Brigade Nhamedu: Its predatory violence against Eritreans and its Western media accomplices
Jeff Pearce
https://jeffpropulsion.substack.com/p/b ... y-violence
Mar 27, 2025
Eritrean protest Oberuzwil, Switzerland, 2 Sept 2023
To Brigade Nhamedu:
I hate what you stand for, which is an outright perversion of the idea of standing up to power. Because you don’t stand up to power. You slunk away from that power, put down roots in a nice, cozy place in Europe or North America and then you attack people at festivals where they naturally don’t expect they’ll have to defend themselves.
I hate your phony crusade, and I refuse to fear what is by its nature despicable and cowardly. Neither should anyone else.
**
The time is long overdue to talk about the insanity plaguing the Eritrean diaspora. And the cynically slanted, positive coverage a terrorism group gets on Western news sites. That group is called
Brigade Nhamedu, and from any objective viewpoint, it’s made up of psychopaths.
I don’t make that statement lightly. But what else would you call the members of a movement that deliberately attacks people at public festivals and has provoked violent incidents in Sweden, Germany, Canada, and Israel (more on those in a bit). That treats violence as its modus operandi and celebrates it.
Worse, the Western media operations that treated the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) like heroes during its war with Ethiopian federal forces now consider Brigade Nhamedu the new plucky underdogs, even if they don’t always identify them by name—usually just calling them “
protesters.” There are two reasons for this shameless support.
For the unfamiliar, it’s an open secret that many of Brigade Nhamedu’s ranks are made up of staunch TPLF zealots who fled Ethiopia and falsified their asylum claims by pretending to be Eritreans.
It’s only recently that Western authorities have figured out the con job.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... ikTok.html
In part, because TPLF-ites can’t help bragging on social media platforms, and some dumbass gave the game away. The
Daily Mail was either too ignorant or too lazy to do the proper research to confirm that most of the fake refugees were of Tigrayan background, simply calling them Ethiopians.
The other reason is that the Brigade Nhamedu narrative is being peddled by a few of the same unethical reporters who first lied about the TPLF.
Here is how an
Associated Press https://apnews.com/article/eritrea-dias ... 8c02fd6ef9 story flipped the script in 2023 and practically made a story about thugs at cultural festivals into the Boston Tea Party:
Flaming cars, violent clashes, dozens of people detained. As one of the world’s most repressive countries marks 30 years of independence, festivals held by Eritrea’s diaspora in Europe and North America have been attacked by exiles the Eritrean government dismisses as ‘asylum scum.’
The story is by
Cara Anna. And right now, the Ethiopians reading this will be rolling their eyes and muttering, Of course. Because it’s easy to recognize Cara Anna—she’s the one with her pants constantly on fire over the falsehoods and distortions she’s written.
But now Brigade Nhamedu has gone too far and tipped its hand. An
AP story written by a
Kirsten Grieshaber notes that police in six German states conducted raids and scooped up 17 suspects. In Germany, they’re not screwing around. They consider Brigade Nhamedu a terrorist group, which it is, as it
coordinated violent riots at Eritrea festivals in Giessen on Aug. 20, 2022, and on Aug. 7-8, 2023,
https://apnews.com/article/eritrean-cul ... 7bee1767aa as well as the seminar of an Eritrean association in Stuttgart on Sept. 16, 2023. Numerous police officers were injured at the events, some of them seriously, and dozens of protesters were detained.
Now here’s what’s truly fascinating.
Grieshaber buries the lead. It takes until paragraph 7 for her to get to what is likely the real reason the German authorities swooped down on homes in Hesse, Bavaria and other locales. Paragraph 7.
That’s where you read this:
Prosecutors also say that some members of the association considered violence against German state institutions and police officers to be legitimate.
Years ago, I predicted that some TPLF exiles would morph into an organized crime syndicate or into a terrorism organization. It seems I was at least partially correct, but I take no pleasure in that. I’ve studied gangs—wrote a whole book about them, which even got used as a criminology textbook—and I studied terrorism and insurgencies to get my MA. I was already studying some of that anyway for my book,
Prevail.
