“They’ve begun an offensive around southern Tigray,” Abdisalam Balema, a member of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front’s (TPLF) central committee, told Al Jazeera by phone from Mekelle, the Tigrayan capital, on Wednesday morning.
“They’re carrying out strikes in many places. We are not sure of the extent of it or whether they will continue, but we will assess it.”
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Balema did not know it then, but he was describing the start of a major military escalation.
Fighting intensified across parts of Tigray and later spread to the neighbouring Afar and Amhara regions, pitting federal forces against several armed groups. A day later, Balema told Al Jazeera that the situation had become a “full war”.
The Tigray Army said the federal government had launched a “full-scale offensive” involving infantry, mechanised units and drones, and said its forces had begun counteroffensive operations.
Getachew Reda, a former senior TPLF figure who now advises Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, gave the opposite account of how the fighting began, accusing the TPLF of launching the attack.
The escalation disrupted air travel, as Tigrayan forces seized airports in the region and Ethiopian Airlines suspended flights across Tigray. Local reports also said they had captured Abala, a district capital in neighbouring Afar.
Amid the competing accounts of how the escalation began, the immediate question may now be whether Ethiopia has crossed into a wider conflict.
The intensification came days after seven armed movements from across Ethiopia, including the TPLF, announced the formation of the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, which committed itself to removing Abiy’s government.
The coalition has brought together the Amhara Fano National Movement and the Oromo Liberation Army, alongside other movements from Somali, Afar and Benishangul-Gumuz areas.
The alliance marked a striking realignment that had been almost a year in the making, bringing together movements with very different histories and grievances against the central government, including forces with bitter histories of conflict among themselves.
In a statement issued as the fighting widened on Wednesday, the alliance said the federal government was attacking its member forces on several fronts and presented their response as part of the broader struggle that had brought the coalition together.
The regional East African bloc IGAD called for hostilities to cease and direct dialogue to resume, while the United Nations has expressed concern over the formation of the new armed coalition and reports of drone attacks.
About three-quarters of a million people were already internally displaced in Tigray because of the earlier war, according to UN migration data.
Formation of the alliance
The alliance grew out of the political realignment that followed the Pretoria agreement, which ended the two-year Tigray war in November ۲۰۲۲. The deal brought peace between Addis Ababa and the TPLF, but fractured the coalition Abiy had assembled to fight the war.
Neither Eritrea nor Amhara forces, whose troops had fought alongside the federal army, were parties to the final agreement, and both later fell out with the federal government.
In Amhara, tensions over plans to dismantle regional forces helped trigger open conflict between the Ethiopian government and Fano fighters, organised under the Amhara Fano National Movement, in ۲۰۲۳. Relations with Eritrea also deteriorated, first over the Pretoria settlement and later over Abiy’s push for access to the Red Sea through Eritrean ports.
The Pretoria agreement also deepened divisions within the TPLF, between figures such as Reda, who continued to defend the settlement, and a faction led by Debretsion Gebremichael that increasingly rejected the political order it had created.
Pretoria “changed the equation”, Faisal Roble, a regional analyst and member of the East African Parliament, told Al Jazeera. “Abiy alienated all of them at different levels.”
The faction led by Debretsion later seized power in Tigray and repaired relations with former enemies, including Fano fighters in Amhara and Eritrea, upending the alliances that had defined the previous war.
The government’s spokeswoman, Billene Seyoum, told the Reuters news agency after the new coalition was announced that its members had already been collaborating with financial backing from Asmara and that the formal declaration confirmed statements by government officials.
Eritrea has repeatedly denied supporting Ethiopian armed groups.
Reda had dismissed the alliance’s chances of ousting the government shortly after it was announced. “I don’t lose sleep over that,” he told state media this week.
“Now it [the TPLF] goes back to the drawing board, and declares Pretoria dead and starts an alliance with the very people who fell out with the federal government because Pretoria was signed,” he added.
Balema, the senior TPLF official, said the party’s decision to join those former enemies reflected its determination not to find itself isolated if the conflict widened again.
