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.

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