Forty miles from Addis

Forty miles from Addis

The Tigray Defence Forces and the Oromo Liberation Army take the road south. By early November they are at Debre Sina, 220 kilometres from the capital. Then the Bayraktars, Mohajers, and Wing Loongs arrive, and the offensive stops.

Filed late December 2021, after the TDF withdrawal

Between July and December 2021, the Tigray war’s strategic geography shifted in a sequence of operations that, at one point in early November, appeared poised to end Abiy Ahmed’s premiership by force of arms. The Tigray Defence Forces, refreshed by their return to Mekelle in June and motivated by the famine conditions the federal blockade was imposing on the Tigrayan civilian population, moved south into Amhara and Afar regions in a coordinated offensive with the Oromo Liberation Army. By the first week of November, TDF formations were in Dessie and Kombolcha — the strategic gateway towns 380 kilometres north of Addis on the A2 highway, the same towns whose capture by the TPLF in 1991 had preceded the fall of the Derg by weeks. By 5 November, TDF advance units had reached the outskirts of Debre Sina, 220 kilometres from the capital. International airlines began suspending flights to Bole International Airport. Western embassies evacuated non-essential staff. The federal-government media operation transmitted images of Abiy in fatigues at unspecified front-line locations. A diaspora-funded #NoMore campaign mobilised in defence of the federal government across United States, European, and East African capitals. Tigrayan diaspora communities in the same capitals organised counter-mobilisations.

Six weeks later, the TDF had withdrawn from Amhara and Afar regions. The federal-government counter-offensive had retaken Dessie, Kombolcha, and Lalibela. The Tigrayan offensive had been halted not by Ethiopian conventional ground forces but by a foreign-supplied drone fleet whose deployment in the war had escalated through the second half of 2021 and which, by November, was operating with sufficient density and coordination to make daylight movement on the A2 highway impossible for the TDF. The strategic threat to Addis had been broken. The siege architecture against Tigray, suspended briefly by the necessity of redeploying federal forces to defend Amhara and Afar, was being reimposed.

The story of the November 2021 advance and its halt is, in many respects, the story of how the Tigray war was transformed from a conventional ground war into an asymmetric air war, and of how that transformation produced both the federal-government’s operational survival and the durability of the post-war strategic standoff. The story has three layers.

The first layer is the operational sequence of the TDF–OLA offensive.

In July 2021, three weeks after retaking Mekelle, the TDF began offensive operations into the Amhara and Afar regions adjacent to Tigray. The strategic objective was twofold: to break the blockade architecture by destroying the federal-Amhara checkpoint system at the southern Tigray border, and to relieve the famine pressure on the Tigrayan civilian population by opening commercial corridors through Amhara into the broader Ethiopian economy. The military objective was to inflict sufficient operational damage on the federal-Amhara coalition that the federal government would be compelled to negotiate. The political objective, articulated more openly as the offensive progressed, was to force the resignation of Abiy and the establishment of a transitional government that would include the TPLF as a partner.

Through July, August, and September 2021, the TDF took successive towns in northern Amhara: Alamata, Korem, Kobo, Lalibela. The TDF’s southern flank operated in coordination with units of the OLA, which had been expanding its operations in northern and central Oromia through 2021. On 11 August 2021, the TDF and OLA announced a formal military alliance; in November, the two groups, together with seven smaller rebel formations including the Agew Liberation Front, the Benishangul People’s Liberation Movement, and the Sidama National Liberation Front, declared the United Front of Ethiopian Federalist and Confederalist Forces, an opposition coalition whose stated objective was to “dismantle Abiy’s government by force or by negotiations, and then form a transitional authority.” [Wikipedia, “Tigray war,” accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigray_war]

The federal government’s initial response was operationally limited. The ENDF had been depleted by the seven months of operations in Tigray; its Northern Command, the formation most experienced in the operational geography of northern Ethiopia, had been substantially destroyed in November 2020 and never fully reconstituted. The Amhara regional forces, the principal federal-aligned ground formation in the affected zones, were stretched across multiple defensive positions. The Eritrean Defence Force, still operating in northern Tigray, was not committed to the defence of the southern federal positions. Through August and September, the TDF advanced with limited federal-allied resistance.

