The Amhara turn

The Amhara turn

A federal order to dissolve regional special forces produces, in the constituency that had been the federal government’s principal ally in the Tigray war, an armed uprising against the same federal government. By December 2023, Fano controls most of rural Amhara. The federal government cannot defeat it. The federal government will not negotiate with it on terms Fano can accept.

Filed December 2023

The constituency that had given the federal government its principal regional support during the Tigray war began, in April 2023, to take up arms against the federal government. The decision was not, in the conventional sense, made; it was produced by a sequence of federal-government policy moves that the Amhara political constituency read as betrayal, by political fractures within the constituency that produced the operational form of the uprising, and by the absence of any alternative political channel through which Amhara grievances could be effectively addressed. By August 2023, what had begun as scattered clashes between Fano militia formations and federal security forces had escalated into full-scale armed insurgency. By December 2023, Fano controlled most of rural Amhara, the federal government had declared a renewable state of emergency, and the federal government’s military operation in Amhara had begun replicating, in operational form, the architecture of the war in Tigray that the Pretoria Agreement had ended thirteen months earlier.

The political background to the April 2023 break needs to be set down clearly.

The Amhara political constituency had been the federal government’s principal regional ally during the Tigray war. Amhara Regional Special Forces had operated alongside the ENDF in the initial November–December 2020 offensive that took Mekelle. Amhara Regional Special Forces had administered Western Tigray (the Welkait area) from November 2020 onwards, conducting the ethnic-expulsion campaign against Tigrayan residents that Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International had documented in their April 2022 report. Amhara Fano militias had operated as auxiliary forces during the war’s open-conflict phase, with substantial autonomy from formal federal-government command. Amhara political voices — through the Amhara regional government, through diaspora media operations, through Amhara-aligned voices in the federal government — had been the principal political amplifier of the federal-government narrative of the war as a defensive operation against TPLF criminality.

The Amhara constituency’s price for this support, articulated through Amhara political voices throughout the war, was twofold. First, the eventual restoration of Welkait, Tegede, Raya, and Alamata — the areas the Amhara political tradition has long claimed as historically Amhara and that the 1991 ethnic-federal reorganisation had placed under Tigray administration — to formal Amhara administration. Second, the recognition of the Amhara constituency’s historical centrality to the Ethiopian state and the corresponding recalibration of the ethnic-federal architecture in directions more favourable to Amhara political interests.

The Pretoria Agreement of November 2022, in its handling of the contested-territories question, had alarmed the Amhara constituency. The agreement committed the federal government to resolve the territorial dispute “in line with Article 39 of the constitution” — that is, through a referendum process administered by the House of Federation. The Amhara political reading of this provision was that the federal government had committed to a process that could, under unfavourable conditions, restore Welkait to Tigray administration. The agreement also committed the federal government to ensure the withdrawal of “non-ENDF” forces from Tigray Region — which, as applied to the Amhara Regional Special Forces and the Fano militias operating in Western Tigray, was a commitment to remove the Amhara administrative and military presence from the contested territories. The Amhara constituency read these provisions, in late 2022 and into 2023, as the federal government’s preparation for the eventual return of Welkait to Tigray — that is, as the betrayal of the political compact under which the Amhara constituency had supported the war.

The federal government’s subsequent policy moves through early 2023 confirmed the Amhara political reading. On 6 April 2023, Abiy issued an executive order dissolving all regional special forces across Ethiopia and integrating them into either the federal ENDF or the regional police. The order was nationally applicable: all nine regions plus the two chartered cities were required to comply. Most regions had already partially integrated their special forces, or had less to lose from the integration — Oromia, Somali, Afar, Sidama, the smaller regions. The Tigray Regional Special Forces had been dissolved under the Pretoria Agreement’s DDR provisions. The Amhara Regional Special Forces, however, were the largest, best-equipped, and politically most central regional security formation in the country. They had been the principal federal-aligned ground force during the Tigray war. They constituted, in operational reality, a regional army that the Amhara political constituency considered the institutional guarantee of its political position within the federation. [The Conversation, “Ethiopia’s civil war: what’s behind the Amhara rebellion?”, 7 November 2025, https://theconversation.com/ethiopias-civil-war-whats-behind-the-amhara-rebellion-252425]

The dissolution order was, in the Amhara political reading, the federal government’s preparation for the eventual surrender of Welkait. With the Amhara Regional Special Forces dissolved, the Amhara constituency would lack the operational means to defend the administrative control of Western Tigray that had been one of the principal Amhara gains of the war. The order was, on this reading, the federal government’s instrument for completing the post-war administrative restoration of Tigray’s pre-war territorial integrity at the cost of the Amhara constituency’s wartime gains.

