Witnesses in a Tigray Town Said They Recognized the Soldiers by Their Uniforms. Hours Later, Ethiopia Ordered Every Foreign Army on Its Soil to Leave — Its Own Drones Had Already Opened Fire on Them.

Abstract: Two witnesses told Reuters they saw dozens of Eritrean soldiers pass through Adigrat, a Tigray town roughly 25 kilometres south of the Eritrean border that had not previously seen fighting in the current conflict, in two trucks on the morning of 7 October, identifiable by their off-white camouflage uniforms. Reuters could not independently verify the account. The same day, the conflict-monitoring group ACLED reported that Eritrean forces had crossed the border at Zelambesa and advanced along the Adigrat–Idaga Hamus route, and that Ethiopian drones struck an Eritrean column near the village of Guada; AFP separately placed troops in Adigrat, with some continuing south toward Mekelle. Ethiopia's government communications minister, Enatalem Melese, responded by demanding that "all foreign military forces operating within our sovereign territory" withdraw immediately, naming Eritrean forces specifically. Eritrea's information minister, Yemane Gebremeskel, denied Eritrean troops were in Adigrat and accused Ethiopia of fabricating a pretext for war, without directly denying that any forces had crossed the border elsewhere. The reports land six days after Ethiopia closed its embassy in Asmara and expelled ten Eritrean diplomats, a rupture Eritrea answered within hours by severing all remaining ties, and they convert a diplomatic break this outlet has already covered into what independent analysts now describe as the first instance of direct Ethiopian-Eritrean military contact on Ethiopian soil since the current war widened on 23 September.

Two trucks in a town that had stayed out of the war

Reuters reported that two witnesses, speaking on condition of anonymity because of security concerns, said they saw dozens of Eritrean soldiers riding through Adigrat in two trucks on the morning of Wednesday, 7 October. Adigrat, a town in Tigray about 25 kilometres south of the Eritrean border, had not experienced clashes during the current phase of the conflict, which makes the sighting, if accurate, a marker of how far the war's geography has shifted rather than a continuation of existing front lines. The witnesses said they recognised the soldiers as Eritrean by their off-white camouflage uniforms, distinct from Ethiopian federal army dress; a third Adigrat resident who was away from the town at the time told Reuters that family members had separately described seeing Eritrean troops. Reuters said it could not independently verify any of the accounts, and that spokespeople for Ethiopia's government and for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

A border crossing and a drone strike ACLED says it tracked

ACLED's East Africa analyst, Jalale Getachew Birru, reported a more specific sequence the same day: that Eritrean forces crossed the border at Zelambesa, the formal border town on the main road linking the two countries, and advanced along the route connecting Adigrat to Idaga Hamus, further south inside Tigray. Ethiopian National Defence Force drones, ACLED said, struck an Eritrean column near the village of Guada as it travelled by vehicle toward Idaga Hamus. AFP, citing separate sources, placed Eritrean troops in Adigrat itself, roughly 40 kilometres by road south of the border, and reported that some were continuing south in the direction of Mekelle, the Tigrayan regional capital that federal forces and allied Tigray Peace Force fighters had retaken on 5 October after the Tigray People's Liberation Front withdrew and relocated its administration, as this outlet reported at the time. None of the figures reported, troop numbers, casualties from the reported drone strike, or the extent of Eritrean advance, has been independently confirmed by a government on either side.

Ethiopia's answer: every foreign army, leave now

Ethiopia's government communications minister, Enatalem Melese, responded on 7 October by declaring that "all foreign military forces operating within our sovereign territory must withdraw immediately," a statement that named Eritrean forces in Tigray specifically rather than referring only to unspecified foreign fighters, according to Bloomberg, The Reporter Ethiopia and The New Arab. The demand echoes, in sharper form, a letter Ethiopia's foreign minister, Gedion Timothewos, sent his Eritrean counterpart, Osman Saleh Mohammed, on 7 February, which accused Eritrean forces of occupying Ethiopian territory along their shared border "for an extended period" and called the occupation "not just provocations but acts of outright aggression," while still offering dialogue if Eritrea respected Ethiopia's territorial integrity. Eight months separate that letter from this week's demand, and the difference between them is that the February letter described a standing border occupation, while October's statement responds to witnessed and reported troop movement deep inside Tigray itself, tens of kilometres past the border Eritrea was already accused of occupying.

Asmara's denial that does not quite deny everything

Eritrea's information minister, Yemane Gebremeskel, denied specifically that Eritrean forces were in Adigrat, and accused Ethiopia's government of constructing a "fallacious narrative of 'self-defense'" to manufacture a justification for what he called a war of aggression against Eritrea, according to Reuters and the Somali Guardian. What his statement did not do, on the accounts reviewed for this analysis, is issue a blanket denial that any Eritrean soldier had crossed into Ethiopian territory anywhere along the border; it addressed Adigrat specifically and framed the broader allegation as political rather than addressing the Zelambesa crossing or the Guada drone strike ACLED separately reported. That distinction, between denying a named location and denying a border crossing in general, is the kind of gap independent analysts flagged as significant rather than incidental.

