Yet how the government scored its wins and what they mean for an eventual outcome in the year-old war remain points of fierce debate as fighting enters a new, uncertain phase.
But after Abiy announced last week he would lead operations in the field, the government announced a string of victories and the rebels acknowledged making adjustments to their strategy."The enemy is destroyed, disintegrated," the Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation quoted Abiy as saying Thursday. Though Abiy, the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize winner, promised a quick victory, by late June the TPLF had retaken most of Tigray, and it soon launched offensives into neighbouring Afar and Amhara regions.
The TPLF also never explicitly said it wanted to enter Addis Ababa, instead simply declining to rule out such a move.The government first claimed towns in Afar, near a critical highway bringing goods to Addis Ababa, then on Wednesday it declared victory in Lalibela, a UNESCO World Heritage site that fell to the TPLF in August.
"I was quite surprised by the latest counteroffensive by the government," said Mehdi Labzae, a sociologist who studies land issues and mobilisation in Ethiopia. For Labzae, such statements recall the government's announcement that it was withdrawing from most of Tigray in late June -- a claim that elided military setbacks even as TPLF fighters celebrated in the streets of the regional capital Mekele."It means there was something worrying them or something that did not look good for them."
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