The dissolution order produced, within days, the open break between the Amhara constituency and the federal government. Amhara Fano militias — the irregular formations that had operated alongside the Amhara Regional Special Forces during the war and that had not been included in the dissolution order — became, in operational reality, the institutional vehicle for armed Amhara resistance to the federal-government policy. Through April, May, June, and July 2023, Fano militias conducted clashes with federal security forces across multiple Amhara regional zones. The clashes escalated in tempo and scale through July. By August 2023, the clashes had become a sustained insurgency.

The August 2023 escalation marked the operational beginning of what international observers have characterised as the Fano insurgency or, more formally, the Amhara conflict. Through August, Fano militias briefly took control of Lalibela, Gondar, parts of Bahir Dar, and several towns in Gojjam. On 4 August 2023, the federal government declared a state of emergency in Amhara Region. The state of emergency authorised mass arbitrary detentions, restrictions on movement, restrictions on speech, restrictions on assembly, and the deployment of federal security forces in roles normally reserved for regional police. The state of emergency would be repeatedly extended through the second half of 2023, through 2024, and substantially into 2025; restrictions in major Amhara cities have persisted into 2026. [Wikipedia, “Fano insurgency,” accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fano_insurgency]

The Fano insurgency that emerged in August 2023 was, organisationally, not a single unified movement. It was a constellation of regionally-distinct militias sharing an Amhara nationalist political identification but operating with separate command structures, separate sources of funding and weapons, and often separate political goals. The principal Fano formations as of late 2023 were: Gondar Fano (operating in North Gondar and Central Gondar zones), Gojjam Fano (operating in East Gojjam, West Gojjam, and Awi zones), Wollo Fano (operating in North Wollo and South Wollo zones), and Shewa Fano (operating in North Shewa Zone of Amhara Region). Each formation had its own leadership; relationships between formations ranged from operational cooperation to active rivalry; coordination across the formations was, in 2023, limited.

The decentralisation was both a strategic strength and a political weakness. As a strategic strength, the decentralisation made the movement difficult to defeat through targeted operations against leadership: the federal government could not decapitate a leader who, in operational reality, did not exist. As a political weakness, the decentralisation made the movement difficult to translate military strength into political settlement: there was no single Fano interlocutor with whom the federal government could negotiate even if it had wanted to.

The federal government’s military response through the second half of 2023 was heavy. The ENDF deployed armoured columns, helicopter gunships, and the same Turkish-Iranian-Emirati drone fleet that had defeated the TDF in late 2021. Drone strikes against Fano positions intensified through autumn 2023 and into 2024. Specific incidents through 2023 — the August 7 Finote Selam fighting, the September Meskel Square Fano demonstration that turned into mass arrests in Addis Ababa, the December Mota military operation — accumulated. ENDF mass arbitrary arrests of ethnic Amhara, including Amhara residents of Addis Ababa whose connections to Fano militias were unproven, accelerated through autumn 2023. Civilian casualty figures from federal operations in Amhara through the second half of 2023 ran into the hundreds, with the figure rising substantially through 2024 and into 2025.

The political dimension of the federal response, through the second half of 2023, was characterised by an absence: the federal government conducted no significant political outreach to the Amhara constituency through which Fano was operating. The federal government’s communications about the insurgency framed it as a criminal disturbance organised by “anti-peace elements” and “extremists” who were attempting to “destabilise the country.” The communications did not engage with the underlying Amhara political grievances — the dissolved Special Forces, the contested-territory question, the perceived federal-government tilt toward post-Pretoria Tigray — that were producing the political support Fano was operating from. The communications framed the conflict as a security operation against criminals rather than as a political conflict requiring political settlement.

The framing was, in operational consequence, the same framing the federal government had used in the early phase of the Tigray war: the law-enforcement operation, the criminal organisation, the defensive military response. The framing’s operational deficiencies in the Amhara case mirrored its operational deficiencies in the Tigray case. The Fano insurgency was not, in any meaningful political sense, a criminal organisation operating outside the constitutional order; it was an armed expression of the political grievances of a major regional constituency whose institutional channels for grievance expression had been closed. The framing of the insurgency as criminal foreclosed the political settlement that the underlying conflict required. The federal government’s choice to frame the insurgency in the law-enforcement vocabulary was, like the earlier choice in the Tigray case, a rhetorical instrument that postponed political settlement at the cost of continued armed conflict.