A rupture seven days old becomes a battlefield

This week's reports do not arrive in isolation. Ethiopia's foreign ministry closed its embassy in Asmara and declared ten Eritrean diplomats in Addis Ababa, some accredited to the African Union, persona non grata on 1 October, citing unspecified "acts of hostility and belligerence" it said breached the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, and gave the diplomats 48 hours to leave, as FIKIR Institute reported at the time. Eritrea's foreign ministry answered within hours, calling the move "astounding" and announcing on social media that Asmara "has no option but to reciprocate in kind and sever all diplomatic ties ... with all the negative corollaries that this entails," while accusing Addis Ababa of hosting, training and arming Eritrean opposition groups and of waging war to secure Red Sea access. A diplomatic rupture of that speed and scale, the sharpest between the two governments since their 2018 rapprochement, left little room between words and the battlefield; six days later, according to the reporting reviewed here, soldiers rather than diplomats were reportedly crossing the same border.

The Afar claim no one has verified, and a road no one has confirmed is threatened

A second, separate allegation has run alongside the Adigrat and Zelambesa reports without being resolved by them. Haji Awol Arba, the Afar regional chief administrator, told Al Jazeera that Eritrean soldiers had crossed into the Afar region to support the rebel alliance's offensive there, a claim Reuters said it could not confirm and that describes a different region from the Tigray sightings this week. Kulu Media separately reported, and was unable to verify, an allegation that Eritrean forces were manoeuvring to cut the road linking Djibouti and Eritrea, a route whose disruption would carry logistical consequences well beyond the immediate battlefield. Neither claim has independent confirmation, and both illustrate how much of the current picture, in Tigray, in Afar, and along the roads that connect them to Eritrea and Djibouti, rests on local and partisan sourcing that Reuters, AFP and ACLED have each, in their own reporting, declined to fully vouch for.

Why analysts say this reads as a different war now

Independent assessments published the same day argue the distinction matters regardless of exactly how many soldiers crossed where. Critical Threats, the American Enterprise Institute project that tracks the conflict weekly, has noted that Eritrea never fully withdrew its forces from Tigray after the 2020-2022 war, has conducted a nationwide military mobilisation since early 2025, and has maintained an enhanced military posture on the Eritrea-Ethiopia border since that time, while flagging that high-level contacts between Eritrean officials and the Tigray People's Liberation Front have continued since at least January 2025, when Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki is reported to have personally pledged to back the TPLF in the event of renewed conflict with Ethiopia's federal government. A strategic assessment published the same day argued that if the Eritrean presence in Tigray is confirmed and sustained, the conflict is no longer accurately described as an Ethiopian civil war with foreign sponsors on its margins; it becomes an interstate confrontation layered directly on top of a multi-front domestic insurgency, with Ethiopia's own federal government having, for the first time in this round of fighting, treated Eritrean troop presence as established fact rather than disputed allegation in its own public demand for withdrawal.

What to watch

Three signals will show whether 7 October marks a durable escalation or a contested moment that recedes once claims are tested. First, whether any government, international monitor or independent journalist produces verifiable evidence, satellite imagery, captured equipment, or on-the-ground access, confirming either the Adigrat sighting, the Zelambesa crossing, or the reported drone strike at Guada, none of which Reuters, AFP or ACLED has been able to independently verify as of this writing. Second, whether Ethiopia follows Enatalem Melese's withdrawal demand with any formal diplomatic or multilateral step, a complaint to the African Union or United Nations Security Council, for instance, that would convert a government minister's statement into a documented interstate dispute. Third, whether fighting involving Ethiopian and Eritrean forces directly, rather than Ethiopian forces against the Tigrayan-led rebel alliance alone, is reported again in the days ahead, which would answer more directly than any statement could whether 7 October was an isolated incursion or the opening exchange of a wider Ethiopia-Eritrea confrontation.

Policy implications

For Ethiopia, treating Eritrean troop presence in Tigray as established fact in an official government statement, rather than as a disputed claim, raises the diplomatic and military stakes of its northern war considerably; a demand for immediate withdrawal that Eritrea does not meet leaves Addis Ababa to decide whether to escalate further against a neighbour with which it has now severed all diplomatic contact. For Eritrea, a denial confined to a single named town, Adigrat, without a broader denial covering the Zelambesa crossing or the Afar allegations, leaves Asmara's public position narrower than the scope of what it is being accused of, a gap that will invite continued scrutiny regardless of whether Asmara intends it as a deliberate hedge. For the African Union and other international actors, a reported direct military engagement between the drones of one member state and the ground forces of another, on the first state's own sovereign territory, tests whether existing regional mechanisms can intervene before the current Tigray-Amhara-Afar insurgency and a separate Ethiopia-Eritrea interstate dispute fully merge into a single, harder-to-resolve regional war. For outside powers and regional neighbours already watching Ethiopia's reported troop withdrawal from Somalia and its rejection of the El Alamein Declaration's Red Sea provisions, this week's reports add a live interstate military dimension to a set of crises this outlet has so far tracked mainly as diplomatic and domestic.