Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on July 24, 2021
The two monsters, Abiy Ahmed Ali and Mengistu Hailemariam say and do the exact same wicked things. They are both Oromos who hate Christian Tigrayans so deeply that they attempt to exterminate them using siege warfare, starvation – as a weapon of war and war Crime.
The vicious dictator Mengistu was deposed in 1991, but fled to Zimbabwe and, despite a genocide conviction, is still walking free.
👉Tigrayan Ethiopians should not repeat the mistakes their fathers made in dealing with Ethiopia’s troubled history by allowing evil Abiy Ahmed Ali to flee the country. This bastard must be severely punished – JUSTICE must be served!
💭 History repeats itself:
🔥 Amhara & Oromos bombing Tigray, Using Rape, Hunger & forced resettlement (Mengistu did it back then, Ahmed will do the same now) as a Weapon against People in Tigray for the past 130 years:-
😈 Menelik ll: Half Oromo + Half Amhara = Oromo (Crypto-Muslim / Man of the flesh)
😈 Haile Selassie: Half Oromo + Half Amhara = Oromo (Crypto-Muslim / Man of the flesh)
😈 Mengistu Hailemariam: Half Oromo + Half Amhara = Oromo (Crypto-Muslim / Man of the flesh)
😈 Abiy Ahmed Ali ´= Half Oromo + Half Amhara = Oromo (Crypto-Muslim / Man of the flesh)
[Galatians 5:19-21]
“Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.”
“Vor wenigen Monaten schienen die Rebellen in Tigray besiegt, nun drohen sie Addis Abeba die Versorgung abzuschneiden. Wie ist das möglich?
Rekonstruktion einer dramatischen – aber erklärbaren – Wende.“
At the end of May, the man, whom some consider to be one of Africa’s best military strategists, gave an interview. He was sitting in front of a stone wall somewhere in the hinterland of Tigray, talking to a local journalist, and what Tsadkan Gebretinssae said sounded full-bodied.
“We see clearly that their defeat (that of the occupying forces) is approaching. We have created several brigades and cells within a few months, we will use them effectively soon. We need to plug a few more holes, but we’re working on that. “
Tsadkan is a legendary guerrilla leader, he defeated an Ethiopian government thirty years ago. But at the time of the interview, hardly anyone outside the Ethiopian region of Tigray would have bet money for the one announced by Tsadkan to arrive. The Tigray Defense Forces (TDF), of which Tsadkan is the Central Command, had been hiding in the mountains, leading out of the ambush war against the troops who invaded Tigray in November 2020. The TDF seemed strong enough not to be defeated – but too weak to launch an offensive.
But then, at the end of June, the rebels did just that. Within a few days they overran the Ethiopian army in Tigray. They conquered large parts of the region, including the capital Mekele. “Operation Alula” was the offensive. It was one of the most amazing comebacks in recent military history.
What’s more, the TDF has now entered the neighbouring region of Afar, apparently trying to cut off the link between the port in Djibouti and Addis Ababa. It is by far the most important supply route for the Ethiopian capital. If the TDF succeeds, the civil war enters a completely unpredictable phase. There are rumors that the militarily lucky Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed could threaten a coup.
How could it get that far?
Disastrous rumbling attacks
Before the rebels made an amazing comeback in Tigray, they suffered an amazing defeat. In early November 2020, the Ethiopian army began its offensive against Tigray. The conflict had begun since Abiy Ahmed became Prime Minister in spring 2018. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), Tigray’s main political force, had previously determined Ethiopian politics for nearly three decades. Abiy put an end to this, removing the Tigray faction from important posts in the military, politics and administration. The TPLF withdrew to its region of origin, soon the signs of war stood – on 4 November 2020 he broke loose.
It was first a one-sided conflict, after less than four weeks he seemed decided. The TPLF troops had rapidly lost ground, on 28 November they also lost the capital Mekele. Prime Minister Abiy declared the offensive, which he had defined as a “criminal action,” to be over.
