Ethiopian government forces halted significant Tigray Defence Forces (TDF) advances in December, but the government's position is perilous. Jordan Anderson, Bisrat Semere, and Nizar Manek analyse three scenarios for how the Ethiopian conflict may develop.
Janes Intelligence Review, January 6 2022
The Ethiopian federal government announced on 23 December that its offensive operations against the Tigray Defence Forces (TDF) had been halted following an announcement by the TDF-aligned Government of Tigray (GoT) on 20 December that the TDF had withdrawn from Amhara and Afar regions. The move followed a counter-offensive by federal government forces in late November in response to a TPLF push that prompted a state of emergency in early November.
Ethiopia's civil war began with pre-emptive attacks by Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF)-aligned forces in Tigray against the Ethiopian National Defence Force's (ENDF) Northern Command on 3-4 November 2020. The TPLF had until then been Tigray's governing party, and the dominant wing of Ethiopia's ruling coalition until early 2018. The TDF was formed in 2020 as the military wing of the TPLF-dominated GoT.
In the three months preceding the civil war, as reported to Janes by an Eritrean opposition leader in Ethiopia in October 2020, nomads filtering into Eritrea through Ethiopia's Afar regional state and Port Sudan observed co-ordinated military training in Eritrea between the ENDF and the Eritrean Defence Forces (EDF). The sources additionally observed the installation of radar equipment in Agordat city in Eritrea's Gash-Barka region, which borders Tigray. TDF attacks followed ENDF and EDF movements towards the Badme, Zalambessa, and Rama fronts at the Eritrea-Tigray border, Eritrean soldiers and militiamen supporting relevant Eritrean mechanised and infantry divisions reported to Janes in late 2020 and early 2021 both before and after returning to Eritrea.
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