The big news sites have finally started to do some serious reports on the war in Tigray, but there’s a funny tilt to their coverage: they’re not very interested in the war aspect of the war, if you know what I mean. There are a few honorable exceptions, but looking back at mainstream coverage of this war, it’s odd how little there is about actual combat.

This happens a lot with African war stories, as if the MSM can only think of African war as atrocities, not as strategy and tactics. I’m not minimizing the atrocities, but as I’ve said a lotta times, atrocities are part of war-fighting everywhere, just as publicizing and hiding them is part of overall strategy.

Most people by now understand that there’s been terrible suffering in Tigray. That too is true of every war. And though it’s a good idea to draw attention to civilian suffering, you have to remember that the battlefield still decides the outcome.

In Syria, the MSM won the media war, no contest. Don’t get me started on that, as the feller said. But who’da thunk, the SAA/Hezbollah/Russian side went and won on the battlefield, nullifying the efforts of thousands of hard-working propagandists.

So the actual, y’know, battle aspect of war is still worth talking about. In fact, it makes much more sense to fold atrocities and propaganda into the category of war-fighting than to take them in isolation, as if they were just tragic events unconnected with real strategy.

This is especially true in the Ethiopian wars of the last four decades, which have never gotten the respect they deserve for the sheer ferocity and brilliance with which they were fought.

That’s true for this latest episode of the Ethiopian long war, the one that flared when the Ethiopian and Eritrean armies tried to sandwich Tigray between them in November 2020.

This war was a typical war in the Horn, with uniformed armies deploying infantry, artillery, armor, and aircraft (both piloted and drones.) Yet it’s hard to find stories about what happened on the battlefields. In that way, you have to give the MSM a partial pass, I guess, because it hasn’t been easy to get news about the fighting.

When the war started, I thought there would be more video of the battles, since everyone has a camera phone and a Twitter account. But the Ethiopian gov’t came up with a simple plan to stop anyone filming its wet work in Tigray, cutting off all internet access from Tigray and locking down the borders. I wrote about how well this worked in RWN Newsletter #117.

The short version is, it worked. Although you can’t help but wonder if it would’ve worked quite as well if there’d been a lot of interest from the people who run the big news organizations. Bans like this work a lot better when the rich consumers aren’t very hungry for that particular news anyway.

All those news sites, and all us news-consumers, got one of the biggest surprises of this century when the Tigrayan Defense Force (TDF), the rebranded military force of the TDLF (Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front), marched into the provincial capital Mekelle, showing off thousands of EDF prisoners, on June 28, 2021.

How did that happen? In my last newsletter (RWN Newsletter #118) I went back to the Battle of Adwa, another shock victory that happened in Tigray in 1896. In that battle, an Ethiopian force cut an Italian army to pieces. That wasn’t supposed to be possible either. Adwa is like one of those Belgian towns during the 16th-21st centuries; it just keeps coming up in military news, as it did in early 2021.

And now for a brief digression on war poetry: Those Belgian towns were so annoying that Matthew Prior, one of the war poets of 17th-c. Britain, mocked them in a poem on the British victory at Blenheim:

What work had we with Wageninghen, Arnheim,

Places that could not be reduced to rhyme?

And though the poet made his last efforts,

Wurts — who could mention in heroic — Wurts?

Prior’s poem is an apostrophe to his counterpart, Boileau. As you can see in the quoted lines, Prior is very collegial, basically having a post-game beer with Boileau, gloating but at the same time sharing the misery they both went through trying to find a way to incorporate un-heroic place names like “Wurts” into their bread and butter, which was providing patriotic verse as required.

There are probably poets writing in Tigrinya and Amhara trying to work Tigrayan place names into their war poems. And when the current iteration of this very long war stops for a while, they may well josh each other over a bottle of Habesha about the problem of working “Jijiqe” or “Adigrat” into their rhyme-schemes. The fact that there were massacres in those places may not matter as much as first-world humanists might think. For one thing, there were massacres in Prior’s and Boileau’s wars too, and it didn’t stop the literary factories from turning out the verses.

Here endeth the digression. So, two weeks into the war, the EDF announced it had captured two towns, Axum and Adwa, both Tigrayan and carrying between them a thousand years of Ethiopian/Tigrayan history.

And in between the 2021 shock victory and the one in 1896, there was another shock victory in the Highlands. In the 1980s, the Eritrean/Tigrayan insurgents destroyed an Ethiopian Army, a humongous and heroic war I covered in three earlier newsletters (RWN Newsletters #94, #95, #96). That war was won by a coalition of many militias, but only two of them really had much combat power — and both were dominated by ethnic Tigrayans. One was the TDLF. And the other the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF).

The EPLF was stressed its Eritrean loyalty but that was not an ethnic loyalty. There’s no such thing as an Eritrean ethnic group. Ethnic/national identity is never fixed, so now that Eritrea is a very tight, isolated nation-state, it may be that in a generation or two, a big chunk of the population will call itself simply Eritrean. Maybe, maybe not. At any rate it hasn’t happened yet.

