Tigray People's Liberation Front

DRONE STRIKES AND ALLIANCES the fighting erupted on the first of august it began in the same place most observers thought it would on the western edges of the tigray region on territory that has been contested since the end of the recent war it's contested by the amhara the community that was allied with the ethiopian federal government during the first tigray war but is currently in the midst of their own conflict with the state back at the height of the tigray war the amhara used the conflict as an opportunity to seize the land that's disputed today and they've held that land ever since Apart from grabbing the land, we'd be remiss not to mention that the Amhara committed a whole host of war crimes during the prior conflict.

The Tigray and their regional paramilitary force, known as the TPLF, want that land back.

They argue that returning it to Tigray was part of an arrangement that was supposed to settle this issue years ago, known as the Praetoria Agreement.

To keep a really long story short, the first iteration of the Tigray War, between the Tigray TPLF on one side and the Ethiopian National Defense Forces and their allies on the other, began in 2020.

That war followed a concerted effort to reduce the TPLF's influence across Ethiopia.

The Tigray had dominated Ethiopian politics for nearly three decades, and their rule had become extremely unpopular, which led to massive protests in 2015 and the resignation of the Prime Minister at the time.

This paved the way for Abiy Ahmed, the nation's current Prime Minister, to rise to power, and once he took charge, he launched a concerted effort to reduce the TPLF's influence.

We're obviously glossing over a lot of the history here, and if you'd like to learn more, we have several episodes in the archives here on Warfront, so do check those out if you like.

Nearly four years later, the large-scale war has ended, but many of the disputes that fueled it remain unresolved.

More significantly, the period since 2024 has seen the TPLF reposition itself politically and organizationally while retaining military leverage and developing new relationships.

The sequence is striking.

TPLF contacts with Eritrean officials, including reported meetings in Dubai and Zalembesa, a renewed struggle over political control in Tigray, reports of recruitment and mobilization, new clashes involving Tigrayan forces, and the emergence of SIMDO, a loose convergence of groups opposed to the federal government.

Taken together, the developments raise a question over whether Pretoria became less a completed transition to peace than a period in which the TPLF could regroup and reposition itself while the underlying conflict remained unresolved.

There is no evidence that the TPLF entered the agreement with a predetermined plan to use it as a tactical pause, but the events since 2024 suggest that the movement has retained an organizational and security role the Pretoria was supposed to diminish.

You can read the rest of that piece at Al Jazeera.

This Timdo group puts the TPLF in alliance with multiple armed factions, including FATO militias from the Amhara region and the Oromo Liberation Army.

Thank you very much indeed.

Oleksandr Merezhko, Ukrainian MP from President Zelensky's party and chair of the Parliamentary Foreign Policy Committee.

You're with the BBC World Service live from London.

This is News Hour.

How complicated a picture is it in terms of, of public allegiances?

That's correct, because part of the Pretoria agreement was the establishment of what is called an interim regional authority in Tigray.

That structure was dismantled by the party, Tigray People's Liberation Front, earlier this year, and they assumed full control of the political authority in the region, meaning that the Tigrayan political elite was split by that action.

At the same time, the Tigrayan people on the ground all fear the outbreak of a new war, and we have seen tens of thousands of Tigrayans fleeing the region over the last three months in order to avoid being caught in a new war as they experienced just a few years ago.

Not independent, no, and that tension goes back decades, actually further than that.

The TPLF, the Tigrayan political movement, dominated Ethiopian federal politics for nearly 30 years before Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018, and systematically dismantled their influence.

The war was, at least partly, about that reversal.

En el mundo, muchas personas no saben esto.

Reports of a visible military buildup in the south of the Ethiopian region of Tigray, which has been on the brink of war with the federal government for months.

Both the army and the Tigrayan TPLF.

It's Tigray and Tigrayan, right?

Yes, I believe that's what we're going to say anyway.

Several people died along the Sudan-Ethiopia border during clashes over the weekend that also sent projectiles into refugee camps near Fighting has stopped since Saturday, but hundreds of people have been fleeing into Sudan, which itself is at war.

Tom Canetti breaks it all down for us from Addis Ababa.

The TPLF has released a statement accusing Ethiopian government forces of starting these clashes on Saturday, that mass casualties have occurred and that hospitals in Gondar and Western Tigray have been overwhelmed.

France 24 cannot independently verify those claims nor any casualty numbers.

It's, it's very, very important.

There are some very interesting developments, one of which was the struggle that broke out in northern Ethiopia, led by the Tigray People's Liberation Front.

That is im- important historically, because at that time, the military government in Ethiopia, the Derg, was backed by the Soviet Union, and yet you had these organizations, particularly the TPLF, I suppose also Eritrea, the EPLF, and others, fighting against that, fighting against the ba- the Soviet Union-backed and even Cuba-backed governments, but doing so with the perspective that they needed to organize amongst the masses of the people, that the people needed to empower themselves, and so on and so forth.

So actually looking at what happened, and they were successful.