On 31 October 2021, TDF forces took Dessie. On 1 November, they took Kombolcha. The capture of Kombolcha was strategically significant: the town sits at the junction of the A2 (the Addis–Mekelle highway) and the A3 (the Addis–Djibouti highway), giving the TDF operational positioning to threaten both Ethiopia’s federal capital and its principal port corridor to the Gulf of Aden. The TDF’s tactical formations, by 2 November, were advancing south on the A2 toward Debre Birhan and Addis. The OLA, operating in coordination, had taken Kemise and was pressuring federal positions in the Oromia Zone of Amhara Region. The combined force, by 5 November, had advance units in Debre Sina — 220 kilometres from Addis on the A2.

The Ethiopian parliament, on 2 November, declared a nationwide state of emergency. The federal government issued mobilisation orders. Tigrayan civilians in Addis were detained in mass arrests — by various estimates between 9,000 and 16,000 — including civil servants, journalists, hotel staff, businesspeople, and elderly relatives of TDF fighters. The detentions were conducted on the basis of ethnic identification through identity cards and rental records; the constitutional architecture for ethnic political representation became, in the operational terms of November 2021, the technical infrastructure for ethnic detention.

Abiy made repeated public statements through early November characterising the federal-government position as one of imminent defence rather than imminent defeat. On 22 November, in a televised statement, he announced that he would personally lead the federal armed forces “from the front lines” and called on the Ethiopian population to “lead the country with a sacrifice.” Images of Abiy in ENDF fatigues at unidentified locations were widely distributed by federal media. Whether Abiy was, in operational fact, at the front lines is contested; multiple journalistic accounts have characterised his presence as substantially performative. What is not contested is that the federal government’s framing of the moment — as a national emergency requiring popular mobilisation against a foreign-backed insurgency aimed at the dismemberment of the state — was successful in producing the political mobilisation it required.

The #NoMore campaign, which originated in the Ethiopian diaspora and was amplified by federal-government media operations through November and December 2021, characterised Western criticism of the federal-government conduct of the war as foreign interference in Ethiopian sovereignty. The campaign’s principal effect, in international terms, was to insulate the federal government from the kind of coordinated diplomatic pressure that, in a different political environment, might have produced a ceasefire-and-withdrawal framework. Russia, China, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey aligned with the federal government’s framing through the November–December 2021 period. The United States, the European Union, and the African Union — which had been pressing for de-escalation — found their political leverage substantially reduced by the federal government’s mobilisation of diaspora and international constituencies in support of its position.

The second layer is the drone fleet.

The Ethiopian federal government had begun acquiring foreign-supplied combat drones in early 2021, in response to the federal military’s recognition that its 22 manned combat aircraft (a mix of aging Su-27 and MiG-23 fighters and Mi-24 Hind attack helicopters) were insufficient to dominate the operational geography of the conflict. The acquisition programme involved four supplier states: Turkey (Bayraktar TB2 medium-altitude long-endurance combat drones, approximately $5 million each, equipped with the MAM-L laser-guided munitions that had been decisive in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and in the Libya conflict); Iran (Mohajer-6 medium-altitude armed surveillance drones, plus the smaller Shahed-129); China (Wing Loong II long-endurance armed drones, $1–2 million each, equipped with Chinese AKD-10 air-to-ground missiles); and the United Arab Emirates (which served as both supplier of some platforms and operational facilitator for the broader procurement programme). By summer 2021, Bellingcat satellite-imagery investigations had identified Iranian Mohajer-6 platforms at Semera Airport in Afar Region; Chinese Wing Loong II platforms at Harar Meda Air Base near Addis; and Turkish Bayraktar TB2 platforms at Bahir Dar Airport in Amhara Region. [European Council on Foreign Relations, “Deadly skies: Drone warfare in Ethiopia and the future of conflict in Africa,” 2024, https://ecfr.eu/publication/deadly-skies-drone-warfare-in-ethiopia-and-the-future-of-conflict-in-africa/; Al Jazeera, “How armed drones may have helped turn the tide in Ethiopia’s war,” 10 December 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/12/10/how-armed-drones-may-have-helped-turn-tide-in-ethiopia-conflict]

The strategic effect of the drone fleet was to provide the federal-Ethiopian military with two capabilities it had previously lacked: real-time aerial reconnaissance over the operational area of the war, and standoff precision-strike capability against TDF and OLA ground formations. The TDF, like most non-state armed actors of its kind, had no anti-aircraft capability adequate to defeat a sustained drone campaign. Bayraktar TB2 platforms could loiter for hours over a TDF column, identify the column’s composition and movement, and call in either drone-launched munitions or supporting strike-aircraft action. The Mohajer-6 platforms provided complementary capability in zones the TB2s were not covering. The Wing Loong II platforms operated in standoff strike roles against larger targets, including TDF headquarters formations and supply depots.

