Two days after seven Ethiopian armed groups announced an alliance sworn to remove Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, a senior official of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front was asked whether the statement amounted to a declaration of war. He hesitated, then answered with a question. “We are at war now, aren’t we?” The exchange, relayed to Al Jazeera by Kjetil Tronvoll, a professor of peace and conflict studies at Oslo New University College, catches what the new alliance has and has not done. It has not built one army able to march on Addis Ababa. It has pulled several of Ethiopia’s separate wars into a single frame.
The Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival was announced on September 20, with the Fano commander Zemene Kassie reading the founding statement on Tigrai TV. It joins the TPLF, the Amhara Fano National Movement and the Oromo Liberation Army to the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front, the Benishangul Peoples’ Liberation Movement and the Gumuz Peoples’ Democratic Movement. It promises a transitional administration once Abiy is gone. Abiy’s spokesperson, Billene Seyoum, told Reuters the members had long collaborated with Eritrean money behind them — a charge Asmara has repeatedly denied.
Within days the talk became shooting. On the Tuesday, drones struck two schools in Alamata in southern Tigray; the town’s mayor said 14 civilians were killed and 22 wounded. The account could not be independently verified and the federal government said nothing. On the Wednesday, Tigrayan forces seized three federally controlled airports, including Alula Aba Nega International Airport in Mekelle; Ethiopian Airlines suspended all flights to the region. Fighting also broke out in Amhara and Afar, where, Reuters reported, Tigrayan forces fought alongside Fano units and a local Afar armed group. CNN reported that the Tigrayan government called the war defensive, while Getachew Reda, an adviser to Abiy, accused the TPLF of an “all-out offensive” and of taking “irresponsibility to new heights.” By the Friday, telecom and internet networks in the north had stopped working, raising fears of the blackout and blockade Tigray knew before.
The war that preceded this one began in November 2020, when federal troops, Eritrean soldiers and Amhara forces fought the TPLF, which had dominated Ethiopia for 27 years until Abiy took power in 2018. The African Union’s mediator, Olusegun Obasanjo, believes some 600,000 people died. The deal signed in Pretoria on November 2nd 2022 silenced the guns and set terms for Tigray’s disarmament, but only Addis Ababa and the TPLF signed it; Eritrea and the Amhara forces had no seat, and the fertile disputed territory of Western Tigray was left, fatefully, for later. Jawar Mohammed, the Oromo politician once allied to Abiy, says the shut-out parties were given every reason to wreck the deal.
Wrecked it now is. “The agreement didn’t collapse overnight — it was systematically hollowed out over three years,” Surafel Getahun, an Ethiopian geopolitics researcher, told CNN, blaming the federal government for failing to return the displaced and the TPLF for rebuilding its army. The TPLF itself split: Debretsion Gebremichael’s faction expelled Reda, Abiy installed a new interim leader in April 2025, and a month later Gebremichael’s men retook control of Tigray’s government and made him regional president. Clashes with federal forces followed at Shererina near the Sudanese border on August 1. Drones wounded 13 people in Mekelle on August 20, the TPLF says, and on September 20 a drone destroyed a truck carrying 41 tonnes of food aid. Addis Ababa has acknowledged none of these strikes. “We signed the Pretoria Agreement, but the regime used the agreement to kill the people of Tigray systematically,” its spokesperson, Michael Asgedom, told Al Jazeera.
Asgedom keeps two scripts. The alliance, he says, “was created to bring peace and democracy to Ethiopia.” It will also, he says, build a new order “over the ruins of Abiy Ahmed’s system,” for this is “the right time to eradicate the regime.” Asked whether joining it violated Pretoria, he said the accord was “no longer valid.” Tronvoll calls this constructive ambiguity, and it has its uses: seven peoples speaking as one can delegitimise Abiy abroad and raise the price of any settlement, whether or not a shot is fired.
The neighbour not named
Eritrea appears nowhere in the founding statement, yet it hangs over everything. Over two years Asmara has reconciled with the TPLF it helped to crush, as Abiy’s demands for Red Sea access were read on the Eritrean side as a claim on its coast. Mohamed Kheir Omer writes in Al Jazeera that months of coordination meetings among the seven groups were held in the presence of Eritrean and Sudanese military and security representatives, and that the alliance’s three northern members matter most precisely because the border allows supply from Eritrea. Tronvoll says Eritrean troops are already in Tigray — Al Jazeera could not verify this — while Magnus Taylor of the International Crisis Group is more cautious: “This is substantially a domestic Ethiopian phenomenon.”
The Afar front has already moved. TPLF forces, allied with the Afar National Unity Revolutionary Front of Ibrahim Osman Aliyu — known as Haji Ibrahim, a defector who crossed to Eritrea last year with a contingent of Afar special forces and who is related to Ethiopia’s defence minister, Aisha Mohammed — advanced into several districts of Afar’s Zone 2 with little resistance, promising Afar residents the fight was with the Prosperity Party, not with them. Their next target, Omer writes, may be the highway that carries Ethiopia’s trade to the port of Djibouti.
Whose soldiers go first?
The second test is whether seven commands can fight as one. Zemene chairs the alliance but the statement names no joint commander, and says nothing about Western Tigray, claimed by both Tigrayans and Amharas. “If it is a Tigrayan general commanding Amharas to be sacrificed first to save the Tigrayan soldiers, that will split it immediately,” says Tronvoll. Taylor says Fano itself is divided: commanders in Gojjam and Wollo can contemplate partnership with Tigray, those beside the disputed land cannot. The OLA calls its membership a “procedural consensus” and demands Fano disown a Wollega faction it says the government armed; Jawar says he has “not seen anything as unpopular among the Oromos.” Even the Ogaden front is split, an overseas faction in and leaders inside Ethiopia denying they joined. “This is a temporary marriage of convenience against a mutual enemy,” Getahun told CNN.
Ethiopia has seen this film. In November 2021, nine groups hastily announced a united front as Tigrayan and OLA forces advanced on Addis Ababa; by January 2022 the Afar front had quit, accusing the TPLF of killing Afar civilians, and by that December the Benishangul movement had signed its own peace. The lesson, Omer writes, is how quickly a common enemy stops being enough. The disobliging details have a pattern: the OLA broke off rather than disarm after 2018 and walked out of talks in Tanzania in 2023; the ONLF split in 2025 in a dispute over a Chinese natural-gas concession; Fano took up arms in 2023 when Abiy folded the Amhara special forces into the federal army. In June the Prosperity Party won 438 of 486 contested parliamentary seats, with no voting in Tigray and voting disrupted in Amhara and Oromia. The new parliament is due to open on October 5.
Whether the guns get that far is another matter. The conflict monitor ACLED judged the federal army already “stretched” before this week, while several of the seven allies are confined to their home districts or short of recruits. The African Union has declared the airport seizures inconsistent with the Pretoria deal, urged de-escalation and called again on Obasanjo. Getahun warns that a renewed war “would likely end up far bloodier and more widespread than the 2020–2022 fighting,” and Omer raises a further risk: should Abiy’s government be truly threatened, the United Arab Emirates may step in to rescue one of its closest regional allies. On Friday Abdisalam Balema of the TPLF’s central committee was still taking the measure of the offensive from a Mekelle now under strikes: “We’re not sure of the extent of it or whether they will continue, but we will assess it.”