Source: Ethiopia Insight 22 October, 2026
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A campaign against the TPLF undermined Tigray’s unity while its people’s urgent needs went unmet.
Tigray’s struggle is not a dispute between TPLF elites and the Prosperity Party, nor is it tribal politics. It is a popular cause. No faction can claim to defend it while subordinating the region’s interests to its own political ambitions.
After the TPLF withdrew from Mekelle on 3 October, the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) and the Tigray Peace Force (TPF), aligned with former ENDF chief of staff Tsadkan Gebretensae, advanced through the region, capturing most major towns. TPLF-led forces retreated toward rural and mountainous areas as federal officials prepared to re-establish direct control over Tigray.
The advance has brought the central contradiction into sharp focus: a faction that sought to remake Tigray by weakening the TPLF is now advancing alongside the federal forces the Tigrayan resistance was formed to oppose.
Tigray has endured invasion, devastation, displacement, siege, dehumanization, and enormous loss. The genocide inflicted physical destruction and left deep collective trauma, straining the solidarity on which Tigrayans had long relied. The November 2022 Pretoria Agreement offered a way out. People at home and abroad accepted it as Plan A, deferring demands for justice and suspending some war-crimes documentation in the hope that diplomacy could secure a lasting peace.
The years since have brought neither the promised recovery nor the political unity needed to achieve it. Tsadkan and his allies, who presented themselves as reformers capable of taking Tigray beyond the TPLF, helped deepen those divisions. Their political opportunism weakened the party and the institutions associated with the resistance while leaving the population’s most pressing problems unresolved.
Weakening Defenses
Within the Interim Administration led by Getachew Reda, Tsadkan Gebretinsae’s faction made dismantling the TPLF a central objective. The campaign extended beyond challenging the party’s leadership or demanding internal reform. It sought to displace the political outlook and historical narrative through which the TPLF had mobilized Tigrayans.
Opposition to the TPLF brought together people with different grievances but no common answer to Tigray’s predicament. Old disputes, including those dating to the Haile Selassie and Derg eras, returned to the fore. Tsadkan’s allies cultivated provincial loyalties, or awrajawinet, and sought political support in Southern and Southeastern Tigray, areas they hoped to draw toward the Prosperity Party.
A political geography took shape in which Southern, Eastern, and Southeastern Tigray were treated as receptive to change, while Shire, Adwa, and Axum were associated with resistance to it. Southern Tigray became contested ground among the Prosperity Party, the TPLF, and the Interim Administration. Armed groups were also established in Afar to target the TPLF, the Tigray Defense Forces (TDF), and Tigray’s regional leadership. The mobilization deepened existing grievances and political fragmentation, helping create conditions in which youths from these areas were recruited into armed groups in Afar.
The TPLF had ample reason to face criticism over maladministration and corruption. But weakening the principal political and military structures through which Tigray had defended itself, without securing a credible alternative, left the region more vulnerable to federal encroachment.
The return of internally displaced Tigrayans and refugees from Sudan should have been the foremost test of the post-Pretoria settlement. People driven from their homes needed security, services, and a route back. Those obligations could not reasonably be postponed while political elites pursued other ambitions.
Yet access to the sea became a growing concern in Tigray’s political debate, aligning regional interests with the federal government’s increasingly confrontational agenda. Tsadkan embraced the argument for sea access despite its implications for Eritrean sovereignty and the risk of another war.
He did so even as Tigray struggled to recover from a war that had devastated its communities and its leaders became entangled in a geopolitical project that risked exposing the region to another war. The return of displaced people, restoration of services, and pursuit of justice received less political attention than the struggle over who would govern Tigray and how it might support Addis Ababa’s regional ambitions.
Tigray had already paid an enormous price in the previous war. Its recovery required room to determine its own priorities, not another conflict in which its people would bear the costs of decisions made elsewhere.
Rewriting the Struggle
The campaign against the TPLF was fought through narratives as well as political organization. Media platforms associated with Tsadkan’s allies concentrated on the party’s alleged failures and sought to detach Tigrayans from the movement that had led their resistance. The campaign also exploited postwar regret and trauma, as well as divisions over Tigray’s political future and the question of self-determination.
Some of the criticism resonated for good reason. Young people had died in vast numbers, leaders deserved scrutiny—including Lt. Gen. Tsadkan, who was credited with playing a key role in devising the TDF’s battle strategy—and the population had every right to demand peace. But calls for reform increasingly became arguments against the resistance itself. Young people were told they should not die for 80-year-old leaders or serve as cannon fodder. The TPLF was accused of prolonging the war to preserve its power and, in some accounts, of bearing responsibility for the suffering inflicted on Tigray.