The Norwegian politologist Kjetil Tronvoll, who is in regular contact with the leadership of the rebels, gives two reasons for the fact that the fight in November was so one-sided: firstly, the Tigrayan troops were not prepared to be attacked by three fronts; In addition to the Ethiopian army, the Eritrean army advanced from the north as well as militias of the neighbouring region Amhara from the south. Secondly, drone strikes that the United Arab Emirates allied with Ethiopia flew from a base in Eritrea would have had a devastating effect. The attacks destroyed Tigrayan tanks and heavy war equipment and killed several TPLF leaders.
The accusation that the UAE would support the campaign in Tigray with drones had been expressed early by TPLF representatives – experts believe this is possible, it is not documented.
In December and January, the rebels went for survival. The Ethiopian government maintained a “Most Wanted” list of 167 TPLF leaders. Within two weeks of January alone, the Ethiopian army captured or killed 47 of the wanted. The most prominent victim was Seyoum Mesfin, a 71-year-old former foreign minister who was shot dead by Ethiopian soldiers.
It seemed a matter of time before the list would be cut off. But it came differently.
The return of the almost 70-year-old general
For those who had saved themselves in the mountains of Tigrays were not helpless politicians, but some of the most experienced military of Ethiopia. The core of the TPLF leadership was a group of men who had fought a guerrilla war against the Ethiopian central state forty years ago. Debretsion Gebremichael, for example, the TPLF chairman, had joined the TPLF in the 1970s, when it was a rebel organization fighting the communist Derg regime.
Or Tsadkan Gebretinssae, the man who announced the defeat of the Ethiopian army in the interview. According to the BBC, he had joined the TPLF in 1976, when it only numbered a few hundred fighters. He became one of their most important commanders and led the 1991 attack on Addis Ababa, which put an end to the Derg regime. At that time the TPLF had become an army with over 100,000 fighters.
After the TPLF took power, Tsadkan was Chief of Staff of the Ethiopian Army and led it into a war with Eritrea in 1998, which cost nearly 80,000 lives. Later the general was dismissed because he had resigned with the then TPLF Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. In 2019, he participated in negotiations between the TPLF and Prime Minister Abiy. They were unsuccessful – and after the war broke loose, Tsadkan joined the rebels. He later said, “I had the choice to surrender to either foreign forces or those of Abiy or to go into resistance. I chose the latter. ” Tsadkan again has a key military role, he is almost 70 years old.
Besides Debretsion, Tsadkan and the other former guerrilla fighters, many more capable military forces found themselves in the mountains of Tigray; Tadesse Worede, for example, the commander-in-chief of the Tigrayan troops, had once led UN peacekeepers in Sudan. In addition, there were officers at all hierarchy levels who had either been expelled from the Ethiopian army or deserted.
One of the most militarized regions in the world
These experienced military forces now sent themselves to organize the resistance in Tigray. According to TPLF expert Kjetil Tronvoll, they received indirect support from the American government: after Joe Biden took office, the Americans pressured the UAE to end drone strikes in Yemen. These were flown from the same base in Eritrea, from which the attacks against the TPLF allegedly also originated. According to media reports, the Emirates largely shut down the base in February.
The absence of drone strikes gave air to the Tigrayan rebels. At the same time, tens of thousands of volunteers flocked to newly established training camps. Mass recruitment was a consequence of the humanitarian drama that has been taking place in Tigray since November. The Eritrean, Ethiopian and Amharic troops are blamed for numerous war crimes. Several thousand civilians were killed in massacres, and hundreds of women were raped. American Foreign Minister Antony Blinken, among others, spoke of “ethnic cleansing” in connection with the events in Tigray.
Tronvoll says that many Tigrayans have seen no other way out than to go to the mountains and fight: “They said to themselves: If we stay home, they come, rape our sisters, kill our mothers or us. If we want to survive, we have no choice but to join the rebels. “
In training camps new recruits were trained by experienced military personnel. There was no lack of weapons, the Tigray on the fragile border with Eritrea is one of the most militarized regions in the world. According to Tronvoll, many of the new fighters brought weapons sufficient for guerrilla combat; Kalashnikov rifles, for example.
