Tigray cancels Ashenda festival over drone attack fears

In the highlands of northern Ethiopia, a festival older than the modern state—Ashenda, a celebration of womanhood and the Virgin Mary, when young women braid their hair and dance freely in the open—has been silenced this year not by drought or poverty but by the shadow of drones. Regional authorities in Tigray cancelled the gathering in Mekelle after a series of aerial strikes killed and wounded civilians in the days preceding it, judging that assembling thousands of people in one place had become too dangerous. The cancellation is not merely a cultural loss; it is a signal, read by those who