The effect was to redirect public anger. The conduct of Tigray’s leaders became the focus, while the responsibility of the forces that invaded and devastated the region faded from view. Tigray’s quest for self-determination was forgotten; individual figures and parties, rather than the cause itself, came to dominate politics. Genuine grievances were used to weaken the political cohesion needed to confront the consequences of that invasion.
Tsadkan’s own history makes his subsequent position difficult to separate from the wider argument. He was a senior military figure in November 2020, when the decision was taken to strike the Northern Command amid warnings of an impending attack by joint Ethiopian and Eritrean forces. During the war, the BBC described him as “Ethiopia’s Tigray rebel mastermind.” His later campaign against the TPLF raises questions about how he came to understand the struggle he had helped lead.
His split from the TPLF in 2001, following the Ethio-Eritrean War and Meles Zenawi’s decision not to capture Asmara, is also relevant. That experience shaped Tsadkan’s outlook and left a lasting sense of unfinished business. The atrocities committed by Eritrean forces during the recent war revived similar feelings among Tigrayans who regretted the earlier decision.
But regret over Asmara can lead to a dangerous conclusion: that Tigray should join a future Ethiopian war against Eritrea to secure sea access, or risk giving Abiy Ahmed a pretext to attack it. That would place Tigray’s security at the service of Addis Ababa’s ambitions.
The “Stop Conscription” campaign revealed a related imbalance. Opposition to forced recruitment is legitimate, but the campaign focused on Tigray’s defensive mobilization while giving far less comparable attention to underage recruitment and forced drafting by the Ethiopian National Defense Force. In the circumstances, its political effect was to undermine the TPLF and TDF at a time when Tigray’s security remained unresolved.
The Cost
The result was a weakened TDF, declining recruitment and morale, significant desertion, and a fractured political landscape that left Tigray increasingly vulnerable to federal control. Provincial grievances and competing administrations widened the divisions that federal forces have now exploited.
Western Tigray remains occupied, displaced people remain unable to return home, and refugees are still stranded in Sudan. The commitments made at Pretoria remain unfulfilled, while the TPLF’s loss of Mekelle and the advance of federal forces mark a further erosion of Tigray’s political and military autonomy.
Tsadkan’s defenders argue that he was trying to reform an authoritarian and corrupt TPLF. The need for reform was real. But reform did not require dismantling Tigray’s defences, especially while external threats continued to endanger its survival. Nor did the TPLF’s failures justify aligning with forces responsible for the devastation of the region.
The alternative was not to leave the TPLF beyond criticism. It was to pursue reform without destroying the capacity for collective defense, unite political forces around implementing Pretoria, and make the return of displaced people and refugees a central measure of progress. Federal violations required scrutiny alongside the TPLF’s failings. Tigray also needed a position on Eritrea and the wider region grounded in its own security, rather than in Addis Ababa’s ambitions.
Mekete III
The renewed war has brought the consequences into sharper focus. Tigrayans aligned with Tsadkan are participating in military operations alongside the Ethiopian army against Tigray. For many Tigrayans, this crosses a line that ordinary disputes over leadership or reform cannot explain away.
The renewed war has already brought air strikes, artillery exchanges, and a federal advance across much of Tigray. Reported air strikes in Adwa and Sheraro killed at least 17 people in early October, while fighting continued near the Tekeze River and federal forces pushed north to the Eritrean border. Reports put the number of air strikes during the previous two-year war at 65, excluding attacks on military establishments, and report more than 70 air attacks in the renewed fighting.
Tsadkan and his associates have aligned themselves with forces responsible for grave crimes against Tigray. Their campaign against the TPLF and the institutions associated with the resistance has coincided with renewed federal military action and the recapture of Mekelle.
The post-Pretoria period has thus become another chapter in Tigray’s resistance—“Mekete III”: a renewed struggle to defend Tigray’s security, advance self-determination, and secure a future in which genocide can never again be inflicted on its people.
If politics, law, and diplomacy cannot secure peace or resolve Tigray’s fundamental questions, the right to collective self-defense remains. Any such course must rest on the will of the people and legitimate institutions, rather than on a faction claiming an exclusive mandate. Pretoria offered a path toward peace; it did not authorize the installation of a Prosperity Party surrogate or give any organization an indefinite right to rule.
Tigray needs to recover the unity and political agency eroded since the agreement. That means allowing genuine debate over leadership and past mistakes without surrendering the region’s security or leaving its future to competing elites. It also means dismantling cultivated hostility and pursuing reconciliation with Afar, Amhara, Eritrea, and Sudan, whose peoples will remain Tigray’s neighbours regardless of who holds power.
The struggle continues. It is not about which party or which Tigrayan takes office in Mekelle, but about the aspiration for a free and liberated Tigray, securing its future, and ensuring that genocide is never inflicted upon Tigray again. The legitimacy of any party or political force will depend on its commitment to these causes.
