Seven Rebel Groups Announced an Alliance to Save Ethiopia on 20 September. Three Days Later, They Had Seized Three Airports and Called It War.

Abstract: On 23 September 2026, forces loyal to the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) seized three federally controlled airports in Ethiopia's Tigray region, Alula Aba Nega Airport in Mekelle, and smaller airports at Aksum and Shire, disarming the federal police guarding them. Ethiopian Airlines suspended all flights to the region. The seizures followed two days after Ethiopian federal drone and air strikes on the southern Tigray town of Alamata killed at least 14 civilians and injured 22 others, two of the strikes hitting secondary schools, according to the town's mayor. Both events followed a 20 September announcement by seven armed groups, the TPLF, the Amhara Fano National Movement, the Oromo Liberation Army, the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front, the Benishangul Peoples' Liberation Movement and the Gumuz Peoples' Democratic Movement, that they had formed an "Ethiopian People's Forces Alliance for Survival" aimed at removing Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. Federal government adviser Getachew Reda described the airport seizures as an "all-out offensive against government positions in Afar and Amhara"; the TPLF's regional government said its forces had been attacked from southern and eastern Tigray and were fighting a defensive war, with TPLF Vice President Amanuel Assefa telling reporters he saw "no possibility of de-escalation now." United States Ambassador to Ethiopia Ervin J. Massinga issued a statement on 24 September condemning the TPLF's "poor decision" to launch what he called "a large-scale offensive" and an "unwinnable fight," and warned that Washington retained tools to impose further sanctions on leaders who derail peace efforts. African Union Commission chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf called for immediate de-escalation and a return to talks. The escalation follows the collapse, in all but name, of the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement that ended Ethiopia's 2020-2022 Tigray war, and it carries a regional dimension the 2020-2022 war did not: Eritrea, which fought alongside Addis Ababa against the TPLF in that war, has spent roughly two years rebuilding ties with the same movement, as Abiy has begun publicly discussing retaking the Eritrean port of Assab.

From alliance announcement to airport seizures in three days

The sequence matters as much as any single event in it. On 20 September, seven armed groups formalised a coalition, the Ethiopian People's Forces Alliance for Survival, that FIKIR Institute had already flagged in August as a re-alignment of former civil-war enemies: Fano, which fought the TPLF in 2022 on the federal government's side of the conflict against Tigray, and the TPLF itself, joined now by the Oromo Liberation Army, the Ogaden National Liberation Front and three smaller regional factions, all committed to the same declared objective of removing Abiy Ahmed's government. Three days later, on 23 September, that alliance's Tigrayan component moved from declaration to action. Tigray Defence Forces took control of Alula Aba Nega Airport in Mekelle, the regional capital, along with airports in the historic city of Aksum and the town of Shire, disarming and, according to some accounts, detaining the small federal police details guarding them. Ethiopian Airlines suspended flights to all three cities "due to the current situation in Tigray region," without further explanation. The airport seizures were not confined to Tigray's interior: both sides describe fighting spreading into the neighbouring Afar and Amhara regions, the same territory disputed since the 2022 peace deal left unresolved which administration controls Western Tigray and other contested zones.

The strikes on Alamata that preceded it

The airport seizures did not happen in a vacuum. Two days earlier, on 22 September, the mayor of Alamata, a town in southern Tigray, said federal forces had carried out more than 21 air and drone strikes on the area, using at least five drones and a fighter jet, with two of the strikes hitting secondary schools directly. Tigrayan authorities said at least 14 people were killed and 22 injured, and that all of the casualties were civilians; the mayor accused federal forces of deliberately targeting the schools. Ethiopia's federal government has not, on available reporting, offered its own account of what the Alamata strikes targeted or why schools were among the sites hit. The strikes came amid months of accusations, tracked by monitors including Tigray's regional education bureau, of a broader pattern of drone strikes on civilian and education infrastructure in the region predating the current escalation. Whatever the precise military rationale, the effect was to harden the position of a TPLF leadership that was, within 48 hours, describing its own airport seizures not as an opening move but as a defensive response to an attack already under way.

Washington's warning, and its limits

The most concrete great-power response so far has come from the United States. In a statement issued through the US Embassy in Addis Ababa on 24 September, Ambassador Ervin J. Massinga said he was "deeply disappointed" by the TPLF leadership's decision to launch what he called a large-scale offensive in Tigray and Afar, describing it as a "poor decision" and an "unwinnable fight" that "does nothing for the people." Massinga explicitly tied the offensive to the TPLF's earlier rejection of African Union-led mediation, saying that "rejecting dialogue sponsored by the AU under President Obasanjo and engaging in an unwinnable fight does nothing for the people," and he warned that Washington retained tools, a reference to sanctions authority the US has previously used against actors on both sides of the 2020-2022 war, to penalise leaders who derail peace efforts. He also cautioned other Ethiopian armed groups against joining the fighting. The statement is notable for what it does not do: it does not name or caution the federal government over the Alamata strikes two days earlier, and it does not address Eritrea's role at all, leaving the United States' public position confined to condemning the party that took the more visible unilateral action, airport seizures, while staying silent on the airstrikes that preceded it and the regional actor most likely to determine whether this stays a Tigray conflict or becomes an Ethiopia-Eritrea one.