The Eritrean elite was and still is ethnic Tigrayans, especially since the EPLF, led by highland-Christian Tigrayans, defeated the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), a Saudi-backed rival movement led by lowland, coastal non-Tigrayan Eritrean Muslims.

Tigrayan domination of Eritrea goes right to the very top. The top, in Eritrea, consists of one very scary guy, Isias Afwerki. He doesn’t want it advertised, but he’s from an aristocratic Tigrayan background.

All of which provides a simple lesson: Tigrayans are the bulk of combat power in the Highlands of the Horn. You’d think that would lead to the conclusion that you shouldn’t mess with Tigray unless you’re ready to get in a long, nasty war, even when the conventional military wisdom is that the Tigrayans don’t have a chance.

They weren’t supposed to have a chance against the Europeans in 1896 or the Ethiopian Derg in the 1980s, just like they weren’t supposed to have a chance against the ENDF in November 2020, when Ethiopian armor started pushing into southern Tigray. If you’re running a war-nerd bookmaking business, put a sign on the window: “No bets on wars in Tigray.”

One reason we all underestimated Tigray is that no one outside TPLF circles seems to have known, or at least admitted to themselves, how much of the combat power of both Eritrean and Ethiopian forces came from ethnic Tigrayans. Both these countries are multiethnic coalitions, especially Ethiopia.

The current Ethiopian borders are the product of 19th-c. conquests, pushing from the Highlands south and east, absorbing Somali, Afar, Oromo, Sidamo, and dozens of other peoples who were not part of the “Habesha,” which is what the Highland Orthodox peoples, Tigrayan and Amhara, called themselves. (You can read about this in more detail in the earlier newsletters on this war.)

The other groups were not in the running to control Ethiopia. The contest was always between the two Habesha peoples, the Tigrayans and the Amhara. And the Amhara seemed like the stronger of the two.

There were a lot more of them, for starters. Tigrayans are only about 6% of the population, Amhara about 26%. And the central power has moved south, from Tigray to Showa, the area around Addis Ababa.

The Tigrayans actually played down their power, until 2020 when they were forced to show their hand. As the TPLF realized it would win the long war against the Derg, its leader Meles Zenawi (see earlier newsletters) joined a multiethnic coalition force, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF).

And it was the EPRDF, claiming to represent all anti-Derg Ethiopians, who claimed the triumph in 1991. Looking back, Zenawi (who was a very smart guy, if not an especially nice one) realized that his party, the TPLF, was so much better organized than the other members of the EPRDF that he and his fellow Tigrayans could control all of Ethiopia after deposing the Derg. So the decision to let the very proudly multiethnic EPRDF claim what was largely a TPLF victory was a strange sort of military/political tokenism.

Henri IV went through the motions of converting to Catholicism in return for the throne with the line “Paris is worth a mass or two,” and Zenawi seems to have decided “Addis and the whole GDP is worth letting those weaker militias get the credit.”

Zenawi’s pragmatic use of multi-ethnic front groups blinded a lot of people, inside and outside Ethiopia, to the most important fact of all: The real military strength of the EPRDF was the Tigrayan forces.

The Eritrean forces (EDF) had also shown their strength against the Derg, but what the “Eritrean” label made people forget is that that army was also dominated by ethnic Tigrayans. Tigrinya-speakers are the majority in Eritrea, not only the dominant but the biggest ethnic group.

CONTINUED

  • LeninsRage [he/him]
    hexagon
    ·
    3 years ago

    That has never stopped Eritrean Tigrayans from killing other Tigrayans. That shouldn’t be a surprise — when have people of the same ethnic group ever fretted about killing each other? — but it does underline what seems like the dominant fact at the moment: The Tigrayans are the most formidable people in the Horn.

    Why didn’t Abiy Ahmed and his generals realize that before deciding to invade Tigray in 2020? Well, one thing you discover when you read the Twitter war that’s been blazing since the invasion is that Amhara have a weird double view of Tigrayans. They believe that the Tigrayans are an all-powerful, conniving, tight-knit people who took over all of Ethiopia...and at the same time, they believe that the Tigrayans are parasites who can and should be crushed.

    This paradoxical view of hated ethnic groups, making them simultaneously weak and all-powerful, may seem weird — but it’s pretty common.

    The trouble with this double-headed stereotype is that, if you stress the “weak parasites” pole, you can end up thinking that crushing the hated minority will be a cakewalk.

    Which brings us to Abiy Ahmed’s choice to go to war in 2020. The TPLF had been running the country far too long — most Ethiopians seem to agree on that. The hated Tigrayan minority may have overseen a big jump in economic growth, but they kept most of the money themselves (I’m summarizing views on Twitter, not my own). And it just plain rankled, having this small group running everything, thinking they’re better than other Ethiopians.

    Abiy was the choice of Ethiopians who wanted the other, bigger communities to have a say, and if he chose to take a little revenge on the snotty Tigrayans, that would be the icing on the rough-justice cake.

