"Ethiopia is at war with itself—and the international community is struggling to respond" Atlantic Council
Posted: 08 Mar 2021, 20:25
The unintended consequence of Ethiopia’s civil war might be a border war with Sudan
AfricaSource by Cameron Hudson
Ethiopia is at war with itself—and the international community is struggling to respond. In nearly four months of fighting across Ethiopia’s Tigray region, more than sixty thousand Tigrayan refugees have fled into neighboring Sudan and 80 percent of the region’s six million citizens have been cut off from life-saving humanitarian access. Despite rolling media and internet blackouts, a steady trickle of stories has emerged that paint a gruesome picture of mass atrocities, widespread rape, summary executions, and the wholesale destruction of the region’s critical infrastructure.
...What has broken that decade-plus status quo is the onset of conflict in Tigray and a series of strategic and tactical calculations by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). Unlike many outsiders, senior-level Sudanese officials claim not to have been surprised by the brutal assault by the TPLF on the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) Northern Command outpost in Mekelle, the Tigrayan regional capital, on the night of November 4. Only a week prior, a delegation led by the deputy head of Sudan’s Sovereign Council and head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia, General Mohammed “Hemedti” Dagalo, met with Abiy in Addis, where the restive Tigray region, mounting border tensions, and the stalemated negotiations over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) were all reportedly topics of discussion.
More surprising to the Sudanese was the Ethiopian government’s near-immediate need for supplementary troops—pulled in from Ethiopian deployments in Somalia and, most notably, the al-Fashqa Triangle—to respond to the TPLF attack in Mekelle. The subsequent entry into the Tigray conflict of Eritrean forces and Amhara state militias further indicated that the ENDF was unable to subdue the TPLF uprising on its own and was operating from a greater position of relative weakness than was perhaps anticipated.
Read the article at Atlantic Council website
AfricaSource by Cameron Hudson
Ethiopia is at war with itself—and the international community is struggling to respond. In nearly four months of fighting across Ethiopia’s Tigray region, more than sixty thousand Tigrayan refugees have fled into neighboring Sudan and 80 percent of the region’s six million citizens have been cut off from life-saving humanitarian access. Despite rolling media and internet blackouts, a steady trickle of stories has emerged that paint a gruesome picture of mass atrocities, widespread rape, summary executions, and the wholesale destruction of the region’s critical infrastructure.
...What has broken that decade-plus status quo is the onset of conflict in Tigray and a series of strategic and tactical calculations by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). Unlike many outsiders, senior-level Sudanese officials claim not to have been surprised by the brutal assault by the TPLF on the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) Northern Command outpost in Mekelle, the Tigrayan regional capital, on the night of November 4. Only a week prior, a delegation led by the deputy head of Sudan’s Sovereign Council and head of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia, General Mohammed “Hemedti” Dagalo, met with Abiy in Addis, where the restive Tigray region, mounting border tensions, and the stalemated negotiations over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) were all reportedly topics of discussion.
More surprising to the Sudanese was the Ethiopian government’s near-immediate need for supplementary troops—pulled in from Ethiopian deployments in Somalia and, most notably, the al-Fashqa Triangle—to respond to the TPLF attack in Mekelle. The subsequent entry into the Tigray conflict of Eritrean forces and Amhara state militias further indicated that the ENDF was unable to subdue the TPLF uprising on its own and was operating from a greater position of relative weakness than was perhaps anticipated.
Read the article at Atlantic Council website