A mediator neither side fully accepts

Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo has been the African Union's lead mediator on Ethiopia's northern conflicts since the Pretoria process, and he has continued shuttle efforts through 2026, including a visit to Tigray in August. But the TPLF publicly broke with his process weeks before the current escalation: in a statement issued on 6 September, the TPLF said Obasanjo's mediation "lacks neutrality and concrete substance," complained that his August visit to Tigray came without notice or a defined agenda, and noted that a promise he made in June to return within one or two weeks took him nearly two months to fulfil. The federal government has not publicly disputed Obasanjo's continued role. The result is a mediation architecture that formally exists but that one of the two principal combatants has already, on the record, declared inadequate, a gap Massinga's statement papers over by invoking Obasanjo's authority as though it were uncontested. AU Commission chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf's 23 September call for "immediate de-escalation" and a resumption of talks restates the AU's institutional position without resolving the underlying dispute over who is running the process the TPLF is being asked to return to.

The Eritrea dimension the statements leave out

What separates this escalation from the localised phases of the 2020-2022 war is Eritrea's changed position. During that war, Eritrean forces fought alongside Ethiopia's federal military against the TPLF, one of the conflict's most documented and internationally condemned features. Over the roughly two years since, Asmara has reconciled with the TPLF even as its relationship with Addis Ababa has deteriorated, driven chiefly by Abiy Ahmed's increasingly explicit demands for Ethiopian access to the Red Sea. Abiy called in October 2025 for international mediation on the issue, describing landlocked Ethiopia's lack of sea access as "a matter of survival," and in early September 2026 he said it was only "a matter of time" before Ethiopia regained access to the Eritrean port of Assab, calling its loss after Eritrea's 1993 independence "a mistake." Ethiopian government officials have alleged that the new seven-group rebel alliance has received Eritrean financial backing, an accusation Asmara has repeatedly denied. Regional analysts, including at the International Crisis Group, the Atlantic Council and RANE, have spent months warning that these two dynamics, a reconciled Eritrea-TPLF relationship and an Ethiopian government talking openly about reclaiming Eritrean territory, make renewed fighting along the Tigray-Eritrea-Afar frontier the likeliest trigger for a wider Ethiopia-Eritrea war, one that could in turn draw in a Sudan already three years into its own civil war and Gulf and Red Sea states with direct security interests in the Bab el-Mandeb corridor.

What to watch

Three signals will show whether this stays a contained round of fighting or becomes the wider war regional analysts have been warning about. First, whether Eritrean forces make any visible move, overt or covert, along the northern Tigray frontier; any confirmed Eritrean military involvement, on either side, would be the clearest sign the conflict has outgrown its 2020-2022 shape. Second, whether the federal government responds to the loss of the three airports with further air and drone strikes of the kind that hit Alamata, which would suggest Addis Ababa intends to answer a ground-force setback with the aerial capability it retains and Tigray does not. Third, whether any government beyond the United States, the European Union, Gulf states with Red Sea security interests, or African Union member states beyond the Commission itself, issues its own statement or takes its own action, since a response limited to Washington and the AU's own chairperson, two and a half years after the Pretoria Agreement supposedly settled this conflict, would itself be a sign of how little diplomatic capital remains invested in preventing its return.

Policy implications

For Ethiopia's federal government, the airport seizures are the clearest evidence yet that the Pretoria Agreement's political track, an interim administration ahead of elections, has been superseded on the ground by the same rival Tigrayan authority the deal was meant to sideline, and that the seven-group alliance announced on 20 September gives that authority allies well beyond Tigray's borders. For the TPLF, the Alamata strikes have supplied a justification for military action that a rejected mediation process could not, but Massinga's sanctions warning signals that Washington is prepared to treat renewed offensive action, whatever its stated justification, as attributable to Mekelle rather than Addis Ababa. For the African Union, a mediator publicly disavowed by one side while nominally still endorsed by the United States exposes the institutional weakness of a peace process that has produced statements of concern faster than it has produced enforceable terms. For the wider Horn of Africa, the Eritrea dimension is the one no official statement so far has addressed directly: a war that reopens the Tigray-Eritrea frontier at the same moment Ethiopia's prime minister is publicly discussing reclaiming Eritrean port territory is a materially different and more dangerous conflict than the one the Pretoria Agreement was negotiated to end, and the silence of both the US and AU statements on that connection suggests neither institution has yet decided how to address it.