Ethiopia Tigray crisis: Explosions rock two major cities amid growing fears of wider civil war

 

Two explosions have rocked major cities in Ethiopia amid growing fears that country could be on the brink of a wider civil war.

Rockets were fired at airports in Bahir Dar and Gonda from the restive northern state of Tigray,.

It comes after mounting tensions between the government in Addis Ababa and the Tigray People's Liberation Front – which runs the federal state – boiled over into military clashes.

Federal troops have spent the last 10 days fighting with well-armed local forces there.

So violent have clashes been that more than 14,500 civilians living in Tigray have already fled into neighbouring Sudan, while Amnesty International has reported mass civilian killings in the town of Mai Kadra.

But the new rocket attacks – launched late on Friday – have raised new fears within both the United Nations and African Union that the fighting could spread to other parts of what is Africa's second-most populous country and destabilise the whole Horn of Africa.

In a statement given on regional TV on Saturday morning, the TPLF said strikes like that against the two airports would continue “unless the attacks against us stop.”

State president Debretsion Gebremichael added later that the sites were reasonable targets. “Any airport used to attack Tigray will be a legitimate target, not cities of Amhara,” he told Reuters in a text message.

Tensions initially erupted in Tigray on 4 November after prime minister Abiy Ahmed ordered operations against the TPLF in response to attacks on a military camp where federal troops were training – something the TPLF denies.

That came against a backdrop of mounting unease among state leaders after Mr Ahmed – who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for bring an end to his country’s 20-year conflict with Eritrea – pushed through major government reforms which the TPLF felt side-lined by.

Among these was dissolving the country’s ruling coalition, made up of several ethnically based regional parties, and merging them into a single, national organisation called the Prosperity Party.

The TPLF refused to join the alliance, claiming it was as an attempt to undermine the regional, federal autonomy explicitly promised in the country’s constitution.

Tensions further peaked in August 2020 when Mr Ahmed cancelled elections indefinitely because of Covid-19.

In an act of defiance Tigrayan leaders recalled their representatives from the capital and held their own ballot – described as illegal by the federal government.

Ethiopia only came out of civil war in 1991 following 17 years of fighting.

Source: Independent