The Tigray Defense Forces, consisting not only of members of the TPLF, but also members of other parties, deserters and militias and tens of thousands of people who were civilians until recently, grew. Tsadkan Gebretinssae said in one of his interviews: “Combining these two elements – experienced and capable commanders and a society with a military tradition – takes only a short time to reorganize and take control.”
That seems to have actually happened.
The destroyed command structure of the Ethiopian army
In June, the TDF commanders considered themselves strong enough to go on the offensive. Until then, they had carried out strategic attacks, which were often just needle stitches. But in these, for example, the TDF captured heavy war equipment that would soon be useful to them.
Finally, on June 18, the TDF launched Operation Alula, named after a Tigrayan general from the 19 century. The offensive was of resounding success; the Ethiopian army, which had mainly occupied cities and main axes of traffic, was surrounded in many places and cut off from supplies. Ten days after the offensive began, the TDF captured the capital Mekele. Images and videos from the city showed fighters parading through the city in a triumphal procession. The inhabitants celebrated the rebels, they waved Tigray flags, fireworks popped.
The TDF’s stormy offensive would not have been so successful if the Ethiopian army had resisted more severely. But the army is weakened because it has suffered a spate of Tigrayan officers in recent years – they had formed the backbone of the Ethiopian army after 1991. Prime Minister Abiy arrested thousands of Tigrayan officers for allegedly not trusting them. According to Kjetil Tronvoll, the command structure of the army was practically destroyed – meanwhile, old commanders from the time of the Derg regime again assume a key role. They face their former opponents of the TPLF, to whom they are already inferior.
The TDF are no longer waging a guerrilla war, they are continuing their offensive. They also want to free the north and the west of Tigray. In addition, they have penetrated the neighbouring regions of Amhara and Afar in order to create a buffer zone.
“The TDF are currently running as fast as they can,” says Kjetil Tronvoll. On the one hand, they wanted to prevent the Ethiopian army from reestablishing itself. On the other hand, they tried to open access to humanitarian aid – according to the UN, more than five million people in Tigray are in urgent need of aid. The only way to get help is through Afar.
The main supply route for Addis Ababa also runs through Afar. Around 95 percent of Ethiopia’s import volume enters the country from the port of Djibouti via Afar, including fuel and food. In recent days, the signs have increased that the TDF could try to cut the route from Djibouti to Addis. It would be a disaster for Prime Minister Abiy’s government.
For the ancient Tigrayan guerrillas and their highly motivated army, perhaps the moment when, thanks to them, the leaf would have finally turned in the civil war.
💭 “What has happened to our investment is odd for any listener,” Dinse wrote in English. “In a country with a strong system of the rule of law and hosting the Head Office of African Union, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and many diplomatic communities, it is unbelievable that foreign investment can be taken forcefully without recourse Rule of Law.”
Ethiopia has illegally transferred a school run by German investors to Turkey’s state-run Maarif Foundation, according to the manager of the school.
Turkish authorities claim the school was affiliated with the Gülen movement, a faith-based group inspired by Turkish Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen.
Maarif, which was established prior to a coup attempt on July 15, 2016 through legislation in the Turkish parliament, has targeted the closure of Gülen-linked educational institutions since the abortive putsch as part of the foreign policy of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which labels the movement as a terrorist organization and accuses it of orchestrating the failed coup. Gülen and the members of his group strongly deny any involvement in the abortive putsch or any terrorist activity.
The school was run by the STEM Education Private Limited Company, founded by German investors in Addis Ababa. It is the second such school the Maarif Foundation has taken over in Ethiopia, after assuming control of another school in Harar in July 2019.
A letter from by Dr. Norbert Helmut Dinse, the general manager of the company, addressed to the German Embassy in Ethiopia, the Ethiopian prime minister and other federal and local authorities, was shared on Twitter by journalist Oktay Yaman.
