, biscuit wrappers and the muddy pages of a notebook with poetry scrawled in smudged ink.The fields around Yekaba Terefe’s house in Gashena, a town at a strategic junction in Ethiopia’s Amhara region, bear witness to the twists and turns of the country’s civil war. For the best part of four months dozens of rebels from the neighbouring Tigray region sprawled themselves on mats in her cramped living room, exhausted, angry and hungry. Some, she says, were gentle. Others were brutal. Soon after they arrived in August they murdered her husband, accusing him of passing information to the federal army. Later they stole her crops. Then, in early December, they retreated—killing some of her neighbours as they left.