Much of the Horn of Africa—Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan—was ablaze with conflict in February 2024, just as the Yemen crisis, just across the Red Sea, was also jeopardizing the security of one of the world’s most important trade routes through that sea and the Suez Canal.
The civil war in Sudan was showing no signs of abating, and neither was the conflict in Somalia, from where Iran was relaying aid to the North Yemeni groups that had been harassing Red Sea shipping.
Meanwhile, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali lost perhaps the last glimmer of support from Western powers when, on Jan. 29, Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) troops entered the town of Merawi, in the North Gojjam area of the Amhara.
There, they executed 100 unarmed civilians, leaving their bodies littered through the streets of the town. It was not the first time this had happened in the area.
From the latest attack, a video of the bodies—aged 14 to 96—was uploaded to social media by one of the troops, shocked by the savagery of the event, causing instant criticism from the U.S. and British governments.
But, even apart from this incident, the tide of resistance in Ethiopia against the Abiy government appeared to be entering a decisive phase, with the possibility that the empire of some 115 million people and some 80 ethnicities could see a change of government.
The Abiy government’s successful suppression of the two-year insurgency by the Tigré Popular Liberation Front (TPLF) by November 2022 was then followed by Mr. Abiy’s decision, essentially on the insistence of his more extreme Oromo supporters, to attack Ethiopian nationalists in the Amhara and Afar regions, resulting in around 1 million more killed in 2023, and possibly some 20-plus million internally displaced persons. This led the Amhara and Afar people to create resistance forces against Mr. Abiy’s military force. These are known as Fano militias.
By the end of 2023, Fano forces were created throughout much of Ethiopia, not just among the Amhara and Afar people. By January 2024, some 400,000 Fano fighters were working under five independent but communicating commands. Between late December 2023 and early January 2024, some 40,000 more ENDF troops had crossed the lines and joined the Fano.
On Feb. 1, Ethiopians calling themselves “London Fano” peacefully occupied the Ethiopian Embassy in London, placed their identifying stickers on the furniture and walls, and called for an end to the government’s genocide against the Amhara people.
By February, the capital, Addis Ababa, was becoming increasingly isolated, and Mr. Abiy had alienated his former close supporters in the region, Eritrea and Djibouti. Then, he alienated Somalia, which had not only been a supporter but counted on Ethiopian security help to constrain the Somali insurgency problem.
By Feb. 14, ENDF Chief of General Staff Field Marshal Birhanu Jula Gelalcha and some troops were surrounded by Fano forces in Gondar—also in the Amhara region—where Emperor Haile Selassie and allied troops staged their final battle against the occupying Italian forces in November 1941. The ENDF attempted to get helicopters into Gondar to rescue the Field Marshal.
That illustrated the level of chaos and pace of the conflict: the Armed Forces chief was caught on the battlefield, facing overwhelming Fano opposition, and the government needed to extract him or face humiliation.
The government was also rejected by Eritrean President Isaias Afewerke and Djibouti President Ismail Omar Guelleh, something brought about by Mr. Abiy’s policies against the Amhara and Afar people, among other things. Mr. Abiy, as a result, needed a reliable new trade outlet to and from the Red Sea, which did not rely on Eritrea of Djibouti.
In late December 2023, Mr. Abiy offered the neighboring Somaliland government of President Musa Bihi Abdi a share in the Ethiopian state airline, Ethiopian Airways, in exchange for concessions and secure transit from Ethiopia through Somaliland to its port of Berbera on the Red Sea. This amounted, in some respects, to recognizing the sovereignty of Somaliland, which had separated from its brief union with Somalia (former Italian Somaliland). Significantly, the port of Berbera is run by the Dubai company DP World. But the initiative alienated Somalia, meaning Ethiopia now had alienated most of its neighbors: Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, and Sudan.
This also indicated that Addis Ababa, under Mr. Abiy, was straining its relationship with Turkey, which had provided the Abiy government with advanced unmanned aerial combat vehicles (UCAVs), which were of significant help in defeating the TPLF forces. Indeed, the ENDF now relies exclusively on Turkish UCAVs and has discarded the Russian and Chinese systems, which had proven ineffective.