Etiyopya’da Maarif Vakfı’na devredilen okullar hakkında: Berlin’e ulaşan bilgiye göre, okulları Alman yatırımcılar işletiyormuş. Almanya Dışişleri Bakanlığı, Etiyopya’daki Alman Büyükelçiliği’yle irtibata geçti. Dr. Norbert Helmut Dinse’nin mektubu yetkilileri harekete geçirdi. pic.twitter.com/doVUeX99ER
“What has happened to our investment is odd for any listener,” Dinse wrote in English. “In a country with a strong system of the rule of law and hosting the Head Office of African Union, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and many diplomatic communities, it is unbelievable that foreign investment can be taken forcefully without recourse Rule of Law.”
“Our Investment, STEM Education Plc. which operates in the trade name of ‘Intellectual Kindergarten, Primary and Secondary School’, is wholly foreign-owned in Ethiopia engaged in educational services,” Dinse wrote, “Initially, the company was established by Turkish Investors. Through time, the three German investors acquired the investment following all procedures required under the law. German investors stepped in and took over the parent company again in full compliance with the requirements of the laws of the land.”
Dinse claims that the problems surrounding the school had started in September 2019 when the local authorities decided to close it.
“We have made every effort to get administrative remedies from different offices,” Dinse said.
“Fortunate enough, the Federal Ministry of Education understood our side, proved the legality of our status, and gave us a school license at the beginning of this academic year (2020-21). But a month later, the school’s commencement, Oromia and Sebeta Education Bureau came to the school with gunned police and expelled all the staff and children from the school Friday, January 29, 2021, while the teaching is going on.”
Dinse went on to say that a committee comprising the offices of the Ethiopian Attorney General, Ethiopia Investment Agency, ministers of education and foreign affairs and Oromia Education Bureau was formed to tackle the issue.
“Unfortunately, on July 14, 2021, staff from the Sebeta Education bureau and the Turkish staff of Maarif Foundation trespassed our compound and took photos and left out. Our Security Company could not stop them from the entrance. Today, the same people came, broke keys of our buildings, destroyed the security system and took all illegal actions,” Dinse said.
Turkish authorities claim the school was taken over after a legal battle that spanned several years.
“Official handover of the school will soon follow after the conclusion of the asset transfer,” Levent Şahin, the Maarif’s Ethiopia representative, told the Anadolu news agency.
“We strongly believe that our investment is well protected by the Ethiopian Investment Laws, International Investment Treaties adopted by Ethiopia and the Bilateral Investment Treaty between Ethiopia and Germany,” Dinse wrote, requesting “all concerned stakeholders to stop the outrageous conduct of Oromia and Sebeta Education Bureau and Maarif Foundation from illegally seizing our investment.”
According to Birol Akgün, chairman of the Maarif Foundation, they have taken over 216 schools affiliated with the Gülen movement in 44 countries.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP has jailed some 96,000 people while investigating a total of 622,646 and detaining 301,932 over alleged links to the movement as part of a massive purge launched under the pretext of an anti-coup fight, according to the latest official figures.
The BBC has heard new reports of ethnic cleansing in Tigray, in northern Ethiopia amid growing concern that the conflict is entering a dangerous new stage. Tigrayan forces are continuing to extend their control over the region, prompting the Ethiopian government to warn it may end its unilateral ceasefire and to mobilise forces from nearby Amhara and other parts of the country. The likely next flashpoint is in western Tigray, currently controlled by Amhara forces. BBC Africa correspondent Andrew Harding has this report from the border with neighbouring Sudan.
💭 One of the worst massacres of the civil war in Ethiopia took place on sacred ground: precisely in a city where Christians believe the ten commandments given by God to Moses are kept.
According to Tigrayan sources ten drones supplied by Turkey are being built in Addis Ababa with the support of Turkish technicians.
The weapons, which are said to be for both surveillance and tactical use, are being built at a training and intelligence centre of the Information Network Security Agency or INSA.
The director-general of INSA – Temesgen Tiruneh– is reportedly in overall charge of the program, and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is said to visit the site frequently.
The agency is said to be building a runway from which the drones can be launched, about ten kilometres from the centre of Addis.
Drones in the Tigray war
There have been previous reports that drones were being used in the Tigray war, being flown from United Arab Emirates bases in Eritrea.
