ADDIS ABABA, Sept. 9 (Reuters) – Ethiopia said on Thursday that rebel forces in the Tigray region had been defeated in the adjacent Afar region and withdrew, but Tigrayan forces said they had only moved troops to neighbor Amhara for an offensive there.
“The TPLF force has left Afar (region),” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Dina Mufti told reporters at a news conference in Addis Ababa.
“According to military information, they were defeated and left,” he said.
Tigrayan spokesman Getachew Reda, speaking to Reuters by satellite phone from an undisclosed location, said Ethiopian authorities had only noticed that Tigrayan forces had withdrawn.
“We were not defeated. There was no fighting at a distance, so we made troop movements from there to the highlands of the contiguous region of Amhara,” he said.
Neither claim could be verified immediately.
The Ethiopian military spokesman could not be reached for comment on Tigrayan’s version of events. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s spokeswoman told a news conference in Addis Ababa on Thursday that Tigrinya forces had been “defeated” in the afar region by the region’s military and militia forces, which she said collaborated. closely and that they caused serious losses to the tigraianas forces.
In November, war broke out in Tigray between federal troops and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which ruled Ethiopia for three decades but was then the ruling party in the region. Thousands have been killed and more than 2 million have been forced to flee their homes.
In July, after the TPLF recaptured the regional capital of Mekelle and seized most of Tigray, its forces advanced into the Afar and Amhara regions, marking an expansion of the conflict into areas. which until now had not been touched. Read more
Since then, the government estimates that about 450,000 people have fled the fighting in these two regions. Read more
Addis Ababa editorial reports; Additional reports and writing by Maggie Fick; Editing by Kevin Liffey, Jon Boyle and Jonathan Oatis
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