End the Carnage - U.S. to UN Security Council on Tigray Crisis

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, has strongly criticised the UN Security Council for lack of action on the conflict in Ethiopia's Tigray region. "We cannot let Ethiopia starve. We have to act now. And yet... the Council still has not yet held a single - a single - public meeting or taken necessary action to address the human rights and humanitarian crisis that we are witnessing. What are we afraid of? What are we trying to hide? The Security Council's failure is unacceptable," she said at a June 10, 2021 U.S.-European Union-hosted high-level roundtable on the issue.

Also on June 10, 2021, a new report said that more than 350,000 people in Tigray were gravely threatened by famine, with most of the province's 5.5 million people in need of food aid. UN agencies say the food crisis in Tigray is the worst since the famine that gripped Somalia from 2010 to 2012 killed more than a-quarter-of-a-million Somalis.

The Ethiopian government launched a military offensive against the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in northern Ethiopia in November 2020. Hostilities soon spiraled into a complex conflict that involved the neighbouring country of Eritrea, which fought a war with the TPLF-led Ethiopia, Deutsche Welle reports.