Rebel alliance thunders across northern Ethiopia

Conflict in Ethiopia's north has escalated to its most serious level since the signing of the Pretoria Agreement that putatively ended the devastating Tigray War in November 2022. The fighting follows the announcement on 20 September of the formation of an anti-government alliance between Ethiopia’s key rebel groups – the Amhara Fano National Movement (AFMN), the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front (Ugugumo), and three other regional armed groups. These hostilities threaten to intensify conflict throughout the region.

In its statement, the self-described Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival maintained that the viability of the Ethiopian state rests on the removal of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party (PP), under whose governance, they argue, ‘genocide, mass slaughter and absolute poverty’ have become ‘defining features’. Last week’s hostilities commenced with a joint assault by TPLF and AFMN forces along the Amhara-Tigray border in north Wollo, where they captured several towns. The most strategic of Wollo’s towns, Weldiya, remains uncaptured. It sits at the junction of three major roads, including the A2 road to Addis Ababa. If it were to fall to the rebel alliance (as it fell to the TPLF in 2021), it would represent a major watershed in the conflict.

So far, Ethiopian government forces have held firm. By Friday, they claimed to have killed hundreds of rebel fighters and have launched a counterattack towards the city of Alamata in southern Tigray. Meanwhile, the TPLF have strengthened their position within Tigray by capturing three key airports. Alongside Afar Ugugumo forces, they have also opened a separate front in the neighbouring Afar region, through which runs Ethiopia’s supply line to Djibouti. Fighting is also underway along the Tekeze river in western Tigray and a media blackout has cast darkness over the region, inducing déjà vu for observers of Tigray’s last war.

Indeed, from the TPLF’s perspective, that war never ended. They have framed last week’s escalation as a ‘defensive war’ by arguing that it represents the culmination of months of clashes with Ethiopian government forces and years of deteriorating humanitarian conditions in Tigray. Following the signing of the Pretoria Agreement, the TPLF became resentful of the transfer of its authority to a post-war Interim Administration, which created a parallel authority in Tigray. A stalemate ensued in which the PP accused the TPLF of failing to fulfil its disarmament commitments. The TPLF was then struck off Ethiopia’s Election Board. For its part, the TPLF accused the PP of besieging Tigray and stalling on the restoration of western Tigray and the return of its IDPs.

Throughout 2026, the skies of many of Ethiopia’s federal regions have rumbled with sounds of drone strikes, skirmishes and dense military convoys. Confrontations between government forces, the AFMN in Amhara and the OLA in Oromia have blighted parts of the countryside. Clashes between government forces and the TPLF have also oscillated in intensity. Fighting involving the TPLF along Sudan’s border and Ethiopian government drone strikes punctuated August’s calendar until last week when ‘the war’ – long-predicted as it has been – finally broke out.

What is more surprising than the arrival of conflict itself is the composition of its belligerents. The Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival consists of old enemies of the Tigray War – the AFMN and TPLF – between whom the contested status of western Tigray, which Amhara militias annexed amid accusations of ethnic cleansing, remains unresolved. Political alliances among the elite of the Horn of Africa are, nevertheless, often dispassionate. It seems plausible that the alliance will hold for now. Only time can test its strength and capacity for meaningful coordination.

Meanwhile, Abiy Ahmed’s government has received support from its strongest ally, the United Arab Emirates. Key PP officials have, furthermore, worked hard to align the United States to their cause. The US has allowed its arms embargo on Ethiopia to expire and its Ambassador to Ethiopia, Ervin Massinga, issued an unequivocably supportive statement to the PP. Grasping the opportunity at the UN General Assembly, the Ethiopian president, Taye Atske Selassie, denounced ‘reckless external actors’. By this, he was likely referring to the TPLF’s Eritrean ally which inverted its allegiance to the PP after it was shunned from negotiations to end the Tigray War. Ethiopia’s own threats to annex Eritrea’s Red Sea coastline went predictably unacknowledged. Veteran Ethiopia journalist, Tsedale Lemma, has ventured as far as saying that regime change in Asmara is the ‘endgame’ of this conflict from the perspective of the PP.

Indeed, there is much talk of a regional conflict spilling out of an Ethiopian civil war. We might wonder, however, whether a regional conflict is itself spilling into Ethiopia and whether the PP’s own involvement in the Sudanese Civil War is coming back to bite it. The same actors present in Sudan will likely appear in an Ethiopian war. Two blocs are emerging in the wider region: on the one side are Ethiopia, the UAE and Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces. On the other are Eritrea, Ethiopia’s rebel alliance, the Sudanese Armed Forces and Egypt, the latter of which has adopted an increasingly hostile stance towards Ethiopia’s control of Blue Nile waters. Several additional states such as Saudi Arabia and Israel have assumed more limited and liminal positions between these two blocs.

In the long view, the present conflagration is the latest episode in Ethiopia’s long history of uneasy compromise between its centre and peripheral frontiers. But as drought begins to raise its head and a blockade of Tigray appears probable, world leaders, gathered as they are amid the ongoing UN General Assembly, must work to prevent the more immediate concern of an impending humanitarian crisis. Up to 600,000 people died in Ethiopia’s last full-blown civil war. Such horrors may yet be repeated.