    The TPLF was hunkered down in Mekelle, trying to hold to its local power. They must have known war was coming when they decided to hold elections in Tigray after Addis announced that all elections were cancelled because of Covid. Hell, maybe you could call this the first of the Covid wars, or at least — since news sites call every little mask-squabble a "war" — this was the first one that involved armored columns and airstrikes.

    Rashid Abdi, a journalist who covers the Horn, announced on Twitter that war was coming on October 30, 2020.

    Since Abdi is close to the TPLF leadership, he probably got his info from them. So they knew Tigray was going to be attacked by the ENDF. They decided to strike first, hitting ENDF bases in every Tigrayan city on November 4, 2020. The TPLF first denied these attacks but later admitted them.

    TPLF special forces grabbed the local commanders of the EDF, took any weapons they thought might be useful, and packed ENDF soldiers into trucks for transport to camps far away from the cities. Some ENDF commanders who were ethnic Tigrayans collaborated with the TPLF during the raids, which shows how the revived ethnic divide was ripping apart Ethiopian institutions like the army.

    Two days after these preemptive TPLF attacks, the ENDF answered with air raids, a classic first move by national governments dealing with an insurgent province. The Ethiopian command also unleashed their own ethnic militia, usually called Fano (or Fanno — it means something like "Ronin" in Amharic). These were basically ethnic Amhara irregulars used to terrorize Tigrayan civilians in the south, near the border with the Amhara province.

    At the time, most news sites took the Fano’s deployment and subsequent massacres and rapes as just another African atrocity to deplore in vague terms. That was totally wrong.

    Wars in this part of the Horn have been highly organized, conventional battles, not “bush wars.” It was the commanders who decided that massacres, rapes, and other atrocities were a good idea. And disorganized, poorly armed and trained militias like Fano were of no use for real combat, as shown by the Eritrean case.

    Eritrea used its regular troops to commit atrocities. Unlike Ethiopia, it doesn’t need a deniable irregular force to do the dirty war: Eritrea is already a pariah state. It’s walled off from the whole world of NGOs, first-world advisors, IMF plans, and the rest of the standard African-state package.

    Ethiopia is totally different, dependent on Western aid, tight with the NGOs (until lately anyway) and eager for a share of the graft. So it makes a cold sort of sense that Eritrea let its own forces commit atrocities, while Ethiopia either farmed them out to Fano or tried to hide them.

    In military terms, Ethiopia’s resort to using Fano signaled something else: desperation. Few people realized it back in November 2020 (I certainly didn’t) but the ENDF’s reliance on Fano meant that they knew they’d lost most of their combat power when the Tigrayans defected.

    The EDF is apparently able to order even its ethnic Tigrayan soldiers to carry out massacres, rapes, and the rest of the agenda. The ENDF was not able to do this.

    It’s an interesting divergence. Is this because the EDF is more disciplined, or because their Tigrayan soldiers buy into the new Eritrean identity rather than their Tigrayan heritage? Whatever the explanation, it seems clear that the EDF kept its Tigrayan recruits, while the ENDF lost theirs and had to call up an ethnic-Amhara militia as backup.

    The air strikes and militia raids weren’t going to reconquer Tigray. Everyone knew a big offensive, aiming for Mekelle, was coming. It began about a week after the TPLF’s preemptive attacks. The Eritreans sent armor and infantry into Zalambessa, in northeastern Tigray. Zalambessa is another of those towns which have become metonymic for endless war. I was writing about war in Zalambessa 20 years ago.

    That didn’t stop the EDF from massacring civilians in Zalambessa this time around. After all, most of their soldiers weren’t born back in those days. They didn’t have a problem going house to house, shooting civilians. Soldiers usually don’t, even when the killers and victims are from the same ethnic group. And they did it with discipline, good hard Eritrean discipline, as always.

    The ENDF seemed to be advancing too, in this early part of the war. It wasn’t clear yet how much combat power they’d lost when they lost the Tigrayans. ENDF armored columns rolled into Alamata on the A2 highway, which leads straight north from the Amhara heartland to the Tigrayan capital Mekele. The ENDF was striking for the heart of Tigray and it didn’t seem like anything could stop them. As far as most pundits could tell, the TPLF was just getting rolled up easily by the bigger, better-armed ENDF.

    At RWN we knew better, sorta. I say “sorta” because at the time it really did look like the TPLF had gotten in a fight it couldn’t win, but in our defense we were saying on the show, unlike most pundits, that the TPLF had fought and won a classic Maoist insurgency against terrible odds once before, so it couldn’t be counted out too soon.

    Still, the strategic picture looked pretty grim. The ENDF was rolling toward Mekelle from the south, and the Eritrean army was attacking from the north across a wide front. Even Somalia, which has problems of its own, had loaned thousands of troops to the war against Tigray.

    How could the TPLF hold Mekelle against forces like that?

    By the end of November 2020, the answer seemed simple: They couldn’t. They hadn’t. The ENDF moved up the A2 road with only minor fighting and took Mekelle on November 28. The TPLF said it had left the capital and moved into the mountains to wage a guerrilla campaign, but we’ve all heard that kind of “It’s not over!” claim way too many times. The TPLF’s threats sounded like face-saving playground rhetoric.