This was discounted by the independent investigators, Bellingcat.
Bellingcat concluded in November 2020 that: “In sum, the claims made by the Tigray forces are not impossible, but so far they seem improbable.
Satellite imagery confirms the presence of Chinese-produced drones at the United Arab Emirates’s military base in Assab, but that is all it confirms. There is currently no further evidence that these same drones have been involved in operations in support of the Ethiopian airforce, though there have been confirmed sightings of Ethiopian jet fighters in the conflict zone.”
But the current report is different – quoting first hand accounts by people who have seen the drones currently under construction.
👉 It’s Drone Jihad Against ❖ Christian Ethiopia – that Babylon America executed via UAE.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on July 11, 2021
By The New York Times
A scrappy force of local Tigrayan recruits scored a cascade of battlefield victories against the Ethiopian military, one of Africa’s strongest. Times journalists witnessed the decisive week in an eight-month civil war.
SAMRE, Ethiopia — The Tigrayan fighters whooped, whistled and pointed excitedly to a puff of smoke in the sky, where an Ethiopian military cargo plane trundling over the village minutes earlier had been struck by a missile.
Smoke turned to flames as the stricken aircraft broke in two and hurtled toward the ground. Later, in a stony field strewn with smoking wreckage, villagers picked through twisted metal and body parts. For the Tigrayan fighters, it was a sign.
“Soon we’re going to win,” said Azeb Desalgne, a 20-year-old with an AK-47 over her shoulder.
The downing of the plane on June 22 offered bracing evidence that the conflict in the Tigray region in northern Ethiopia was about to take a seismic turn. A Tigrayan guerrilla army had been fighting to drive out the Ethiopian military for eight months in a civil war marked by atrocities and starvation. Now the fight seemed to be turning in their favor.
The war erupted in November, when a simmering feud between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Tigrayan leaders, members of a small ethnic minority who had dominated Ethiopia for much of the three previous decades, exploded into violence.
Since then, the fighting has been largely hidden from view, obscured by communications blackouts and overshadowed by international outrage over an escalating humanitarian crisis. But during a pivotal week, I went behind the front lines with a photographer, Finbarr O’Reilly, and witnessed a cascade of Tigrayan victories that culminated in their retaking the region’s capital, and altered the course of the war.
We saw how a scrappy Tigrayan force overcame one of the largest armies in Africa through force of arms, but also by exploiting a wave of popular rage. Going into the war, Tigrayans were themselves divided, with many distrustful of a governing Tigrayan party seen as tired, authoritarian and corrupt.
But the catalog of horrors that has defined the war — massacres, ethnic cleansing and extensive sexual violence — united Tigrayans against Mr. Abiy’s government, drawing highly motivated young recruits to a cause that now enjoys widespread support.
“It’s like a flood,” said Hailemariam Berhane, a commander, as several thousand young men and women, many in jeans and sneakers, marched past en route to a camp for new recruits. “Everyone’s coming here.”
A column of thousands of Tigrayans who joined the rebels. Many said they were motivated by atrocities perpetrated against civilians by the Ethiopian military and its allies.
Mr. Abiy, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 and has staked his prestige on the Tigray campaign, has downplayed his losses. In a self-assured address to Parliament on Tuesday, of a kind that once dazzled admiring Westerners, Mr. Abiy insisted that his military’s retreat from Tigray was planned — the latest phase of a fight the government was on course to win.
Seen from the ground, though, Tigray has been slipping through his fingers.
In the past three weeks, Tigrayan fighters have captured a wide swath of territory; retaken the regional capital, Mekelle; imprisoned at least 6,600 Ethiopian soldiers — and claimed to have killed about three times as many.
In recent days, Tigrayan leaders have expanded the offensive to new parts of the region, vowing to stop only when all outside forces have been expelled from their land: Ethiopians, allied troops from the neighboring country of Eritrea and ethnic militias from the next-door Amhara region of Ethiopia.
“If we have to go to hell and back, we’ll do it,” said Getachew Reda, a senior Tigrayan leader.
