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On Saturday, news reports indicated that Ethiopian fighters bombed sites in the Tigray region on Friday, while Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed promised more attacks, amid reports from military groups from the rebel region controlling military sites, equipment and weapons. of the federal forces.
On Friday night, in a televised speech, Abi made clear the need for civilians to avoid gatherings in the region, with ongoing raids and military operations.
Diplomats and experts have warned that the rapid evolution of the conflict that has been developing for several days could turn into a civil war that leads to the destabilization of Ethiopia, which has a population of 110 million, in addition to its threat to regional security in the Horn of Africa.
Diplomats, regional security officials and aid workers told Reuters that clashes were spreading in the northwestern part of the country along the border of the Tigray region with the Amhara region, which supports the federal government.
On Friday, Abiy said, government forces had taken control of the city of Dansha, near the border area, after the forces of the Tigraya Liberation Front were defeated.
Experts from the Center for Research on International Crisis Groups say that the forces in the rebel region have combat strength and a large stock of military equipment, and their human assets number some 250,000 fighters.
They indicated that one of the risks that threatens the country is the occurrence of splits in the Ethiopian army, which includes a mixture of ethnic groups in the country, and this coincides with the control of the Tigray forces over the headquarters of the Army Northern Command Federal government in the city of Mikkeli, according to a United Nations internal security report.
The Northern Command is one of the four military commanders in the country and controls the borders with Sudan, Djibouti and Eritrea.
The international report indicated that Tigray forces seized “heavy weapons” from various command warehouses, indicating that the Northern Command is the most heavily armed and its camps include “most of the army’s heavy weapons, including most of the automatic and armored units, artillery and air assets of the country “.
It appears that government efforts to mobilize forces from across the country to fight in Tigray will threaten the country with a security vacuum in other parts of Ethiopia where ethnic violence is increasing.
Amnesty International had reported that gunmen from a rival ethnic group killed more than 50 people in western Ethiopia on Sunday.
The UN report stated that the redeployment of forces near the border with Somalia would make that region “more vulnerable to possible incursions by Al-Shabaab, which is linked to Al-Qaeda.”
The Prime Minister accused the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the ruling party in this region, of attacking an Ethiopian military base and announced a response to the attack.
Tensions rose between Addis Ababa and Tigray, with the region’s leaders declining to extend Parliament’s mandate to representatives representing the region and staging elections in their region last September.
Since then, Ethiopian senators voted in early October to cut communications and funding from federal authorities in favor of Tigray officials.