    Nope. They meant it. They had decided to withdraw from the cities as Mao advocated, avoid battle, and regroup in the boonies. And it worked.

    I swear, Mao doesn’t get much credit around here — a lotta Bolshevik-love going around, and none for Mao — but in my anything but humble opinion, he did more with less and will be remembered as the preeminent strategist of the last century.

    The thing about Mao’s strategy, though, is that it’s slow. That makes it very difficult for the CNN/BBC model to cover. Day after day, nothing happens — until it happens. The guerrillas withdraw from the cities, and it’s easy to conclude that they’ve simply fled, headed home, “Game over, man!” You can refresh your browser fifty times a day and there’s no news, no maps moving, no sign of anything but a total rout.

    Looking back now, there were signs even then that the conquest wasn’t as complete as it seemed. For starters, where were the leaders of the TPLF? They should have been the most valuable trophies for a victorious ENDF, but only one of the top leaders, Abay Weldu, was captured.

    And the biggest catch of all, TPLF overall leader Debretsion Gebremichael, had slipped away. There were all kinds of rumors about him: he’d fled to Sudan, or South Sudan, or the mountains, or had been killed.

    It wasn’t until early 2021 that there was any reliable news about how the fighting was going. And when it came, it was more bad news for the Tigrayan forces. In a conversation with journalist Alex de Waal, a TPLF veteran turned researcher said that in the first month of the war, the TPLF had decimated the EDF, ENDF, and Fano attackers. Then came the UAE drones:

    “And then the Emirates came. The Emirates effectively disarmed Tigray. They started killing tanks, then howitzers, then fuel, then ammunition. Then they started hunting small vehicles, targeting leaders, [indistinct] all over. This created [unclear: risk?] and sort of dislocation, and this is part of the weakness of the preparation. So many people moved out of the cities of Tigray towards the rural other areas following the army, some including their families.”

    CONTINUED

    • LeninsRage [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      And yet the TDF won, retaking Mekelle in a few months. So the losses inflicted by these UAE drones were not fatal. Why not?

      It’s worth comparing the role of drones in Tigray with what they did in Nagorno-Karabakh in the 2020 war. Up there, drones turned the tide. In Tigray, they were not decisive, however lethal they might have been at first.

      Maybe the difference is between the Maoist model of war-fighting and the Soviet one.

      The Armenian forces in Artsakh were using an adapted Soviet model, heavy on armor and prepared positions — and were expecting the same kind of war from the Azeris, who trained in the same Soviet school.

      But the Azeri army, with all the money on earth behind it, plus US/NATO/Gulf/Israeli support, brought a new war that used armed drones to destroy that armor and blast those prepared defense points right off the hilltops.

      The TDF was lucky: they were too poor to rely completely on that strategy, and too steeped in Mao’s version of insurgency, rather than the Soviet model.

      Mao’s strategy relies on mobility and patience. Mao claimed that a bandit chief once told him “All you need to know about war is circle around, circle around, circle around.” That couldn’t have worked in a tiny theater like Nagorno-Karabakh, but it was perfect for Tigray. Central Tigray looks eerily like Monument Valley where they used to film all those Westerns. Lots of room, lots of hiding places and ambush sites.

      So, even if the ENDF’s drones killed many Tigrayan defenders, they didn’t decide the war this time. Which suggests that the Tigrayan forces didn’t commit everything they had to stopping the ENDF as it rolled in at the end of 2020. They pulled back, maybe using a few suicide squads to delay the Ethiopian advance (those would be the tanks and other assets destroyed by drones) but putting their big bet on watching, waiting, and looking for weak points in the occupying force.

      It’s pretty clear, by 2021, that that’s the way to fight a high-tech occupying force. By this time everybody knows what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s no secret how to defeat a massive occupation...if you’re willing to pay the price.

      And it’s a terrible price. It’s hard to see how terrible the price is until you've read a lot of insurgent memoirs. You do not want to live through an insurgency. It’s not romantic, it’s not adventurous. It’s a nightmare. Because another lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan is that recent experiments in counterinsurgency doctrine, the theory that says "We can win the insurgent people over without terrorizing them" — well, even if those were carried out as cleanly as they claimed (and they weren’t) — even then, they do. Not. Work.

      The ENDF didn’t even bother with trying the new-model COIN. They just killed people. The horrible truth is that that’s how COIN works. That’s what Julius Caesar did in Gaul, and many other commanders before and after him.

      The goal is not usually to kill all of the target population. (Though there are plenty of examples of that policy in the record, as recently as Rwanda in 1994.)

      More often, the goal is to commit atrocities that will shock the enemy population into running away. That’s the key: make them run away. When civilian populations have to flee, especially very poor people with lots of children, they will die on their own. And their children will die first. Children die quickly when there’s no food or rest.