Turkey, however, was moving strategically to control the tenuous governance of Somalia and had a major military position in the capital, Mogadishu. So Mr. Abiy’s ability to mount a successful defense of his government in the internal power struggle now underway is in question.
However, Turkey’s rivals in the region—Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)—were still supporting Mr Abiy. But both were also committed to working with Eritrea and Djibouti, which have important littoral territory on the African side of the Red Sea. In December 2023, the UAE Air Force deployed combat aircraft to the Ethiopian Air Force base at Debre Zeit, near Addis Ababa, for exercises.
Even so, Mr. Abiy is losing traction at home. The pace of ENDF defections to the Fano groups is accelerating. The Fano groups are increasingly gaining a political focus with very specific objectives, including the restoration of a government that would honor the Aug. 6, 1974, draft constitution, which was introduced by Emperor Haile Selassie I when he was overthrown by the pro-Soviet Derg in 1974. Indeed, the coup occurred because the emperor’s new constitution would have introduced a far more liberal state with a structured parliamentary system akin to that of the United Kingdom.
Fano groups have also been identified through their use of the traditional Ethiopian tricolor flags without the communist star in the middle. Many of the groups use the old Imperial flag, with the Moa Anbessa—Conquering Lion of Judah—insignia on the tricolor.
Significantly, the manifesto of the Fano movement, now being finalized, is known to seek the restoration of the Ethiopian crown, in addition to restoring family links with Eritrea and Djibouti.
The question now facing Mr. Abiy is whether he can rebuild his ties with foreign powers in a manner that would give him support against the growing strength of the Fano movement, which is now a pan-Ethiopian phenomenon. But more than that, can Mr. Abiy bolster the morale of his own troops?
A telling indication has been in the fact that he has changed his personal security detail frequently, and has apparently been considering the use of Kenyan or Ugandan security officers out of fear that Ethiopian troops could no longer be relied upon. However, Mr. Abiy reportedly has no faith in Kenyan mercenaries.
All this indicates, too, that Mr. Abiy’s support of opponents of the national Ethiopian church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, at the behest of his Oromo extremist colleagues, has backfired. Attempts to crush the church and Orthodox Ethiopians have failed. In December 2023, just before Ethiopian Christmas (Jan. 7, 2024), a high church official, Archbishop Abune Lukas, based in Melbourne, Australia, called on the Ethiopian military to remove Mr. Abiy from office.
The Patriarch and the senior officials of the Church in Addis Ababa did not comment on Abune Lukas’s statements from the pulpit.
In addition to his calls for the military to remove Mr. Abiy, on Jan. 14, the Ethiopian news site Borkena reported: “In a sermon to a congregation, he openly highlighted how Abiy Ahmed’s administration killed infants as old as eight and 12 months old, how it attacked monasteries and religious scholars with the aim to kill continuity of knowledge sharing about the teachings of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.”
Ethiopian officials are anxious to break with the administration. On Jan. 26, for example, the long-serving deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs, Demeke Mekonnen (an Amhara), suddenly left his post. He had also been the third vice-president of the ruling Prosperity Party. He was immediately replaced by another party loyalist, Temesgen Tiruneh, director-general of the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS). The departure led to a shake-up in the Cabinet: Taye Atske Selassie became minister of Foreign Affairs, Mekdes Daba became minister of Health, Redwan Hussein became the new head of NISS, and Tigist Hamid became the new director of the Information Network Security Administration (INSA).
Gedu Andargachew, who had been national security adviser to Mr. Abiy (and earlier foreign minister), quietly quit the government in 2023 and was under “government-imposed mobility restrictions (house arrest)” for opposing the government’s state of emergency in the Amhara region. But Mr. Gedu was, in early 2024, quietly allowed to leave for Belgium, ostensibly to pursue an academic life. However, he left Belgium for the United States in February 2024. Meanwhile, the Amhara region state of emergency he opposed earlier in 2023 was extended by Mr. Abiy in early February for a further four months, even though it was no closer to achieving its goal of “disarming Fano.”
Now, it appeared that Fano was disarming the ENDF.
