By Getachew Temare, Lawyer, Human Rights Defender and Peacebuilder
Note: this is from Getachew’s Twitter feed: @getachew_temare
Let’s set the record straight. It has been a full month since a full blown war started in Tigray. In just weeks, Debretsion Gebremichael’s TPLF faction went from dominating #Tigray to losing much of its territorial, military political and diplomatic leverage. How did this happen?
A month ago, it controlled Tigray’s principal cities and institutions, commanded an organized army and retained bargaining power under the wounded Pretoria Agreement. Public resentment was growing, but the faction still possessed considerable strategic leverage.
Three interconnected factors explain the extraordinary reversal: geopolitical miscalculations, military failures and the withdrawal of popular consent. The TPLF leadership appears to have misunderstood all three, with consequences that reinforced one another.
The alliance’s geopolitical origins deserve scrutiny. Tsimdo developed amid reported Eritrean involvement since 2025 or even before. But it started to get its current form in the meeting involving Ethiopian opposition figures in Port Sudan and Eritrean representatives in May 2026. This convergence brought together actors with deeply contradictory histories and objectives.
In my assessment, Tsimdo failed to capture the imagination of Tigrayans. The political establishment then embraced a more ambitious narrative: a grand alliance of Ethiopian armed movements. But repackaging an unpopular project could not resolve its contradictions.
On September 20, seven groups announced the Alliance for Survival, including the TPLF, Fano and the OLA. Former adversaries promised to overthrow Abiy Ahmed’s government. Yet hostility toward a common enemy does not constitute a coherent political or military strategy.Show more
The Eritrean dimension was particularly consequential. The TPLF moved toward an alignment involving the very regime whose forces had committed grave atrocities in Tigray. Hostility toward Addis Ababa could not erase this history or make the alliance politically credible.
Reports on October 7–8 described Eritrean troops penetrating Tigray as far as Adigrat and Idaga Hamus before subsequently withdrawing. Although some operational details remain disputed, the developments exposed the dangerous regional implications of the confrontation.
Diplomatically, the TPLF also squandered its distinctive position. Previously a governing authority and Pretoria signatory, it joined an armed coalition pursuing regime change. Its international image became increasingly difficult to distinguish from Fano and the OLA.
The alliance’s sweeping ambitions risked alarming international actors already fearful of another devastating Ethiopian and regional war. The extraordinary gap between declarations of imminent political transformation and actual military capacity soon became apparent.
Militarily, the faction underestimated federal advantages in airpower, mechanized forces and manpower. It also misjudged its own cohesion, including the significance of the Tigray Peace Force, whose fighters joined federal operations against their former comrades.
The turning points came rapidly: renewed fighting from September 23, the withdrawal from Mekelle around October 3–4, further losses across major towns, and the establishment of a six-month federal caretaker administration on October 16.
The loss of Tigrays control does not mean the war is over. The TPLF retains the potential to sustain an insurgency. But the ability to inflict insecurity is fundamentally different from possessing the institutional and political foundations required to govern Tigray.
The most consequential factor remains the least discussed: popular consent. Years of authoritarian practices, coercive recruitment, factional struggles and post-Pretoria failures had corroded the TPLF’s social foundations long before the present offensive.
In June, I examined the TPLF’s wartime proclamation, exposing its coercive mobilization provisions and restrictions on dissent. Its legal architecture illustrated a leadership increasingly prepared to substitute compulsion for political persuasion.
My assessment is that the extraordinary withdrawal of public willingness to fight for the TPLF accelerated its reversal. This is more than war fatigue. It signals a deeper rupture between the survival of a political organization and the aspirations of Tigrayan society.
Crucially, rejecting another TPLF war does not mean embracing Abiy Ahmed. Popular opposition to one political authority does not automatically confer legitimacy upon another. Tigrayans can reject both internal authoritarianism and external domination.
Meanwhile, the TPLF’s established media, intellectual, military and diaspora networks appear caught in disbelief. Rather than confronting the magnitude of the reversal, influential voices continue to rationalize setbacks through selective narratives and new media megaphones.
What is being challenged is not merely the TPLF’s battlefield position, but its longstanding presumption that its survival is synonymous with Tigray’s survival. A political organization cannot indefinitely appropriate the sacrifices and collective identity of an entire society.
The historical irony is profound. A faction that effectively governed Tigray gambled on overthrowing Ethiopia’s government and rapidly forfeited much of its own governing authority. The future of Tigray must belong to its people, not to competing armed monopolies.