      This is why those “senseless” slaughters people read about in places they don’t know about, or want to know about, are not senseless at all. They’re traditional, universal practices designed to create horror. Horror makes the enemy civilians run, and running kills them very efficiently. Better yet, the news sites don’t see the connection and attribute their deaths to "famine" or "wartime chaos," letting you, the occupier, off the hook very nicely.

      Rape is a big part of this process too. Mass rape breaks the spirit of the enemy fighters, because one of the universal goals of male defenders in every war ever is protecting the women. It’s no accident that there’s a long scene of Scarlett O’Hara being menaced by a leering Union soldier in Gone with the Wind. And it’s no accident she shoots him dead, either — because that was a very pro-Dixie movie, and defeated elites need literary victories, over and over.

      IRL, rape victims rarely find themselves on the stairway of a mansion with a pistol conveniently to hand. 999 times out of a thousand, they have nowhere to run when the enemy trucks roar into their towns or villages. They may live after being gang-raped but their lives have been destroyed, and any children they have will be pariahs.

      So rape, like massacre, is horrific, intentionally horrific, rather than “senseless.” A monstrous sense is still sense, and a far more common form of it than we’d like to think.

      There’s one pattern in the rapes and massacres that stands out: soldiers of the Eritrean Defence Forces seemed to be doing more than their share of the atrocities. It was the Eritreans who committed the biggest massacre, or at least the biggest one we know about, in Aksum.

      There could be many reasons for that, from official policy to the Eritreans’ bitter memory of what happened to their troops after the Battle of Adwa (see previous newsletter.) But there’s also a thread you see in many multi-sided wars: Soldiers with no local connections are sometimes the most brutal, just because they have no reason to feel anything about the subject people.

      The Eritrean-Ethiopian border has been closed, totally closed, for a generation now. Eritrean troops probably feel no connection with their Tigrayan-Ethiopian neighbors and see themselves as fighting in a foreign land.

      This is a tough call because the general level of brutality in most wars, anywhere, in any era, is so high you can’t always get a precise reading on relative monstrosity. But it’s interesting to compare the foreign forces in the Thirty Years War, the Euro-jihadis in IS’s wars, the colonial soldiers in just about any war of the late 19th-c., with the Eritreans in Tigray. The Ethiopian command might have been under some sort of weak directive to take it easy on the horrors (“Remember, we want to make the survivors good patriotic Ethiopians again!”) but the Eritrean command had no such plans. They wanted to bring the nightmare to Tigray, and by all accounts they did a good job of it.

      There’s another reason it’s hard to say for certain which force did which massacre. From the very beginning of the war, Eritrean units went into battle wearing Ethiopian uniforms.

      Official policy in both Ethiopian and Eritrean stories on the war for the first few months was that there were no Eritreans fighting in Tigray. It wasn’t until April 2021, five months into the war, that Eritrea admitted it had invaded northern Tigray. And even then they didn’t exactly admit they DID have troops there; they just said “We are now withdrawing our troops from Tigray.”

      That’s the sort of fine distinction that foreign-affairs officers love, though its fine-ness is usually lost on the locals who have been getting raped and killed by those un-acknowledged invaders.

      We talk about how the Tigrayans retreated “to the mountains,” and that was true. But they also concentrated away from the few good roads through the province. Ethiopian and Eritrean armor, drones, and aircraft had enough destructive power to control the roads.

      So by the Spring of 2021, the Tigrayans, now officially the TDF, concentrated away from those roads and cities. This was a classic guerrilla situation: the occupier controls the cities, the roads, and the daytime, while the guerrillas own the countryside and the nighttime.

      The Ethiopian forces moved by road. That’s one reason western Tigray was easier for them to control: it’s flat, or at least flatter than the core Tigrayan territory in the east, along the shoe of the Tigrayan boot, where most Tigrayans live. (There’s a sort of rule here: in the Temperate Zones, or what used to be the Temperate Zones, you want to be at a low elevation or you’ll be too cold to grow crops. In the Tropics, you may prefer to be higher up, where there’s more rainfall and a milder climate.)

      Western Tigray was the front assigned to the Amhara militias. They considered big parts of western Tigray Amhara territory, and when they took control of it, they reacted the way irregular ethnic militias always have: by offering the locals the choice of leaving or dying.

      Well, it seems they didn’t offer the “leaving” option in some cases, but that, unfortunately, is pretty standard ethnic or sectarian militia behavior too.

      These massacres may have been going on all over western Tigray, but the ones that were reported were concentrated along the Sudan border, in places like Humera and Mai Kadra. That’s a very strategic zone, where Eritrea, Sudan, and Tigray/Ethiopian borders collide. Humera, site of a long series of massacres, is exactly at the point where the three countries meet, and Mai Kadra is a village in the Humera District. So the massacres of Tigrayans there could have been aimed at total extermination rather than the usual “make’em run, then they’ll die” pattern I mentioned above.

      CONTINUED

      • LeninsRage [he/him]
        hexagon
        ·
        3 years ago

        It’ll be a long time before anybody knows how many massacres happened in Tigray, but it does seem clear that the pace picked up as TDF ambushes started chipping away at EDF/ENDF/Fano forces.

