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At around 2 a.m. local time on Wednesday, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed announced that he had issued an order for a military strike against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPFL). This after TPFL forces, according to him, attacked government military bases in the area and tried to steal weapons, Ethiopian news site The Awash Post reports.
According to diplomatic sources from Reuters, what broke out was “strong fighting.”
“Forced to attack”
Abiy Ahmed, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, writes in a Facebook post that the government side had no choice but to attack:
“The cup has overflowed with the attacks this morning and, therefore, the federal regime is forced to a military confrontation.”
The relationship between the regime and the TPFL has grown increasingly strained since September, when Tigray held local elections that Prime Minister Ahmed’s government believes are illegal, Reuters writes.
According to TT, TPFL leader Debrestion Gebremichael said on Monday that the regime was planning attacks as punishment for the regional elections.
I’m not ready to negotiate
Tigray is one of the wealthiest and most powerful states in Ethiopia, but since Abiy Ahmed took office in 2018, his influence has waned. Many senior officials in the area have been fired from the central government, which the regime believes is a measure against widespread corruption.
The TPFL, for its part, believes that it is the government’s way of quelling the conflict, which is largely about Tigray’s discontent with Ahmed’s reforms that have made the system of government more uniform than the previous one, where states had greater self-determination.
Redwan Hussein, a spokesman for the newly formed government crisis group, told Reuters that it was the TPFL regime that saw him as “the enemy”, not the Tigray state itself. When asked if the government is prepared to negotiate with TPFL, Hussein replies that it is not relevant at this time.
TPFL leader Debrestion Gebremichael says according to the BBC that Tigray wants to avoid war, but is ready to defend the region if necessary:
– We have prepared our army, our militia and our special forces. We want to avoid a war as much as possible, but if we have to fight, we are ready to win.
