As government officials downplay the fighting in Afar, families are separated, children killed and young people ready to take up arms, while hopes of peace talks fade

When the bombs started to fall on Afar, people scattered. In the chaos and panic families were ripped apart. A young father lost two of his children, killed by ricocheting rocks. A grandmother had to leave behind her dying son-in-law, a bullet wound in his back; his wife still hasn’t heard the news. A 28-year-old woman doesn’t know if three of her five children are alive or dead.

All of them are nomadic people from Ethiopia’s north-east Afar region, and survivors of the latest round of bloodshed in the country’s devastating civil war. In makeshift shelters that have sprung up around Afdera, a hardscrabble merchant town beside a volcanic salt lake, they talk about homes destroyed by shelling and villages looted bare. Afar’s authorities estimate that more than 300,000 people have fled the fighting since January.

Ethiopia’s government has declared a new phase of reconciliation, but a cycle of atrocities on all sides has left a legacy of mistrust. War is far from over, say those on the ground

At first sight, it could have been any normal year. Pilgrims, shrouded in white shawls, smiled as they walked the winding cobblestone streets, shaded from the glare of the midday sun by a sea of colourful umbrellas. Young men and women danced and sang, thrusting wooden sticks joyously into the air, as priests blessed onlookers beside a church carved into the mountainside.

The Epiphany of Saint George, an ancient Orthodox Christian tradition, was celebrated in Lalibela on 26 January just as it has always been. The northern Ethiopian town, a Unesco world heritage site renowned for its dazzling rock-hewn churches, is coming back to life after several angst-ridden months on the frontline of Ethiopia’s devastating civil war. “It is a day of double joy for us,” says Father Tsige Mezgebu, the archbishop who officiated the ceremony.