The international response to the Fano insurgency through 2023 was substantially limited. The international press attention to Ethiopia had been focused, through the second half of 2023, on the Sudan war that had begun in April 2023 and on the post-Pretoria humanitarian developments in Tigray; the Amhara conflict registered in international reporting but did not command the sustained attention that the Tigray war had commanded in 2020 and 2021. The Western governments’ diplomatic engagement with the Amhara conflict was limited; the African Union’s engagement was limited; the regional and continental organisations’ engagement was limited. The Fano insurgency was, in the international diplomatic understanding of late 2023, a domestic Ethiopian conflict in which the international community had limited stake.

The international community’s relative disengagement from the Amhara conflict has, by mid-2026, been criticised in retrospective analysis as a structural failure of the post-war Ethiopian crisis response. The Amhara conflict has, in cumulative casualty terms and in displacement terms, produced damage on a scale comparable to or exceeding the Tigray war’s open-conflict phase. The federal government’s drone campaign in Amhara through 2024 and 2025 produced documented civilian massacres — Merawi in January 2024, the East Gojjam school strike in April 2025, Birakat in March 2025 — that mirror in their operational character the early-war atrocities at Mai Kadra, Axum, and Mahbere Dego. The international human-rights documentation of the Amhara conflict has been less extensive than the documentation of the Tigray war was, in significant part because the ICHREE mandate ended in October 2023 and no comparable international fact-finding mechanism has been established for the post-2023 Ethiopian conflicts.

The structural similarity between the Amhara conflict’s development through 2023 and the Tigray war’s development through 2020 deserves explicit acknowledgment. In both cases: a major regional constituency lost its institutional channels for political expression within the federal architecture (the TPLF in 2018–2020, the Amhara constituency in 2022–2023); the federal government framed the resulting armed conflict as a law-enforcement operation against criminal elements; the federal government conducted military operations that produced documented atrocities against civilian populations; the international community responded with limited attention and limited operational engagement; the conflict produced sustained armed insurgency that the federal government could not defeat militarily and would not settle politically; the conflict’s structural drivers — the unaddressed political grievances — continued to operate as the cause of the conflict’s persistence. The Amhara conflict, in this sense, is the Tigray war’s structural sequel rather than its inverse.

What is different between the two cases is the federal government’s strategic position. In the Tigray war, the federal government’s principal regional allies were the Amhara constituency and the Eritrean government, both of which provided substantial operational support. In the Amhara conflict, the federal government’s principal regional opponent is the Amhara constituency itself; the federal government’s principal regional ally has, by mid-2026, been the Oromo Prosperity Party and the federal-aligned elements of the Southern coalition, neither of which provides the operational support that the Amhara constituency provided in 2020–2022. The Eritrean government, which provided substantial operational support in the Tigray war, has, by 2026, become a federal-government adversary. The federal government’s strategic position, in the Amhara conflict and the broader 2026 regional landscape, is substantially weaker than its position was in the Tigray war.

The strategic implications of the federal government’s weaker position have been visible in the federal government’s operational conduct in Amhara through 2024 and 2025. The federal government has been unable to defeat the Fano insurgency. The federal government has been unwilling to negotiate with Fano on terms Fano would accept. The federal government has been able, through 2024 and 2025, to maintain ENDF control of the major Amhara cities — Bahir Dar, Gondar, Dessie, Kombolcha — but has lost most of rural Amhara to Fano operational control. The federal government’s mass arbitrary detentions of ethnic Amhara through the conflict have produced, by 2025, additional Amhara political alienation that has expanded the political base from which Fano operates. The Amhara conflict has, by mid-2026, become a sustained low-grade armed conflict with no clear operational pathway to settlement.

The political question — what the Amhara conflict means for the broader trajectory of the Ethiopian federation — is the central forward question of the mid-2020s Ethiopian politics. The federal government’s centralising project, under the Prosperity Party, depended substantially on the political marginalisation of the TPLF (achieved by 2022) and the operational support of the Amhara constituency (sustained through 2022). The post-Tigray-war architecture of post-Pretoria Ethiopia required the federal government to manage the political consequences of TPLF marginalisation while sustaining the Amhara political support that had enabled it. The federal government’s failure to manage the post-Pretoria political consequences with the Amhara constituency has, by 2023, produced the structural condition in which the Amhara constituency has become the federal government’s principal armed opponent. The centralising project has, in this sense, generated its own opposition. The Prosperity Party that was founded on opposition to the TPLF has, by 2024, become the political instrument facing an Amhara constituency whose grievances are at least as substantial as the TPLF grievances the party was founded to oppose.