        This is another constant of war: When the occupying force starts to take casualties from guerrilla attacks, they react by firing at any civilians in their sights. It’s armies in the process of losing who commit some of the most bloody massacres.

        Of course, it doesn’t work against an occupied people who are united. In fact, that sort of occupier overreaction is a key part of all guerrilla strategies, a way to alienate the people from the occupier, as if the Tigrayans needed another reason.

        Once an insurgent force has near-unanimous local support and has spent weeks or months watching the occupiers’ outposts, timing their patrols, marking their weak points, sifting reports to gauge the enemy’s morale, staging an attack is easy.

        Well, “easy” isn’t the right word, maybe. Insurgents die at a higher rate than occupiers in almost all asymmetrical wars. But when the occupiers are as brutal as the Ethiopian/Eritrean/Amhara forces have been in Tigray, dying is a real possibility even for those who try to stay out of the fight. So it’s not hard to find volunteers willing to take the risk of a death that will make them heroes.

        The tactics probably haven’t changed very much from the ones the TPLF first learned from the Eritreans in the 1980s, as I described them in RWN Newsletter #96:

        “…The EPLA had perfected a sophisticated mix of conventional and guerrilla tactics, often sending five columns into an enemy position, with one assigned to kill everyone in the enemy HQ while the others kept the force busy along the perimeter. They used these tactics very effectively against the slow, tired Ethiopian Army, now full of cannon fodder dragged out of Ethiopian villages to replace the slaughtered veterans.”

        When I went back to reread those earlier newsletters (#93, 94, 95, & 96) it was surprising how little seems to have changed from that war to this one. Once again, the Ethiopian army went into battle without its best soldiers — in fact, went into battle against them, since it’s very clear by now that it was the Tigrayans who were the real strength of the united Ethiopian forces, before they defected.

        Some estimates claim that half of the ENDF Northern Command, presumably the ethnic Tigrayans, defected to the TPLF/TDF after Abiy sent the ENDF into Tigray. Most would have taken their weapons and vehicles with them, making the TDF much better-armed than other insurgent groups.

        So when you see one of those photos of a destroyed ENDF tank or truck in a Tigrayan canyon road, the best guess you can make about how it got that hole in it is to look at the most recent precedent: the great (and weirdly unnoticed) Battle of Afabet in 1988.

        Afabet is deep in Eritrea, but it has the same kind of terrain as central Tigray, a landscape of sharp rock buttes and narrow canyons with few roads — and the TDF is the descendant of the TPLF, which learned big-battle tactics from the Eritrean EPLF, which mutated into the current EDF.

        The Derg’s army was HQ’d in the town of Afabet, a dry valley town in the foothills of the big Abyssinian Plateau. Think Winnemucca, if you’ve been been through there. The EPLF forced the demoralized Ethiopian forces out of their HQ in Nafka. They attempted to flee south to Afabet. You can see from this map why that’s a dangerous plan for an armor-heavy force, fleeing along a classic narrow valley with one road:

        For instance, what would happen if EPLF antitank gunners managed to knock out a vehicle right at the choke point of a narrow pass on the road to Afabet? Well...here’s how that battle developed, as described in Newsletter #96:

        The Ethiopians held for a while, and then the commander of an elite unit, the 29th Mechanized Brigade, decided to break out southward towards Afabet.

        Withdrawing with an armor-heavy force, through narrow mountain passes, is a very dangerous move. By this time the Eritreans had quite a significant armored force of their own in action, entirely made up of captured Ethiopian tanks, SP artillery, and APCs. So Eritrean armor, including T-55 MBTs, was trailing the retreating 29th Brigade as they withdrew.

        When one of the trucks in the Ethiopian convoy made it to the summit of the pass, an Eritrean T-55 managed to destroy it with a direct hit, and when the T-55’s main cannon hits a truck, it makes quite a mess, especially when the wreckage is right at the top of a narrow mountain pass.

        This is the worst thing that can happen to an armor-based force: stuck in a convoy in a narrow mountain valley, with the exit blocked by burning vehicles. All you can do in that situation is get out of the vehicle and try to flee on foot. That’s what the 29th Mechanized Brigade, which had been one of the army’s best units, had to do. Before fleeing they tossed hand grenades into their abandoned vehicles to make sure they couldn’t be used by the enemy. Then they fought their way out towards Afabet, the main Ethiopian base south of Nafka.

        When the over-centralized Ethiopian command heard about the disaster they ordered their own air force to bomb the abandoned column, making extra sure those vehicles couldn’t be used by the Eritreans. So at this point you have your own AF bombing a convoy of your best armor. The optics, as they say, were not good: Ethiopian MiG 23s bombing Ethiopian T-55s.

