Ethiopia's Army Chief Accused Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt of Arming the Rebels Fighting Him. A Week Later, All Three Sat Down Together in Egypt, and Somalia Sat Down With Them.

Abstract: Egypt hosted a four-way summit in the coastal city of New Alamein on 4 October, bringing together President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, Sudan's Sovereign Council Chairman Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud on the sidelines of the African Union's eighth Mid-Year Coordination Meeting and the inaugural Alamein Africa Business Forum. The Egyptian presidency framed the meeting as routine "consultation and coordination about regional issues of mutual concern," language consistent with past periodic forums on the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Nile Basin. What makes this convening different is its guest list set against the calendar: Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt are precisely the three governments Ethiopia's Chief of the General Staff, Field Marshal Berhanu Jula, publicly accused on 27 September of being unable to sustain the Tigray-led rebel alliance fighting Addis Ababa's forces without being "pushed, supported and supplied" by them, an accusation FIKIR Institute examined in detail at the time. All three governments denied the claim individually within 48 hours. A week later, with Eritrea having since severed all remaining diplomatic ties with Ethiopia on 1 October, the same three sat down together in Egypt, joined this time by Somalia, the one government in the room with its own defence relationship with Addis Ababa. The gathering followed, by four days, a meeting in Addis Ababa between Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and Hassan Sheikh Mohamud that a senior diplomatic source described as Abiy's own idea, reported by regional outlets as an attempt to have Somalia carry Ethiopia's case into a forum Addis Ababa itself was not invited to.

A guest list that answers an accusation

Egypt's presidency announced the New Alamein summit as part of a broader diplomatic calendar tied to the AU's Mid-Year Coordination Meeting, a gathering the African Union's own press office said would bring together heads of state and government, the AU Commission leadership under Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, and the chairpersons of Africa's regional economic communities to advance Agenda 2063 priorities, hosted this year by President Sisi and opened alongside AU Chairperson and Burundian President Évariste Ndayishimiye. Set against that institutional backdrop, the standalone four-way meeting among Sisi, Afwerki, Burhan and Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was reported separately by Ahram Online, Arab News, Garowe Online and Dawan Africa as a deliberate addition to the schedule, distinct from the wider AU gathering. None of the four governments' own statements acknowledged the coincidence directly, but the composition is difficult to read as accidental: Eritrea and Sudan are two of the three governments Berhanu Jula named on 27 September, and Egypt is the third, now hosting the other two on its own soil with Somalia, a country Ethiopian forces still operate inside under the AU's AUSSOM mission, invited to join them.

The bilateral reassurances that preceded the main event

Before the four leaders sat down together, Sisi held separate bilateral meetings with Afwerki and with Hassan Sheikh Mohamud on 3 October, each reported in similar but distinct language. With Afwerki, Sisi reaffirmed Egypt's "full support for Eritrea's security and stability" and Cairo's backing for Eritrea's sovereignty and territorial integrity, categorically rejecting, in his own characterisation, any violation of state sovereignty or interference in internal affairs as a breach of international law and the African Union's Constitutive Act, according to Ahram Online and Egypt's state information service. Afwerki, for his part, said Egypt and Eritrea shared broad agreement on the need to respect state sovereignty and refrain from interference in neighbours' internal affairs, a formulation that, read against Eritrea's 1 October rupture with Ethiopia, reads as mutual validation of each government's own grievance against Addis Ababa. With Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, Sisi reaffirmed Cairo's support for Somalia's "sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity" and for Somalia's government institutions, security and stability, while stressing, according to Daily News Egypt and Somali Guardian, the importance of national understanding among Somalia's political actors, a reference to Mogadishu's own domestic strain as Turkish-backed federal forces and militia loyal to an ousted South West State governor have clashed repeatedly around Baidoa in recent weeks. The two leaders also discussed the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, waters in which Egypt has steadily expanded its security role in Somalia, including through its participation in AUSSOM.

Egypt's foreign minister answers the accusation directly

A day before the summit, Egypt's Foreign Minister, Badr Abdelatty, addressed Berhanu Jula's accusation in the most direct terms any of the three named governments had yet used. "We have absolutely nothing to do with what is happening inside Ethiopia," Abdelatty said, according to EgyptToday, arguing that Ethiopia's statements shifting blame onto external parties were a clear attempt to deflect attention from the country's domestic crises. An Egyptian source separately told reporters that Addis Ababa's accusations were aimed at escaping the consequences of its own failure to fulfil its commitments under the 2022 Pretoria peace agreement that ended the 2020-2022 Tigray war, an argument that inverts Ethiopia's own framing of the current conflict's origins. Abdelatty did not limit his remarks to the TPLF accusation: he separately declared that negotiations with Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam had reached a dead end, reaffirming Egypt's right to self-defence over what Cairo regards as an existential threat to its Nile water share, a dispute FIKIR Institute has previously covered in detail, including Egypt's case to the UN Security Council built on Ethiopia's own water minister describing the dam as built to "control" the Nile. The juxtaposition, a denial of interference in Ethiopia's internal war delivered in the same set of remarks as a declaration that the two countries' separate water dispute has reached an impasse, leaves Cairo's relationship with Addis Ababa estranged on two fronts simultaneously, even as Abdelatty frames Egypt's posture as one of non-interference.

