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FCOME FIRST muffled sobs, gradually growing louder with each new voice that joins the chorus. A woman in a black shawl begins to moan, her body swaying towards the portrait of a smiling young man in the middle of the room. Abraham was 35 when he was shot, says an older brother who welcomes grieving relatives on the outskirts of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. Last month, gunmen arrived at the family’s home in Adwa, a city in the northern region of Tigray. By then, many of the city’s residents had fled, but not Abraham, who had a young son and an elderly, sick father. When the gunmen tried to steal two of the family’s trucks, Abraham resisted. They shot him dead on the spot, in front of his father.
According to his family, Abraham’s killers were from Eritrea, a neighboring country whose troops have been fighting alongside Ethiopian government forces against the recently overthrown rulers of Tigray. There is little reason to doubt your claim. Although the phone lines to Adwa have been cut since the fighting began in early November, they know what happened to Abraham from a family friend who knew his father, as well as neighbors who escaped to Mekelle, the regional capital. .
Abiy Ahmed, the Prime Minister of Ethiopia, has consistently denied having the help of soldiers from Eritrea, the Gulag state next door. But Abiy’s denials ring hollow in the face of a growing number of claims such as those of Abraham’s family, as well as those of foreign diplomats and governments. In December, the United States called reports of Eritrea’s involvement “credible” and urged it to withdraw. Belgian journalists who made an unusual trip to Tigray found video footage that apparently showed an Eritrean tank loaded with loot.
Exposing Eritrea’s involvement is important because both governments have done everything possible to deny it. Abiy told António Guterres, the secretary general of the A, that no Eritrean soldiers had entered Ethiopia. His government says that the now-renegade Tigray ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), manufactured fake Eritrean uniforms to spread misinformation. Eritrea’s foreign minister told Reuters that Eritrea was not a party to the conflict.
Others say that Eritrea’s involvement is not only real but highly significant. It gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993. The two countries fought a bloody border war in the late 1990s, followed by two decades of low-level conflict that ended in a 2018 peace agreement (for which Abiy won the Nobel Prize). of peace in 2019). Much of the fighting took place on the Tigray border, sparking bitter enmity between the Eritreans and the TPLF.
This bitterness may explain the destruction that the Eritrean forces have left in their wake. They are accused of killing civilians, looting, razing farmland and kidnapping some of the 100,000 Eritrean refugees who had fled their own totalitarian government and sought safety in the Tigray camps.
The use of foreign troops to fight a war on their own soil tarnishes Abiy’s reputation and will complicate efforts to pacify Tigray. “The government will never admit it,” says an Ethiopian analyst. “Because they know they could never justify it to the Tigrayans.”
Awet Tewelde Weldemichael, an Eritrean academic at Queen’s University in Canada, says that in recent weeks there appears to have been a gradual withdrawal of Eritrean troops. If true, it might suggest that Abiy has had enough of them. Or it could mean that Issaias Afwerki, the dictator of Eritrea, trusts that his old enemies in the TPLF have been routed. Although fighting is reported to continue in various parts of Tigray, the TPLF the leadership, believed to be hidden somewhere in the mountains, has been mostly silent for weeks. On December 18, the Ethiopian government offered a reward equivalent to $ 260,000 for information on his whereabouts.
It is not just Eritrea that has an interest in Ethiopia’s civil war. Clashes between Sudanese forces and militias from Amhara, a region south of Tigray, have turned deadly in recent weeks. They are fighting over a large chunk of fertile land that lies within Sudan’s borders, but has long been occupied by Amhara farmers. Shortly after the war began in Tigray, Sudanese troops moved to positions previously held by the Ethiopian army. Since then, each side has accused the other of upping the ante. On December 22, Ethiopia’s Deputy Prime Minister accused Sudanese forces of looting. Sudan’s information minister responded by accusing the Ethiopian army of participating in border attacks. Talks and a visit to Addis Ababa in December by Abdalla Hamdok, Sudan’s prime minister, have failed to resolve the issue.
These tensions are unlikely to escalate into a full-scale war between the two states. But if the border conflict is not resolved, Sudan could prolong the fighting in Tigray, for example by turning a blind eye to weapons and other supplies crossing the border. That would be a headache for Abiy, whose forces are already overloaded trying to locate the TPLFthe guerrilla forces at the same time that they fight against the armed insurgents and quell inter-ethnic fighting in other parts of the country.
On December 23, more than 200 civilians, mostly Amhara, were massacred by heavily armed ethnic militiamen in the western region of Benishangul-Gumuz. Similar incidents have been reported in western Oromia in recent weeks. Somalis and ethnic Afar in the east of the country are also exchanging deadly blows. Already a tinder box, Ethiopia risks causing a wider conflagration in the Horn of Africa. ■
This article appeared in the Middle East and Africa section of the print edition under the title “The Expanding War.”
