 Its objective was to move 1.5 million peasants from the northern provinces, and by the end of 1986 half a million had been moved, most of them forcibly.Although by the mid-1980s the Derg had lost control of virtually all of rural Tigray, the army continued to attack population centers in the liberated territories until the final days of the war).It is virtually impossible to make an overall assessment of the human and material costs of the war, since detailed figures have not been released of the number of fighters killed.