Ethiopia Dragged Into Civil War in the North 

After two years of anarchy and lawlessness TPLF seems to have managed to drag Ethiopia to civil war  

Google map of Ethiopia. The red spot shows one of the areas where TPLF opened war

Borkena

November 4, 2020 

The security situation in Ethiopia had been fragile since Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in April 2018. Millions of people have been internally displaced due to ethnic based violences in different parts of the country mostly in the Oromo, Somali, Benishangul Gumuz and South Ethiopia regional states. 

Hundreds of thousands of Ethiopian were savagely massacred by radical ethnic nationalists groups mainly in the Oromo regions of Ethiopia.

Abiy Ahmed’s government has accused new alliances of Tigray People’s Liberation Front and Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) as entities behind most of the brutal attacks. 

In the latest string of massacre in oromo region of Ethiopia, which happened on Sunday this week, at least 54 ethnic Amharas subsistence farming communities were slaughtered in Guliso district of Wollega ( in Oromo regional state) after they were called for a meeting by Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) which the regional government confirmed. 

According to regional and federal authorities, TPLF and OLF were behind the carnage. 

Civil war in north Ethiopia

There had been extensive militarization in the Tigray region of Ethiopia – a region which is governed by TPLF, a political force that dominated power in Ethiopia for nearly three decades until it was removed in April 2018 following unrelenting and pervasive protest in the country. 

Yet, it was this earlier this week that the impending war between the TPLF leaders and the Federal government became more apparent. Debretsion Gebremical called on the people in the region to stand on the side of the regional government and “defend Tigray.” 

There was a little rant in his latest televised speech in which he talked about the inevitability of the war. “Tigray will be the burial places of those who want to subdue us as was the case in the past,” he said. He also said that this war will be a people’s war as far as Tigray is concerned. 

TPLF leaders prepared for war with the assumption that they would be facing the alliance of Abiy Ahmed and Isaias Afeworki. 

As it turns out, based on a claim by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and citizen’s reports on social media, it is TPLF who started the war on Tuesday in the evening. 

PM Abiy Ahmed disclosed in a social media update on Tuesday that TPLF, as he put it, attacked the Northern command of Ethiopian Defense Force which was stationed in the region since the Ethio-Eritrean conflict. In his facebook message, he went on to say that TPLF attempted to loot the Defense Force. 

He also announced that the Defense Force is ordered to respond to the attack as the red line, in his words, is crossed. 

Clearly Ethiopia is dragged to another civil war. Whether it will be a short or lengthy is unpredictable at this time. Whatever the case is the humanitarian crisis it will bring about would be clearly immense.

What makes the civil war more dangerous is that chances are foreign powers, like Egypt for example, will be involved – directly or indirectly.