And I can assure you this will get uglier. If the lunatics in Germany think German targets are legit, that means Brigade Nhamedu cells anywhere could attack government institutions and ordinary civilian targets, as well as commit assassinations.
It’s insane because terrorism in most contexts is self-defeating. And let me be clear. My own beliefs are closer to those of
Frantz Fanon, who was repulsed by violence but saw the necessity of it in a revolutionary struggle.
The Amhara militia groups known collectively as “
Fano” in Ethiopia are fighting federal forces today because their people are getting ethnically cleansed; you can’t negotiate with a dictator committing genocide any more than
Netanyahu will bargain in good faith with Palestinians—he just goes on bombing the [deleted] out of them. And so Abiy Ahmed keeps up the drone strikes against civilians.
And while Ethiopians in the diaspora will retweet memes and hashtags supporting Fano, no one is so reckless or irresponsible as to suggest attacking pro-government Ethiopians in their communities in America or Europe. The very idea would mortify any sincere backer of Fano. Just as the students supporting Palestinians were not violent at Columbia, as much as Fox News tried to depict them otherwise.
Resistance tactics are yes, technically terrorism. The French Resistance got started a year after the Nazis made themselves at home in Paris; its agents shot a member of the German military at a Metro station, and the poor shmuck hadn’t even really earned that execution. But a blow had to be struck. There was good reason for the Ethiopian Resistance to plan and carry out the grenade attack on Marshal
Graziani during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, even though it resulted in the notorious Addis Ababa Massacre. Such attacks disrupt the occupiers; they unsettle them and make them feel fear for once.
But the Brigade Nhamedu terrorists aren’t attacking a regime at home. They don’t live in Eritrea; they live in Western cities, enjoying the relative stability and freedom of immigrants. It’s despicable enough that they think it’s okay to violently continue a political feud in a different nation—but now they want to reward the hospitality of that nation with violence.
It’ll be stupidly tragic and self-defeating. Nobody flocks to white supremacy after a creep plows his car through demonstrators and kills people. Nobody flocked to the cause of Basque or Palestinian terrorists in the 1960s and seventies because their destruction naturally horrified the European public minding its own business.
You have to be completely deranged to reach the point where you commit violence for the sole purpose of “
raising awareness,” that is, to get attention. But yes, today’s modern psychopath can point to precedent.
Americans hate their health care and insurance infrastructure, and with good reason. Out of these vague resentments, it somehow became socially acceptable in some circles to cheer on
Luigi Mangioni, who allegedly strolled outside a Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan in December and shot to death an insurance executive,
Brian Thompson.
A zealot considers the ends justify the means. “
Hey,” the zealot replies to natural condemnation,
it doesn’t matter if I attack or kill these folks, you are talking about me.
In passing, I’ll just put Brigade Nhamedu on notice that yes, I’m fully aware that you might try to kill me. I’m 62 years old. I can’t run fast or far anymore. I now have to get up in the middle of the night to use the washroom, but the way I see it, your egos are more fragile than my bladder. Just the same, I won’t put up any false macho bravado of “Hey, come get me.”
I’ll just say that if you do, that could be a great career move for me because a martyred writer often gets a boost in readership.
I hate you. I hate what you stand for, which is an outright perversion of the idea of standing up to power. Because you don’t stand up to power. You slunk away from that power, put down roots in a nice, cozy place in Europe or North America and then attack people at festivals where they naturally don’t expect they’ll have to defend themselves.
I hate your phony crusade, and I refuse to fear what is by its nature despicable and cowardly. Neither should anyone else.
So, let’s examine your violence, your cowardice, and how you intend to keep this madness going.
The Background
There’s not enough space or time here to dig deep into the sordid, sad history of Eritrea. And no matter what I write here, it’ll [deleted] someone off. Too bad. It is a historical fact that
Menelik abandoned the residents of Eritrea after the Battle of Adwa. Now, if you’re a Menelik fan as so many folks are, you can justify it a number of ways. The country was still trying to cope with widespread famine and cattle disease, and his army was exhausted and wanted to go home.
