Ethiopian News, Current Affairs and Opinion Forum
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Zreal
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by Zreal » 31 Oct 2020, 19:08
Last edited by
Zreal on 31 Oct 2020, 19:28, edited 2 times in total.
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Zreal
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by Zreal » 31 Oct 2020, 19:18
Isaias Afewerki is an angry animal who waited so long to avenge TPLF for his humiliation of the 1998 Badme war.
From Alex de Waal book "The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa Money, War and the Business of Power"
Isaias miscalculated. Whatever errors he made in the first seven years after liberation were as nothing compared to the blunder of the war with Ethiopia and its aftermath. Isaias dispatched an armoured brigade to punish Tigrayan militiamen for their encroachments in Badme in May 1998, part of what appeared to be an annexation of land that, on the common published maps, lay in Eritrea.11 For Isaias, it began as just another exercise in brinkmanship, but he led his country over the precipice. For two years, the Ethiopian and Eritrean armies fed their young people into the Badme meat-grinder, until the Ethiopians used their underestimated battlefield skills to best effect, penetrating the under-defended mountains north of the disputed plain on humble donkeys and overrunning the Eritrean trenches from the rear. The Ethiopian army went on to overrun the EDF on several fronts. It was a personal humiliation for Isaias, who was on the point of abandoning Asmara and repeating the EPLF's 1978 ‘strategic withdrawal’ to the mountains of Sahel. For reasons that have never been fully clear, Meles ordered his commanders to halt, and Isaias survived.
![Laughing :lol:](./images/smilies/icon_lol.gif)
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Zreal
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by Zreal » 31 Oct 2020, 19:32