The United States again urged, Monday, November 15, the Americans to leave “at once” Ethiopia at war on their own, adding this warning: there will be no military evacuation as there was for Afghanistan. The American embassy has been urging its fellow citizens for several days to take commercial flights to leave the country, where rebel groups no longer rule out marching on Addis Ababa, the capital. It offers loans to those who are unable to purchase a ticket immediately. “We are doing this not out of pessimism about the prospects for peace, but out of practicality”, State Department spokesman Ned Price explained with a new appeal. He said he dreaded a “misunderstanding” from the opinion which could “to think that what took place in Afghanistan can be replicated by the US government everywhere else in the world.”
Chronicle of an announced war
The war began in November 2020 when Abiy Ahmed sent the army to remove regional authorities from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), who challenged his authority and accused him of attacking military bases. Ethiopian forces have received support from troops from neighboring Eritrea. Abiy Ahmed declared victory on November 28, but TPLF fighters recaptured most of Tigray in June, then advanced into neighboring Afar and Amhara regions. Allied to an armed group of the Oromo ethnic group (OLA), they have claimed since the end of October for strategic territorial gains in these two regions, without ruling out marching on the capital Addis Ababa.
Threat to all of East Africa
With thousands dead, two million displaced and fears of a rebel march on Addis Ababa, the war in Ethiopia poses the threat of large-scale destabilization, with potential repercussions throughout Africa. East. The situation worries Ethiopia’s neighboring countries and the international community, all of which have been working to end the year-long conflict between government forces and rebels in the northern region of Tigray. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned that the failure to hold talks “would lead to the implosion of Ethiopia and spill over to other countries in the region.” Antony Blinken is due on November 16 in Kenya, one of Ethiopia’s many neighbors, worried about an influx of refugees caused by the war. Tens of thousands of people have already fled west to Sudan, straining relations between the two nations, already poisoned in particular by the Ethiopian Renaissance Grand Dam (GERD) project on the Nile.
The African Union (AU), headquartered in Addis Ababa, has stepped up efforts to end the fighting, through its envoy for the Horn of Africa, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo . Without much result, for the moment.