The TDF’s southern offensive, by November 2021, was operationally over-extended. Its supply lines from Tigray stretched several hundred kilometres through hostile territory. Its conventional formations, moving along a single highway — the A2 — were exposed to drone surveillance and strike at every step. Its operational tempo, which had been sustainable during the August–October advance through limited federal resistance, became unsustainable once the drone fleet’s coverage became dense and continuous. By late November, the TDF was taking unsustainable casualties from drone strikes on its supply convoys, command formations, and forward units. Debretsion Gebremichael, in a 19 December 2021 letter to the UN Security Council announcing the TDF’s withdrawal from Amhara and Afar, explicitly cited “the drones provided by foreign powers” as the primary cause of the strategic reversal.

The drone fleet’s casualty effects on Tigrayan civilians were extensive in the weeks that followed. The most documented single strike was the 7 January 2022 Bayraktar TB2 attack on a makeshift IDP camp at Dedebit Elementary School in northwestern Tigray, in which three laser-guided bombs killed between 56 and 59 displaced persons and wounded at least 30 others. The Dedebit strike occurred at approximately 23:30 EAT, after children had gone to sleep in the camp; the camp had been hosting displaced Tigrayans from the Western Tigray zone who had been forced from their homes by the Amhara-administration ethnic cleansing campaign documented by Amnesty/HRW. Open-source investigators determined that the Bayraktar TB2 that conducted the strike had taken off from Bahir Dar Airport, 278 kilometres south of the target, based on the platform’s operational range. Human Rights Watch in March 2022 and the ICHREE in September 2022 both characterised the strike as a “likely war crime.” No federal-government accountability process has addressed the Dedebit strike or any of the dozens of comparable drone strikes documented through the war’s open-conflict phase. [Wikipedia, “Dedebit Elementary School airstrike,” accessed June 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedebit_Elementary_School_airstrike]

The third layer is what the drone fleet’s deployment meant for the war’s overall trajectory.

The November 2021 advance had been the TPLF’s strongest tactical position of the war. It was also, by mid-December 2021, the TPLF’s strategic high-water mark. The strategic balance shifted decisively against Tigrayan forces between November 2021 and August 2022. The federal government’s combination of drone-enabled air dominance, mobilisation-enabled ground force regeneration, and diplomatic mobilisation of regional and global supporters reduced the TPLF’s operational position to one of strategic defence. The renewed federal-government offensive of August–October 2022, which preceded the Pretoria Agreement, was conducted under conditions in which the TDF could no longer match federal-aligned firepower and in which the Tigrayan civilian population was suffering from cumulative famine-related mortality at a scale that further degraded the TPLF’s political and material base.

The Pretoria Agreement of 2 November 2022, by which the TPLF accepted disarmament, dissolution of its regional administration, and recognition of federal sovereignty in exchange for a cessation of hostilities and humanitarian access, was, in operational terms, a settlement that reflected the strategic balance the drone fleet had produced. The TPLF had been unable, in October 2022, to convert its November 2021 high-water mark into political settlement on terms more favourable than those Pretoria provided. The federal government had been unable, despite the drone fleet’s effects, to defeat the TDF decisively or to eliminate the TPLF politically. The Pretoria Agreement reflected the impasse the drone fleet’s deployment had produced: a federal-government conventional victory but not political defeat of the TPLF, combined with a TPLF strategic defeat but not political dissolution.

The wider strategic implications of the drone fleet’s deployment extended well beyond Tigray. The Ethiopian federal government’s success with the foreign-supplied drone fleet, observed by other African states, accelerated the regional proliferation of combat drones through 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. By 2026, drone strikes were a feature of conflicts in Sudan, Burkina Faso, Mali, Mozambique, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and several other African states. The HORN Institute’s 2026 review of the regional drone-conflict landscape identified the Tigray war as “the first war on the continent in which a government deployed a diversified arsenal of foreign-supplied combat drones as a deliberate component of its military strategy.” The model — diplomatic alignment with Turkey, Iran, China, and the UAE; procurement through Emirati distributors; deployment in non-state-actor conflicts where Western states would not supply equivalent platforms — became a template for authoritarian African governments through the 2020s. [HORN International Institute for Strategic Studies, “How Drones Are Redefining Conflicts in the Horn of Africa,” 6 March 2026, https://horninstitute.org/how-drones-are-redefining-conflicts-in-the-horn-of-africa/]