“We’ve been forced to ally with other movements who also face an existential threat from the government,” he told Al Jazeera. “We don’t want a repeat of ۲۰۲۰ when we were encircled and alone.”
Balema acknowledged unresolved disputes within the alliance, including competing claims over western Tigray involving Amhara forces, but said the groups had agreed to address them through dialogue.
“We have a political charter, and our aim is to remove the personalist regime of Abiy Ahmed, establish a transitional government, hold a constitutional dialogue and move to elections,” he added, saying “the alliance is in consensus on this.”
“For now it seems like it will work, but when the deeper issues need to be resolved it will test their different constituencies, who have different expectations,” Mohamed Kheir Omer, a researcher focused on the Horn of Africa, told Al Jazeera.
“But right now it isn’t the urgent issue.”
Beyond northern Ethiopia
The alliance also draws in the Oromo Liberation Army and a faction of the Ogaden National Liberation Front, movements rooted in older demands for autonomy and self-determination among Ethiopia’s Oromo and Somali populations.
Both had fought the TPLF-dominated government that preceded Abiy and are now allied with the TPLF. Taking office in ۲۰۱۸, promising a break with the old order, Abiy sought to bring both into civilian politics.
The Oromo Liberation Front returned from exile, but disagreements over disarmament left part of its armed wing outside the settlement.
Those fighters continued their armed conflict as the Oromo Liberation Army, and subsequent peace talks with the government failed.
Though the OLA ultimately signed the new alliance agreement, its leader, Jaal Marroo, had described it in the preceding days as a “procedural consensus” rather than a substantive settlement on Ethiopia’s political future.
The ONLF stayed out of armed conflict after its own ۲۰۱۸ peace deal, but later fractured. An overseas faction accuses the government of failing to implement the agreement and eroding Somali autonomy, while the leadership inside Ethiopia’s Somali region denies joining the new alliance.
Abdulkadir Hassan Hirmoge, a spokesperson for the faction that joined, told Al Jazeera that it now regards the ۲۰۱۸ agreement as void.
He said joining the alliance did not mean restarting an armed struggle, but backing its programme of removing Abiy and establishing a transitional government.
Regional dimension
Ethiopia’s domestic conflicts are becoming harder to separate from wider rivalries in the Horn, particularly Sudan’s civil war and Addis Ababa’s deteriorating relationship with Eritrea.
Sudan’s army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan has visited Asmara twice since July for talks with Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, while Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, the commander of Sudan’s rival Rapid Support Forces, reportedly visited Addis Ababa in late August.
Reuters reported in February that thousands of RSF fighters were being trained at a camp in western Ethiopia, while Sudan has accused Ethiopia, and its ally the United Arab Emirates, which also reportedly backs the RSF, of allowing drones to be launched from its territory into Sudan.
The emerging Ethiopian opposition alignment has touched the same regional network.
Several figures associated with groups now in the alliance attended a meeting in Port Sudan in May, publicly presented as a “people-to-people” initiative.
In July, Abiy told lawmakers: “Let alone Eritrea, the TPLF and Sudan, even if others were added, we do not have an iota of fear regarding Ethiopia’s sovereignty.”
Balema, the senior TPLF official, denied that the alliance was receiving military or logistical support from either Eritrea or Sudan, saying its relationships abroad amounted to political contacts rather than foreign backing.
“We didn’t create the current problem with Eritrea; Abiy did with his demands on its ports, and the same with Somalia,” he said.
“In Sudan, he is now supporting the Rapid Support Forces. He has created his own enemies across the region and we are just picking up the pieces.”
Sudan has recently sought to ease tensions with Addis Ababa. Malik Agar, the second in command of its military-aligned government, said last week that “we do not want to get involved in a war with Ethiopia.”
Jawar Mohammed, an Oromo opposition politician, warned that Ethiopia could nevertheless become an “incongruent battlefield” in which wider regional contests increasingly play out.
“These things are impossible to control,” he said.
