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As the 10-month-long conflict in northern Ethiopia continues, the hostile parties have made conflicting claims about developments in the Afar region.
The Ethiopian Federal Government stated that hostile troops from the war-stricken Tigray area were beaten in the neighboring Afar area and retreated, but the Tigray army stated that they were only redeploying the troops to the Amhara area next door. To attack.
“TPLF troops have left Afar,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Dina Mufti told reporters at a press conference in the capital Addis Ababa, referring to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which ruled Ethiopia is 30 years old, but it is the gathering of the rulers of the northern region when the fighting broke out in November 2020.
“According to military sources, they were defeated and left,” he said.
Tigrayan spokesperson Getachew Reda told Reuters via satellite phone from an undisclosed location that Ethiopian authorities are only now aware that Tigrayan troops have withdrawn.
“We were not defeated. Afar did not fight, so we mobilized troops from there to the high ground adjacent to the Amhara region,” he said.
These two claims could not be verified immediately.
The spokeswoman of Prime Minister Abi Ahmed said at a press conference in Addis Ababa that Tigray’s troops were “ruled out” by the military and militias in the Afar area, she said. The troops cooperated closely and caused heavy losses to Tigray’s troops.
“The Afar militia has been working closely with the Wehrmacht and TPLF has suffered a lot of losses in the past few weeks,” Billene Seyoum said.
Getachew disputed this statement in a series of Twitter posts.
“#Abiy & Co is trying to convince their supporters that they are making progress on the battlefield of #Amhara and #Afar: they have not,” he said, adding that “our army is destroying thousands of people every day.”
“The fighting in the Amhara region is going on in a way to ensure that #Abiy cannot lie,” he said.
Since the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner Abi sent troops into Tigray in November last year, northern Ethiopia has been suffering from violence, saying that the move was in response to the TPLF’s attack on the barracks.
TPLF, which has dominated national politics before Abi came to power in 2018, stated that the federal army and its allies launched a “coordinated attack” against him.
The 10-month war has killed thousands of people and forced more than 2 million people to flee their homes. There are countless reports of massacres and atrocities, including rapes and extrajudicial executions, and hundreds of thousands of people suffering from famine.
In July, TPLF regained the regional capital of Mekle and most of Tigray. Its forces advanced to the Afar and Amhara regions, marking the expansion of the conflict to previously unaffected areas.
Since then, the government estimates that approximately 450,000 people have fled the fighting in these two areas.
Abiy rejected the early call for talks between the senior African Union envoy and the Tigray leader and insisted on his position that conflict is a limited “law and order” action.
On Thursday, Billing said that Ethiopia is considering proposals from neighboring countries to help promote conflict resolution.
“The Ethiopian government views these efforts positively and sees them as an extension of goodwill, and they are under scrutiny.”
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