Press officers for Mr. Abiy and the Ethiopian military did not respond to questions for this article.
We flew into Mekelle on June 22, a day after national elections in Ethiopia which had been heralded as major step toward the country’s transition to democracy.
In Tigray, though, there was no voting and the Ethiopian military had just launched a sweeping offensive intended to crush for good the Tigrayan resistance, now known as the Tigray Defense Forces, commanders on both sides said.
An Ethiopian airstrike had struck a crowded village market that day, killing dozens. We watched as the first casualties arrived at Mekelle’s largest hospital.
Days later, three aid workers from Doctors Without Borders were brutally murdered by unknown assailants.
In the countryside, the war was moving at a furious pace. Ethiopian military positions fell like dominoes. Hours after the Tigrayans shot down the military cargo plane, we reached a camp holding several thousand newly captured Ethiopian soldiers, about 30 miles south of Mekelle.
Clustered behind a barbed wire fence, the prisoners erupted into applause when we stepped from our vehicle — hoping, they later explained, that we were Red Cross workers.
Some were wounded, others barefoot — Tigrayans confiscated their boots as well as their guns, they said — and many pleaded for help. “We have badly wounded soldiers here,” said Meseret Asratu, 29, a platoon commander.
An estimated 3,000 Ethiopian soldiers captured by the Tigrayans were being held at a makeshift prison camp about 30 miles south of Mekelle on June 29. Many were wounded, others barefoot.
Further along the road was the battlefield where others had died. The bodies of Ethiopian soldiers were scattered across a rocky field, untouched since a fight four days earlier, now swelling in the afternoon sun.
Personal items cast aside nearby, amid empty ammunition boxes and abandoned uniforms, hinted at young lives interrupted: dog-eared photos of loved ones, but also university certificates, chemistry textbooks and sanitary pads — a reminder that women fight on both sides of the conflict.
Stragglers were still being rounded up. The next day, Tigrayan fighters marched five just-captured prisoners up a hill, where they slumped to the ground, exhausted.
Dawit Toba, a glum 20-year-old from the Oromia region of Ethiopia, said he had surrendered without firing a shot. War in Tigray was not like he had imagined it. “We were told there would be fighting,” he said. “But when we got here it was looting, robbery, attacks on women.”
“This war was not necessary,” he added. “Mistakes have been made.”
Driving off, we came across a figure sprawled on the roadside — an Ethiopian, stripped of his uniform, with several bullet wounds to his leg. He groaned softly.
The wounded soldier appeared to have been dumped there, although it wasn’t clear by whom. We drove him back to the prisoner camp, where Ethiopian medics did some basic treatment on the ground outside a school. Nobody was sure if he would survive.
Artillery boomed in the distance. The Tigrayan offensive was continuing to the north, using captured heavy guns against the Ethiopian troops who had brought them in. A platoon of fighters walked through, bearing a wounded man on a stretcher. Teklay Tsegay, 20, watched them pass.
Before the war, Mr. Teklay was a mechanic in Adigrat, 70 miles north. Then, last February, Eritrean soldiers fired into his aunt’s house, killing her 5-year-old daughter, he said. The following day, Mr. Teklay slipped out of Adigrat to join the resistance.
“I never thought I would be a soldier,” he said. “But here I am.”
As Tigrayans quietly mustered a guerrilla army this year, they drew on their experience of fighting a brutal Marxist dictatorship in Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s, under the flag of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
Then, Tigrayan intellectuals used Marxist ideology to bind peasant fighters to their cause, much like the Viet Cong or rebels in Angola and Mozambique.
But this time, the Tigrayan fighters are largely educated and hail from the towns and cities. And it is anger at atrocities, not Marxism, that drew them to the cause.
The wave of recruits has included doctors, university professors, white-collar professionals and diaspora Tigrayans from the United States and Europe, colleagues and friends said. Even in government-held Mekelle, recruitment grew increasingly brazen.
Two weeks ago, a T.D.F. poster appeared on a wall beside St. Gabriel’s, the city’s largest church. “Those who fail to join are as good as the walking dead,” it read. Hours later, Ethiopian soldiers arrived and tore it down.
Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe, 61, a senior fellow at the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, in Massachusetts, was visiting Mekelle when war erupted in November. I found him near the town of Samre, a leather-holstered pistol on his hip.
“I joined the resistance,” said the academic, who once helped broker a peace deal for the United Nations in Darfur. “I felt I had no other option.”
Even some Ethiopian commanders felt alienated by Mr. Abiy’s approach to the conflict.
Until late June, Col. Hussein Mohamed, a tall man with a gold-tooth smile, commanded the 11th Infantry Division in Tigray. Now he was a prisoner, held with other Ethiopian officers in a closely guarded farmhouse.
Of the 3,700 troops under his command, at least half were probably dead, said Colonel Hussein, confirming that he was speaking voluntarily. “The course of this war is political madness, to my mind,” he said.
He always had serious reservations about Mr. Abiy’s military alliance with Eritrea, Ethiopia’s old foe, he said: “They ransack properties, they rape women, they commit atrocities. The whole army is unhappy about this marriage.”
Still, Ethiopian soldiers have been accused of much the same crimes. I met Colonel Hussein in a stone-walled room, with a tin roof, as rain splattered outside. When the room’s owner, Tsehaye Berhe, arrived with a tray of coffee cups, her face clouded over.
“Take it!” she snapped at the Ethiopian officer. “I’m not serving you.”
Moments later Ms. Tsehaye returned to apologize. “I’m sorry for being emotional,” she said. “But your soldiers burned my house and stole my crops.”
Colonel Hussein nodded quietly. Col. Hussein Mohamed, who commanded an Ethiopian army division, was captured with his troops and held in a closely guarded farmhouse. He called the war “political madness.”
Even before Ethiopian forces abandoned Mekelle on June 28, there were hints that something was afoot. The internet went down, and at the regional headquarters where Mr. Abiy had installed an interim government, I found deserted corridors and locked offices. Outside, federal police officers were slinging backpacks into a bus.
Smoke rose from the Ethiopian National Defense Forces’ headquarters in Mekelle — a pyre of burning documents, it turned out, piled high by detainees accused of supporting the T.D.F.
Weeks earlier, Ethiopian intelligence officers had tortured one of them, Yohannes Haftom, with a cattle prod. “We will burn you,” Mr. Yohannes recalled them saying. “We will bury you alive.”
But after he followed their orders to cart their confidential documents to the burn pit on June 28, the Ethiopians set Mr. Yohannes free. Hours later, the first T.D.F. fighters entered Mekelle, setting off days of raucous celebration.
Residents filled streets where young fighters paraded on vehicles like beauty queens, or leaned from speeding tuktuks spraying gunfire into the air. Nightclubs and cafes filled up, and an older woman prostrated herself at the feet of a just-arrived fighter, shouting thanks to God.
A woman in Mekelle fell to the ground and shouted thanks to God on June 29, as it became clear that Tigrayan forces had taken control of Mekelle.
On the fourth day, fighters paraded thousands of Ethiopian prisoners through the city center, in a show of triumphalism that was a pointed rebuke to the leader of Ethiopia. “Abiy is a thief!” people chanted as dejected soldiers marched past.
The celebrations eventually reached the house where Mr. Getachew, the Tigrayan leader and T.D.F. spokesman, now descended from his mountain base, was staying.
As the whiskey flowed, Mr. Getachew juggled calls on his satellite phone while a generator rattled in the background. Mr. Abiy had once been his political ally, even his friend, he said. Now the Ethiopian leader had cut the power and phone lines to Mekelle and issued a warrant for his arrest.
Buoyed by victory, the guests excitedly discussed the next phase of their war in Tigray. One produced a cake with the Tigrayan flag that Mr. Getachew, sharing a knife with a senior commander, cut to loud cheers.
For much of his career, he had been a staunch defender of the Ethiopian state. But the war made that position untenable, he said. Now he was planning a referendum on Tigrayan independence.
“Nothing can save the Ethiopian state as we know it, except a miracle,” he said. “And I don’t usually believe in them.”
