“The young people – including my relatives – say a wave of arrests have taken place in Libya, particularly in Tripoli.”

The women I was speaking to is from a religious order in Tigray. She is desperate, but does not want to be identified, in case her relatives are targeted.

“The arrests are completely arbitrary. Mothers, pregnant and lactating women are being rounded up. They are taken to unknown detention centres.”

My interviewee was remarkably calm, but there was no hiding her emotions. She explained how the refugees and migrants, many of whom had made journeys of many months to reach Libya, were being driven from their accommodation.

“Homes have been set on fire over the last 9 – 10 days. They were told: ‘There will be no refugees in Libya.’ What does that mean?”

Her own nephew has been in Libya for 1 year and three months, desperately trying to find a way of crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe.

“He has tried three times. Each time we have to pay 15,000 birr to the traffickers. And another 15,000 to get him freed when the voyage fails, and he is returned to Libya.”

In total the family has paid out a total of 840,000 birr since he left Ethiopia – approximately $17,000. It is a huge strain on the family.

“We lived through war – now we have this as well,” she tells me. “I feel hopeless.”

But with the tensions inside Tigray and across Ethiopia there is a real fear that young people will be conscripted, and so they continue to leave, making the hazardous journey to Libya, like so many before them.

“It adds to my pain,” she says, in a quiet voice.