        The Ethiopian high command, over-managing from the safety of Addis Ababa, ordered attacks from Keren, the big town to the SW of Afabet, and simultaneous sorties from Afabet toward Keren, to open the road. But that meant sending more armor-heavy convoys along roads that followed the courses of dry riverbeds down long mountain valleys. That’s a defender’s dream landscape. The Italians had discovered that at the Battle of Adwa a century earlier, and the Ethiopian Army, which should’ve known better, was finding it out all over again.

        The attacks failed, as the weary Ethiopian troops and mid-rank officers must have known they would. That left the garrison in Afabet totally isolated. And these weren’t the proud Ethiopian troops of the Ogaden War.

        They’d been terrorized and mismanaged by their own command for way too long, and the best soldiers had died years ago. Most of them were conscripts rounded up from the streets of the cities, along with any rural kids too slow to avoid the recruiting gangs.

        The Eritreans were fast. This was their terrain, they had the enemy demoralized and on the run, and for the first time they could advance by truck and APC. They attacked Afabet on March 19, just two days after beginning the campaign. The town fell fast. Just as in the debacle at the mountain pass, all the Ethiopian commanders could do was blow up what they could and flee south toward Keren.

        CONTINUED

        • LeninsRage [he/him]
          hexagon
          ·
          3 years ago

          The best guess for how the TDF retook Tigray so quickly is the Afabet scenario repeated on smaller scale, dozens or hundreds of times. And unfortunately, the likeliest explanation for at least some of the massacres of Tigrayan civilians is that they were slaughtered in retaliation after TDF guerrillas destroyed the occupiers’ convoys or outposts. Not all the massacres would have happened this way, because it’s pretty clear that the Addis Ababa government wanted a mass purge of Tigrayans everywhere in Ethiopia, even in places like Addis Ababa, where there are still plenty of journalists watching. What happened in at least some parts of Tigray, where no journalists were allowed, looks pretty much like straight-up genocide.

          It was a genocide that failed, however. Once again, the battlefield has trumped the massacre/PR campaign, and the TDF’s victory has forced the Ethiopian elite to worry more about holding on to cities like Gondar, now threatened by south-moving TDF forces, than massacring Tigrayan civilians.

          But where the Eritrean forces hold control, things are very different, very grim. Unlike the ENDF, the EDF seems to have held together. It’s still occupying part of northern Tigray, and seems to be replacing ENDF/Fano in the flat land of western Tigray, especially the strategic corner around Humera:

          “An internal European Union document dated August 20 said Eritrean troops were ‘present in western Tigray, where they have taken up defensive positions with tanks and artillery around Adi Goshu and Humera, and possibly also along the border with Sudan.'”

          This seems like another sign that while Tigray and Ethiopia have lost a great deal, Afwerki’s Eritrean elite has won, at low cost.

          In fact, it looks like the streetwise old fighter Afwerki lured Abiy, a naïve and vain orator, into a pact (the one that won him the Nobel Prize) that included a secret clause to join in crushing Tigray. And maybe Afwerki knew, when he talked Abiy into that pact, that the ENDF would not succeed. After all, Afwerki knows Tigray and saw the combat power of the Tigrayan forces up close.

          Looking cold-bloodedly from Afwerki’s stronghold in the north, you couldn’t help seeing that it would be to your benefit to get Tigray and Amhara to fight it out. Both would be weakened, and all Eritrea would lose would be a few thousand soldiers. To leaders like Afwerki, soldiers are a crop, a renewable resource. Kept at home without jobs (and there are very few jobs in Eritrea these days) those young people are dangerous; sent to the front, they will be nicely distracted, and better yet, many of them will not come home at all.

          So if there’s one thing that begins to show through the murk here, it’s that Afwerki has won. The TDF has won on the battlefield, but the war was fought on its terrain, so Tigray will be in poverty and hunger for a long, long time. And Abiy’s Ethiopian elite has just plain lost, lost catastrophically, and will be lucky to hold the rest of the country together for even a decade.

          Maybe he won’t even get the chance. If you look at the most recent control maps, you see the TDF advancing like a hungry amoeba to the south, along the few roads linking Tigray to the Amhara region. It’s not likely the TDF would be foolish enough to try to claim leadership of all Ethiopia, but they could well force Abiy out and install a friendlier Amhara puppet leader.

          The Eritrean problem is a much tougher one for the TDF. The control map doesn’t show much TDF advance northward, into Eritrean territory. As of early September 2021, it looks like the TDF hasn’t even been able to dislodge the Eritrean forces from the Tigrayan territory they’ve taken around Aksum.

          This could be simple tactical sense, choosing to attack the weaker force rather than the stronger, or a strategic decision by the TDF leadership that the threat to Tigray is from Abiy’s circle, from the south, with Afwerki just a vulture gobbling up the casualties of the Tigrayan/Amhara fight.

          The next big question is what will happen if the TDF manages to take, or at least besiege, Gondar? You can see on the map that there are two TDF advances threatening the city: One moving west toward Lake Tana from Weldiya (presumably along the B22 road, which seems to be the only one available), and another pushing south along the B30 road from Debark. Even if these two prongs don’t roll through Gondar, they could isolate the city. That would be a big shock to the elite in Addis Ababa.