The retrospective lesson of the Amhara conflict’s development through 2023 is, in the bluntest terms, the following: the federal government’s political project cannot operate without the support of one of the country’s principal regional constituencies. From 1991 to 2018, the project operated with TPLF support. From 2018 to 2022, the project operated with Amhara support. By 2024, the project operated without either. The strategic dependencies that had structured Ethiopian federal politics since 1991 had been exhausted; the federal government had alienated, in sequence, the constituencies it had previously relied on. The Amhara conflict’s persistence through 2024, 2025, and into 2026 is the operational consequence of the strategic exhaustion.

By December 2023, the Fano insurgency had become a sustained armed conflict. The federal government’s response had become a sustained counter-insurgency operation. The Amhara political constituency had become substantially aligned against the federal government’s centralising project. The political settlement that would, in any plausible scenario, end the conflict required addressing the underlying Amhara grievances — the dissolved Special Forces, the contested-territory question, the federal-government tilt — that the federal government had been unwilling to address. The federal government’s strategic calculation, through 2024 and 2025, has been that the Amhara constituency can be defeated militarily and politically without addressing the underlying grievances. The strategic calculation has, by mid-2026, been refuted by the operational record.

The Amhara turn of 2023 has become, by 2026, the operational reality of post-war Ethiopian politics. The federal government’s centralising project has run, in the constituency that had been its principal regional ally, into the same structural opposition that the TPLF had presented from 2018 to 2020. The pattern, repeated, suggests that the federal government’s broader project cannot be sustained on the basis of opposition to its successive regional adversaries. The pattern suggests, more deeply, that the political settlement Ethiopia requires is structurally larger than any of the federal government’s strategic calculations have, since 2018, been prepared to accommodate.

The federal government, in mid-2026, has neither defeated the Amhara constituency nor accommodated it. The Amhara constituency, in mid-2026, has neither been politically reabsorbed into the federal project nor politically eliminated from it. The conflict continues. Its structural drivers remain in place. Its political settlement, if it occurs, will come from a federal-government recognition that the centralising project requires either the genuine accommodation of regional grievances or the political reconstitution of the federal architecture along different lines. Neither outcome is, in mid-2026, on the federal government’s policy agenda.

The Amhara turn began, in April 2023, with the federal-government order dissolving the regional special forces. It became, by August 2023, the principal political conflict of post-Pretoria Ethiopia. It remains, by June 2026, the conflict that the federal government cannot defeat and cannot end.

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Sources for Article 16

1. Wikipedia, “Fano insurgency,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fano_insurgency
2. The Conversation, “Ethiopia’s civil war: what’s behind the Amhara rebellion?”, 7 November 2025 — https://theconversation.com/ethiopias-civil-war-whats-behind-the-amhara-rebellion-252425
3. The New Humanitarian, “Who is Fano? Inside Ethiopia’s Amhara rebellion,” 12 November 2024 — https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2024/11/12/who-fano-inside-ethiopia-amhara-rebellion
4. International Crisis Group, “Ethiopia: A New Wave of Mass Arrests in the Amhara Region,” 2023
5. Amhara War Updates, “Summary of Amhara War Updates for May 2024 to May 2025,” August 2025 — https://www.amharaamerica.org/post/summary-of-amhara-war-updates-for-may-2024-to-may-2025
6. Human Rights Watch, “Ethiopia: Apparent War Crimes by Security Forces in Amhara Region,” 2024
7. OHCHR / Human Rights Council A/HRC/54/55 (ICHREE final report), 14 September 2023 — https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/chreetiopia/A_HRC_54_55_AUV.pdf
8. Addis Standard reporting on Fano operations and federal response, 2023–2024
9. Borkena reporting on Amhara conflict, 2023–2024
10. Ethiopia Insight, “Why the Amhara are at war with the federal government,” 2024
11. African Union Peace and Security Department, briefings on Ethiopia, 2023–2024
12. ACLED data on armed conflict in Amhara Region, 2023–2025

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End of expanded article for Dispatch 16. One article, approximately 3,000 words.