The federal government’s drone procurement also had implications for its relationships with Western donor states. The European Union suspended €88 million in budgetary support to Ethiopia in December 2020. The United States State Department, beginning in 2021, accused Iran of violating UN Security Council Resolution 2231 by transferring Mohajer drones to Ethiopia. The cumulative effect was a gradual withdrawal of Western governmental support for the federal government’s military operations through the war — a withdrawal that did not produce operationally significant constraints because the federal government’s pivot to non-Western suppliers had reduced its dependence on Western military assistance. The Western donor states’ principal remaining leverage over Ethiopia, by 2022, was through the IMF and World Bank financial-architecture mechanisms — leverage that would, in 2024, produce the birr float and the conditional IMF programme, but which had limited operational effect during the war’s active phase.

The retrospective question — what would have happened if the federal government had not acquired the drone fleet — admits a range of plausible answers. The TDF, by November 2021, was operationally over-extended and would probably have culminated its southern offensive in any event, with or without drone-imposed casualties. Whether the TDF could have produced political settlement on terms more favourable than Pretoria, in the absence of drone-imposed strategic reversal, is uncertain. What is more confidently estimable is that the drone fleet imposed a particular form of strategic conclusion to the war’s open-conflict phase: a federal-government conventional victory enabled by foreign-supplied air power, achieved without the political settlement of the underlying constitutional questions that had produced the war in the first place. The Pretoria Agreement settled the immediate question of whether the TPLF would lose its armed conflict with the federal government. It did not settle the question of what the Tigray Region’s political status would be in the post-war Ethiopian federation. The latter question, as of 2026, remains unsettled and is the operational basis of the Tigray-Eritrea-federal tensions that have, by mid-2026, produced the second crisis point of the post-war period.

The 220 kilometres from Debre Sina to Addis, in early November 2021, was the closest the TPLF came to political victory through force of arms. The drone fleet that stopped them at Debre Sina did not solve the political problem that had brought them within reach of Addis. It postponed the political problem. The postponement is still operative in 2026, and the question of how it will eventually be resolved — by renewed war, by belated political settlement, or by the structural decay of the Ethiopian federation into something else — is the central forward question of Abiy Ahmed’s premiership.

For the people inside the TDF columns that were destroyed by drone strikes on the A2 highway in November 2021, the postponement is permanent.

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Sources for Article 12

1. Wikipedia, “Tigray war,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigray_war
2. Wikipedia, “Dedebit Elementary School airstrike,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedebit_Elementary_School_airstrike
3. European Council on Foreign Relations, “Deadly skies: Drone warfare in Ethiopia and the future of conflict in Africa,” 2024 — https://ecfr.eu/publication/deadly-skies-drone-warfare-in-ethiopia-and-the-future-of-conflict-in-africa/
4. Al Jazeera, “How armed drones may have helped turn the tide in Ethiopia’s war,” 10 December 2021 — https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/12/10/how-armed-drones-may-have-helped-turn-tide-in-ethiopia-conflict
5. HORN International Institute for Strategic Studies, “How Drones Are Redefining Conflicts in the Horn of Africa,” 6 March 2026 — https://horninstitute.org/how-drones-are-redefining-conflicts-in-the-horn-of-africa/
6. Responsible Statecraft, “How foreign drone intervention and more turned tide for Abiy in Ethiopia,” 23 December 2021 — https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/12/23/how-foreign-drone-intervention-and-more-turned-tide-for-abiy-in-ethiopia/
7. London Review of Books, Tom Stevenson, “Incapable of Sustaining Weeds,” February 2024 — https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n02/tom-stevenson/incapable-of-sustaining-weeds
8. Bellingcat investigations on Iranian Mohajer drones at Semera Airport, 2021
9. Debretsion Gebremichael, letter to UN Security Council, 19 December 2021
10. Human Rights Watch, “Ethiopia: Apparent War Crimes in Tigray,” March 2022 — addressing the Dedebit strike
11. ICHREE (UN International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia), interim and final reports, 2022–2023
12. Reuters and Financial Times reporting on the TDF advance and federal counter-offensive, November–December 2021
13. Wikipedia, “Premiership of Abiy Ahmed,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premiership_of_Abiy_Ahmed
14. Mesfin Hagos, “What is wrong with Eritrea’s involvement in Ethiopia’s war?”, African Arguments, 4 December 2020

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End of expanded article for Dispatch 12. One article, approximately 2,800 words.