          How will they react? It’s too soon to know. They might negotiate, or they might ramp up the pogroms against Tigrayans. Or they might do both at once.

          One thing that is clear is that the Ethiopian state doesn’t seem to have any military forces in reserve that are capable of holding back the TDF advance, much less re-taking Tigray itself.

          And the night is young, unfortunately. There are a lot of players who haven’t even joined the game yet. Sudan, for starters; what’s the plan in Khartoum? How much chaos do they want in Ethiopia?

          It’s not easy to dial up the precise level of chaos you think you want in a neighboring state, but God knows that doesn’t stop half-bright local Machiavellis from trying, over and over. Ask Erdogan about that.

          Then there’s Egypt, which has a much more urgent reason to take up Ethiopia-destabilizing as a hobby: the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which would reduce the White Nile’s flow downstream. Rumors about Egyptian interference have been going around Ethiopian Twitter for a while, and Trump himself lobbed a tactful boulder into the pond:

          Picture of a tweet about Trump saying Egypt should "blow up the dam"

          • LeninsRage [he/him]
            hexagon
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            Then there’s the UAE, which has already made some kind of sleazy deal with Afwerki, and their frenemies in Riyadh...oh, the list is long, very long.

            And one player that was fairly quiet in the early months of this war is now jumping in hard. Remember, we said on RWN way back when the war started that the Oromo, the biggest ethnic group in Ethiopia, have been getting tired of seeing Highland groups, whether Tigrayan or Amhara, act like they owned the country, when the Oromo, at least a quarter of the total population, have so little power.

            Oromia is south of the Amhara highlands, so the Amhara, currently the most powerful group, could end up sandwiched between the Tigrayans to their north and the Oromo to the south, just as Tigray seemed to be sandwiched between Eritrea and Amhara.

            That would be a nightmare scenario for Abiy and his handlers, and it seems to be heading that way. The Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) announced an alliance with the TDF in August 2021.

            The OLA doesn’t represent all Oromo, of course. In a very standard development, Oromo independence activists have split into two groups along the usual lines: take-it-slow moderates of the OLF, and the fight-back-right-now militants of the OLA.

            At the moment, the OLA doesn’t have much of a record for armed insurgency. A lot of Ethiopian Twitter-ers make a show of contempt for the combat power of the OLA, a very different attitude than how they talk about the TDF. Basically it’s “OLA, buncha wimps” vs “TDF, horrible monsters.”

            But like I said, the night is still young, horribly young. Weak insurgent movements can grow strong very quickly when their occupier is distracted elsewhere. And the ENDF is distracted, to put it mildly, in Tigray.

            The Irish used to have a slogan about the situation the OLA is trying to exploit: “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity.” I’d bet the rent there’s some Oromo variant of that take going around at the moment, with “Amharas” replacing “England.”

            And then there’s the Afar Province to the east of Tigray. Afar and Tigrayan have gotten along pretty well for the most part, but there’s clearly been an effort from Addis to get’em fighting each other. And that would be grim, because the Afar are as fierce as the Tigrayans. But to date the Afar (notice how I avoided saying “So far the Afar”? It’s the little touches, you know?) haven’t let themselves be drawn into fighting the Amharas’ battles for them. (Another Irish analogue: “Let English men fight English wars”; I bet there’s a version of that going around Afar coffeehouses.)

            If there were a united Somali state, we’d have to be talking about Somali strategies too. But Somalia is so messed up that AFAIK its only contribution so far is sending jobless mercenaries to fight, willingly or otherwise, with the Eritrean forces.

            So there are many turns left to this bloody wheel. The TDF victory has been heroic. The price Tigrayans have paid for it is horrific, and the destruction they’ve suffered will take decades to repair.

            The tectonic plates are still moving in the Horn, and this round of fighting, for all its heroism and overlooked military significance, won’t settle anything. This round of war may peter out soon, though I doubt it. But the war over domination of Ethiopia, or “what is now Ethiopia,” will run hot for decades.

            —War Nerd

            Ethiopia's Liveuamap if you want to see the situation

              • LeninsRage [he/him]
                hexagon
                ·
                edit-2
                3 years ago

                Ethiopia and Eritrea teamed up to crush the Tigrayan Weird Maoists for complicated historical reasons.

                A lot of Tigrayans in the Ethiopian military defected to the Weird Maoists like immediately, so the Ethiopians unleashed some Amhara ethnic irregular militias on the region as a desperation tactic. The Tigrayan Weird Maoists did Maoist Protracted People's War.

                The Ethiopians got completely owned after about nine months of waiting. It took Western media by surprise. But the Tigrayans suffered a lot of horrific atrocities of which we probably won't learn the full extent for years to come. The Tigrayans are still on the offensive in northern Ethiopia. But overall the real winner was most likely the elites who rule Eritrea.

                • comi [he/him]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  But like, are tplf maoists, or are they government in exile fighting for power? I’m not sure how tplf previous reign can be classified plus idk, wtf happened in chena, there is such conflicting info