The ugly truth was that if Menelik had managed to retake all this land, this might have invited stronger colonial players down the road to try to steal it again. Ethiopia was not a sea power and never really had been. His decision not to chase the Italians out of Eritrea was certainly not popular with everyone. Ras
Alula wanted to “
drive the Italians into the sea.” He didn’t get his chance.
But spare a thought for all those folks on the other side of the line who expected Menelik to liberate them. They were to be bitterly disappointed.
No one will like it either that
Haile Selassie does not come off looking good when after the Second World War, he actively campaigned to absorb Eritrea into his realm. I have written about all this in my book,
Prevail, and my late friend, Ambassador
Imru Zelleke, was there and wrote in his memoir,
A Journey, about how the new constitution to please the UN—which was supposed to prove Ethiopia was “
worthy” of taking it over—was a complete sham. Ethiopia set about dismantling all the budding signs of a homegrown democracy and a free press, sparking what would be one of the ugliest and longest insurgencies in African history.
When the TPLF emerged as the front-runner of the coalition that fought the Marxist Derg, one of its key allies was—surprise—one
Isaias Afewerki. Eritrea went its own way after a referendum in 1993, but a border dispute in May of 1998 erupted between Tigrayan militia and Eritrean soldiers at a spot called Badme. Though only lasting a couple of years, the war was incredibly bitter and bloody, with thousands getting killed. In 2002, an international boundary commission declared that Badme belonged to Eritrea. Ethiopia under
Meles chose to ignore this ruling and held onto the village.
The key concession that
Abiy Ahmed made in trying to normalize relations with Eritrea in 2018 was to at last give up Badme.
The history of the past 30 years is so politicized that you’ll find it difficult to track down even one history of Eritrea that isn’t tainted by the creepy influence of Tufts University’s favorite TPLF propagandist
Alex de Waal and/or his circle. He is virtually in every recent book. And if journalists and reporters-turned-historians aren’t talking to de Waal, they’re making pilgrimages to
Martin Plaut, still riding a credibility wave for covering Africa for the
BBC.
Yet even Plaut had to acknowledge that the TPLF attacked Asmara first, reporting on November 14, 2020 that
a residential complex at the Sembel residential complex, which is home to some 1,200 families in the southwest of the city, is said to have received a missile strike. There is reported to be a blackout in the city, with some people fleeing the urban area.
Interestingly, this story is now missing from Martin’s archives, and Martin is an online packrat who usually keeps everything. Even the aggregated post I wrote years ago about historians getting Ethiopian history wrong is still archived on his site. But not the missile attack. If you even try to trace the story through his
X links, it sends you to some weird gambling spam site. Hmm.
But let’s fast-forward to today. Abiy has gone full
Idi Amin, slaughtering Amhara and persecuting Gurage, Afar and other peoples, jailing journalists and activists, and wiping out historical districts of Addis Ababa for the megalomaniacal dream of recreating the capital with shiny glass boxes. Eritrea, once an ally, is now an enemy because the Mad King has decided he wants ocean front property. But as I’ve just explained, Ethiopia’s “
historical” claim to any part of the Red Sea will sink into the sand under proper scrutiny. It doesn’t matter whether you support Isaias or not, it’s absurd.
Now if you want to talk about a cooperative arrangement for access to the sea, that’s a different thing but the Trump-style chest-beating has likely, I suspect, only earned a Canadian-style yawn from Asmara. If you’re lucky. It’s really not a good idea to [deleted] off the folks who just helped you win a war and who know how your army works.
I have no particular love or care for the Eritrean regime, and every time an obvious government troll challenges me on X, the best way to shut them up is to remind them their country hasn’t had a free election in decades. But neither am I going to fudge the history and pretend Eritrea didn’t get a raw deal in its past. And whatever its internal politics at the moment, that doesn’t mean the foaming-at-the-mouth warmongers at the Washington think tanks are justified in trying to provoke a new conflict in the Horn.
As with Ethiopians, as with Burmese, Turks, Iranians, Kurds, etc., my sympathies will always be with people, not a regime or a state or a ideology.
What does any of this have to do with Brigade Nhamedu? A lot as it turns out.
Because this terrorist group is useful in a larger sense to Western media, which can’t seem to get away form serving as a tool for European and American neocolonial interests.
