Ethiopia's New Front: Old Enemies Choose the Same Enemy
Abiy Ahmed won his Nobel in 2019 for ending a twenty-year conflict with Eritrea.
Ethiopia's New Front: Old Enemies Choose the Same Enemy
In Ethiopia, the map of loyalty has just redrawn itself in ways that would have been unthinkable three years ago. The Tigray People's Liberation Front and the Amhara Fano militias — groups that spent years trying to destroy each other in one of this century's most brutal civil conflicts — have announced a coordinated alliance with the Oromo Liberation Army, all of them pointing in the same direction: toward Addis Ababa, and toward Abiy Ahmed.
This is not a ceasefire. It is something stranger and more consequential. These are former enemies who have watched each other commit atrocities, who have buried their own dead at each other's hands, and who have nonetheless concluded that the man sitting in the Nobel Peace Prize laureate's chair represents a threat larger than the one they posed to each other. When enemies of that depth find common cause, the political ground underneath a government doesn't crack — it dissolves.
Abiy Ahmed won his Nobel in 2019 for ending a twenty-year conflict with Eritrea. The citation called it a new era of peace for the Horn of Africa. What followed was the Tigray war, half a million dead by some estimates, mass atrocities documented on all sides, and a country that now finds itself facing not one insurgency but three converging ones. The prize is still on the shelf somewhere. The peace is not.
What makes this alliance significant beyond Ethiopia's borders is the geometry of it. The TPLF was once the dominant force in Ethiopian federal politics before Abiy marginalised them. The Fano militias are Amhara nationalists who initially supported Abiy's federal crackdown on Tigray, then turned against him when federal forces began disarming Amhara militias. The Oromo Liberation Army are from Abiy's own ethnic group — Oromo — and yet they reject him as a man who used Oromo identity as political cover while consolidating personal power. Three groups, three completely different grievances, one target.
The statement said they had been coordinating for more than a year. That detail matters. This is not spontaneous rage — it is organised, patient, and presumably armed. Ethiopia's neighbours, particularly Sudan and Somalia, are watching with the specific anxiety of countries that already have enough instability of their own. The African Union, headquartered in Addis Ababa, has not yet spoken at the volume the moment requires.
Gloria Steinem died this week at 92. The Ethiopian women who have spent years documenting wartime sexual violence in Tigray — largely ignored, occasionally acknowledged, never fully reckoned with — are still alive and still waiting for the kind of international attention that a famous death reliably generates. The world tends to notice certain stories. Ethiopia, for now, is asking to be one of them.
*By Isla Camilleri, Global Affairs & Lifestyle Editor*
