Rebels in northern Ethiopia have warned that Eritrea has launched a full scale offensive against them, in a major escalation of the bloody two year conflict.
In a Twitter post a spokesperson for the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) said that heavy fighting was taking place at several points along the border between Tigray, a region in northern Ethiopia, and Eritrea.
“Eritrean forces have launched full scale offensive,” Getachew Reda claimed on Tuesday. “Eritrea is deploying its entire army as well as reservists. Our forces are heroically defending their positions.”
While it is hard to confirm military maneuverers because of a communications black out in Tigray, the US Special Envoy to the Horn of Africa has said that they have been “tracking” Eritrean troops’ movements across the border.
If Eritrea has rejoined the civil war, it will have devastating consequences for millions in desperate need of humanitarian assistance and will likely lead to a new raft of war crimes.
Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed made the decision to go to war with the dissident local government in the northern Tigray region in late 2020. Initially federal forces, ethnic militias and Eritrea national army soldiers joined forces to crush the well-armed local Tigrayan forces in a pincer movement.
For months it seemed like the Tigrayans had been routed. But in June 2021, the rebels marched out of the mountains and staged a stunning counter offensive, retaking the regional capital Mekelle. Eritrean forces withdrew from the conflict last year because of causalities and low morale.
Tigrayan forces pressed southwards towards the Ethiopian capital. For a while it looked like Addis Ababa might fall. But an influx of cheap armed Bayraktar drones from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates pushed the rebels back to their mountainous terrain.
Now a months-long uneasy ceasefire has been shattered and sources in the Ethiopian military said there was heavy fighting for the western region of Tigray.
A communications blackout which has been in place since the start of the civil war makes it hard to confirm claims and allegations but it seems Ethiopia has been pouring troops into the fight.
Claims flights ferrying soldiers and weapons are heading north
One source at Ethiopian Airlines told The Telegraph that the country’s flagship carrier has been chartering dozens of flights to ferry soldiers and weapons up north to the frontline.
Flight data showed a significant uptick in unscheduled domestic chartered flights last month, which flew in the direction of Lalibela, a key logistics hub for the Ethiopian army near the frontline.
On just one day, September 1st, at least 8 Boeing 737s with a capacity of 180 soldiers and four Canadian made De Havilland Dash 8-400 with a capacity of 90 appeared to set off for Lalibela.
While The Telegraph couldn’t independently establish what was aboard these flights, the source claimed that they had seen three of the flights packed with soldiers and weapons. Ethiopian Airlines declined to comment.
Eritrea, a secretive and dictatorial state with a huge but under equipped army based largely on mass conscription, seems to be pouring troops into the fight. A few days ago, Eritrea launched a general call for mobilisation of armed forces, according to the Canadian government.
The news comes as a group of United Nations experts released a damning report on Monday documenting an array of war crimes committed by all sides in the conflict.
These included Tigrayan children being blown up by drone strikes by the central government, starvation used as a weapon of war and Tigrayan soldiers gang raping mothers in front of their children.
The commission, created by the UN Human Rights Council last year and made up of three independent rights experts, said it had “reasonable grounds to believe that, in several instances, these violations amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity”.
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