As I wrote only a couple of weeks ago,
https://jeffpropulsion.substack.com/p/o ... sreporting these media operations suddenly, collectively decided it was time to jump up and down again and remind everyone that Tigrayans were in danger, Tigrayans were in danger! To hell with Amhara getting murdered every day, their chosen “
worthy” victims needed attention. Because of Abiy’s foolish saber-rattling.
What this means is that every time Brigade Nhamedu hits an Eritrean festival—like Brown Shirts smashing Jewish shop windows—an AP reporter can insert this boilerplate summary:
https://apnews.com/article/sweden-eritr ... d9338d2363
Human rights groups describe Eritrea as one of the world’s most repressive countries. Since winning independence from Ethiopia three decades ago, the small Horn of Africa nation has been led by President Isaias Afwerki, who has never held an election.
Want to make your point? Beat up an old man
The problem is that even the mighty AP can’t always pull a cosmetic job on what the group is doing. In a 2023 article that is more forthright,
David Keyton wrote this about the Brigade Nhamedu attacking a festival in a Stockholm suburb:
https://apnews.com/article/sweden-eritr ... d9338d2363
The protesters set booths and vehicles ablaze, sending smoke billowing into the sky. Swedish newspaper Expressen reported that up to a thousand protesters marched towards the festival grounds, pushing past police cordons and using sticks and rocks as weapons.
It is not simply terrorism here, it’s fascism. The Nazis did stuff like this. The Black Shirts of
Mussolini went around beating up tourists, political rivals, even an American diplomat, in the early 1930s.
In a refreshingly balanced piece about the attack on the Toronto festival in 2023,
https://www.ctvnews.ca/toronto/article/ ... n-toronto/ Katherine DeClerq of
CTV news interviewed witnesses and relatives of those assaulted. Her article deserves to be quoted at length:
Danait Mehreteab told CTV News Toronto that her 60-year-old father was helping set up for the festival and was passing out volunteer T-shirts when a group of protesters “descended upon” Earlscourt Park, near Caledonia Road and St. Clair Avenue West on Saturday.
The Aunties, like the mothers, they were cooking and making food. (The protesters) dumped all the food, they were shoving them to the ground, threatening to burn their clothes, they pushed down the fences,
she said.
That's what was happening when my dad heard, ‘that's him, get him,’ and then he said that they hit him over the head with a metal rod and continued to beat him while he was down.
Mehreteab said her father lost consciousness and was “
left for dead.” He had to get 12 staples on the top of his skull and suffered a fracture to the spine.
This is one of the few articles I can find where we actually hear from the real victims, not spokespersons for the terrorist group.
Yet the thugs still got what they wanted. Thanks to their attack on innocent people and even police officers, the authorities revoked the park permit for the Eritrean festival. Essentially rewarding the mayhem.
I have to return to the point about cowardice. It is a coward who attacks people when they least expect it, listening to music, eating food, enjoying their culture, having a good time and minding their own business. You don’t like what the festival “
represents?” Hold your own.
But this is not good enough for Brigade Nhamedu. Anyone else would simply picket an embassy or heckle a consul or ambassador during a speech at a chamber of commerce or something. These thugs attack the culture festivals for the very reason that they are vulnerable, that ordinary people can be terrorized.
In Israel that same year, they got bolder and started a riot
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/4 ... -of-israel when the Eritrean embassy held an event marking the country’s independence… which it was fully entitled to do. That’s the whole point of embassies. The code of diplomacy is that your legation is sacrosanct, that your envoys, right or wrong, are supposed to enjoy the courtesies and protection of the host nation.
But after
Al Jazeera got through the familiar boilerplate summary of Eritrea’s ills, we were told in its coverage that protesters
broke through police barriers as officers appeared unprepared for such large numbers, and videos showed smashed windows of police and other cars as well as damage to nearby stores. The venue was also vandalized with chairs and tables smashed.
More than 100 people, including several dozen police officers, were injured during the fighting
between rival groups.
Not surprisingly, Al Jazeera has no quotes in the story from pro-government supporters. And all this nastiness just gave Benjamin Netanyahu another excuse to promise he would expel African migrants.