Somalia's dilemma: courted from both directions

What distinguishes this summit from the dueling accusations and denials FIKIR Institute tracked through late September is Somalia's presence at the table. Four days before the New Alamein meeting, on 29 September, Abiy Ahmed met Hassan Sheikh Mohamud in Addis Ababa, a meeting a senior diplomatic source described to Dawan Africa as Abiy's own idea, focused ostensibly on bilateral relations and the security situation in both countries. Wire and regional reporting on the same meeting characterised it as an attempt by Abiy to secure Somalia's mediation, or at minimum its neutrality, ahead of a gathering where Ethiopia itself would not be present but would certainly be discussed; some reporting suggested any such mediation, or Somalia's decision to stay out of an Egypt-Sudan-Eritrea alignment, was expected to come conditional on continued support from Ethiopian forces still deployed in Somalia's South West State, Jubaland and Hirshabelle for federal operations against armed opposition groups beyond al-Shabab. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's own diplomatic circuit in the days before New Alamein underscores how contested his position has become: he met Ethiopia's Abiy in Addis Ababa on Tuesday, Djibouti's Ismail Omar Guelleh in Djibouti City the following day, and then travelled on to Egypt, a sequence Somali Guardian described as Mogadishu testing its regional alliances in real time. Separate commentary, including from Horn Observer, has framed Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's turn toward rapprochement with Ethiopia earlier this year, which included a proposal to let Ethiopian forces rejoin AUSSOM and grant the Ethiopian navy access to Somali waters, as the source of friction with Eritrea and Egypt, Somalia's more traditional regional patrons, a friction this week's summit did nothing to resolve and arguably put on public display.

Sudan brings its own war, and its own version of the same accusation

Sudan's Burhan arrived in New Alamein carrying a conflict of his own. At the summit, Burhan blamed the Rapid Support Forces for Sudan's civil war and said the Sudanese army remained committed to a political transition, a framing consistent with Khartoum's position throughout the conflict. Sudan's presence alongside Eritrea and Egypt is itself a pointed answer to Berhanu Jula's late-September accusation: Sudan's armed forces had already called that accusation baseless, countering that it is Ethiopian territory, not Sudanese, being used to train and arm the RSF and launch drone strikes into Sudan, as FIKIR Institute reported on 29 September. That counter-accusation has its own specific texture: Abdelatty al-Faki, governor of Sudan's Kurmuk province, has said directly that "the forces that attacked Kurmuk set out from inside Ethiopian territory and are supported by Ethiopia," an allegation Ethiopia denies. The New Alamein summit did not resolve which government's account of cross-border militia support is accurate, Ethiopia's claim about Sudanese backing for the TPLF-led alliance or Sudan's claim about Ethiopian backing for the RSF, but it did visibly align Sudan with the two other governments Ethiopia has named, at the exact moment Ethiopia's own would-be interlocutor, Somalia, was in the room with them.

What the summit did not produce

As of this writing, none of the outlets that reported the New Alamein summit's convening, Ahram Online, Arab News, Garowe Online, Daily News Egypt, Dawan Africa or Saudi Gazette among them, had published the text of a joint statement or communique from the four-way meeting itself, as distinct from the bilateral read-outs issued ahead of it. The absence of a published outcome leaves open whether Sunday's gathering produced any formal mechanism, a standing consultative body, a joint position on Ethiopia, or merely a photograph of four leaders who each have an active dispute with Addis Ababa sitting at the same table. That distinction, consultation versus alignment, is the one FIKIR Institute's analysis of Eritrea's rupture with Ethiopia, which also documented the African Union's own call for restraint, flagged as the question still unanswered; this summit does not resolve it, but it sharpens the stakes, since a four-way forum that produces no joint statement and one that produces a standing coordination mechanism aimed at Addis Ababa would mean very different things for Ethiopia's position in the region.

What to watch

Three signals will show whether New Alamein marks a one-off consultation or the start of a standing bloc. First, whether Egypt, Eritrea, Sudan or Somalia publish any joint statement or communique from the four-way meeting in the days after 4 October, and if so, whether its language names Ethiopia directly or confines itself to the same generic "regional issues of mutual concern" framing Egypt's presidency used beforehand. Second, whether Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's attendance translates into any public statement from Mogadishu distancing itself from, or aligning with, the positions Egypt, Eritrea and Sudan have each taken against Ethiopia's accusations, given that Somalia alone among the four has an active security partnership with Addis Ababa that the other three do not. Third, whether Ethiopia's government responds to the summit at all, given that Addis Ababa was not a participant in a gathering substantially about disputes in which it is the common denominator, and whether any response names Somalia's presence specifically as a strain on the Ethiopia-Somalia security relationship Abiy Ahmed sought to reinforce four days earlier.

Policy implications

For Ethiopia, a summit bringing together the three governments its own army chief accused of arming the rebellion against it, convened without Addis Ababa present and alongside the one regional partner, Somalia, Ethiopia had just tried to secure as an interlocutor, is a diplomatic setback regardless of whether the meeting produces a formal joint position; the optics alone confirm the isolation Berhanu Jula's accusation implicitly described, whether or not the accusation's substance is ever proven. For Egypt, hosting Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia together while separately declaring the GERD negotiations a dead end lets Cairo pursue two tracks at once, positioning itself as a convening power for Ethiopia's regional disputes while escalating its own bilateral one, a combination that strengthens Egypt's leverage only if the summit produces visible coordination rather than a one-day photograph. For Somalia, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's attendance after meeting Abiy Ahmed days earlier confirms Mogadishu's position as the swing actor in this alignment: a government courted by Addis Ababa for mediation and by Cairo, Asmara and Khartoum for solidarity cannot indefinitely do both, and the choice it eventually makes, explicit or by default, will shape whether Ethiopia retains any regional partner willing to be seen with its government. For Sudan, arriving in New Alamein already locked in its own cross-accusation with Ethiopia over RSF support adds a fourth active bilateral dispute, after Egypt's GERD dispute and Eritrea's September rupture, in which Addis Ababa is simultaneously disputing basic facts with a neighbouring government, a pattern FIKIR Institute has tracked compounding rather than resolving since late September.