This is what Martin Plaut is defending. He wrote a nauseatingly supportive profile of Brigade Nhamedu on his website and managed to somehow not mention once the terrorists’ attacks on people. The nearest he came to this was to suggest the organization was formed after its thugs started a riot in Giessen, Germany in 2022.
Its own chronology hardly matters. Remember that the German authorities hold the group directly responsible for what happened at Giessen in August of 2022.
But I believe its conceptual birth goes back further, and that Martin Plaut is this terrorist group’s spiritual and intellectual stepdaddy.
In April of 2019, he gave a speech in London to Eritrean activists,
telling them,
Journalists are very simple, one-celled organisms. They look for things, they gobble them up, but you know, you got to find something to gobble… We need to make the news. And this is not as difficult as it sounds, but it is really important… A demonstration outside the Eritrean embassy is not news. It may make you feel better, but it’s happened hundreds of times, but it is not news [sic].
All of this was true, as I pointed out to indignant Ethiopians in 2021 when they thought they found some kind of smoking gun and plastered
Twitter and
Facebook with this video clip. I groaned and muttered, Big deal. I was wrong, but not for their reasons.
What no one could foresee, probably not even Martin himself, were the long-term results of the off-the-cuff advice he gave next. Wagging his finger at his audience, he told them,
Do not go and have another demonstration outside the Eritrean embassy unless you’re going to burn it down.
His audience thought this was hilarious.
Which I didn’t say,
he quickly added with a sly smile.
Yeah, ha, ha, ha… message received. At the time when the clip was floating around in 2021, I still thought, Big deal and didn’t see anything significant in this callous joke.
But obviously, someone was paying attention. Someone realized
Yeah, that’s the ticket. Burn. Beat the [deleted] out of people. Go nuts. That’ll get us coverage.
And lo and behold, it has.
I am sure it was not his intention, but there’s certainly blood on his hands thanks to this foolish remark. And I suspect it’s why Martin wrote an entire profile of a terrorist group without mentioning what it does. What other choice did he have? These are his spiritual children. To even allude to the violence is to implicate himself.
And now Brigade Nhamedu feels entitled to wage its bloody violence on
German institutions and police officers.
And no doubt on institutions and police officers in other spots of Europe and likely Canada.
I suspect (at least hope) they will not try this [deleted] in the States, not anymore because in the new racist political landscape of Trumpism, that is a plane ticket to—call them what they are—concentration camps outsourced for America like Indian call centers.
European authorities have begun to wake up, however, to the magnitude of the danger. A Dutch court apparently gave a tough prison sentence of “
several years”
https://apnews.com/article/germany-erit ... 904f02ad9b to a Brigade Nhamedu thug
on account of his participation in clashes in The Hague.
I highly suspect that as usual, Canadian authorities—ever dumb and slow to navigate multicultural nuances—will arrive at the logical conclusion late. Maybe too late.
Lives will get lost because there is a common escalation with terrorist groups. It doesn’t take much to “
graduate” from a metal rod beating a 60-year-old Eritrean in Toronto to trying to leave a bomb that could go off at the Frankfurt airport. These idiots don’t care.
Innocent Eritreans—and Ethiopians and Somalis because white cops and even whiter governments often can’t make distinctions—will get shoved into the back of wagons and go through harrowing ordeals. And the idiots won’t care.
It is time for the world to call them out for the evil they perpetrate. I personally don’t give a damn whether your politics are “
correct” about the regime. You call yourselves Brigade Nhamedu but your reasoning is TPLF logic. I think this guy is a dictator, so I’ll hold the gun to the head of a woman who hangs an Eritrean flag outside her apartment window. I don’t like the country’s lack of a free press, so it’s natural I go shoot a cop in Berlin.
You need to be stopped. I can appreciate the hesitation of innocent Eritreans not speaking up over you directly, but I do hope that they will flood the phone lines at the Associated Press, the BBC, the AFP and Reuters and make it clear, These are not heroes, these are predators.
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These criminals claim to stand for justice & democracy—yet they violate the very laws of the countries that sheltered them.
Justice must be served, and every law-abiding citizen must cooperate with authorities to bring them to account. 
