Federal forces hold Mekelle after the TPLF says it has left the capital

Ethiopian federal forces and the allied Tigray Peace Forces held Mekelle on Sunday, after the Tigray People's Liberation Front said it had left the regional capital and would run the regional government from somewhere else for the time being.

A source close to the Tigray Peace Forces told Reuters that militia fighters entered the centre of Mekelle on Saturday afternoon, and that Ethiopian military units followed them in. A humanitarian worker and a resident of the city, both speaking without their names, told the same agency that government forces controlled the city. A separate humanitarian source told AFP that staff on the ground had seen the TPLF abandon the capital, and that federal troops and allied fighters had been observed in several parts of Mekelle.

The TPLF, which leads an opposition alliance formed to challenge Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, posted the withdrawal on Facebook. The wording matters. The group did not say the regional government had been dissolved. It said the administration would be temporarily moved out of Mekelle and would operate from another place. That is a claim of continuity, not a surrender document. The prime minister's office did not answer a request for comment on Sunday.

How the city changed hands

The sequence started at the airport. Alula Aba Nega International Airport sits about 10 kilometres from the centre of Mekelle. Federal forces and the Tigray Peace Forces secured it before the push into the city, according to accounts gathered by regional reporters and the wire services. Losing the strip cuts the capital off from the air route that has carried officials, aid staff and military supplies through earlier rounds of this war.

The TPLF launched a large offensive against the Ethiopian military on 23 September. Seven armed and political groups had announced an alliance aimed at removing Abiy and setting up what they called an inclusive transitional administration. In the days after that offensive, TPLF units took positions in northern Ethiopia, including airports. The counter-move reversed that run. Government forces took Alamata, south of Mekelle, then pushed north. Allied fighters also reported gains in Raya, Tembien and Enderta before the capital itself fell.

Mekelle is not a large city by Ethiopian standards. The 2015 figure used by local authorities put the population near 324,000, on a plateau at about 2,080 metres. It is still the administrative seat of Tigray, the place where regional decrees are issued and where foreign missions have kept their contacts with the regional leadership. Holding the buildings does not, by itself, end a movement that has fought from the countryside before. It does remove the symbol the alliance used when it said it governed the region.

What the 2022 deal did not settle

This is the second time in six years that Mekelle has changed hands by force. Federal troops entered the city in November 2020, in the first weeks of the war that began that month. Tigrayan forces retook it in June 2021 after a long march from the rural west. The Pretoria agreement of 2 November 2022 stopped the main fighting, disarmed much of the Tigrayan force on paper, and left the TPLF in charge of the regional administration while disputes over disputed western districts, fighter disarmament and the return of displaced people stayed open.

Those unfinished arguments are the ground under this month's offensive. The September alliance treated the Pretoria settlement as a pause that had not produced a political settlement. Addis Ababa treated the new offensive as a rebellion against a government that had already signed a cessation. Neither side has published a casualty count for the fall of Mekelle. Reuters, AFP and Al Jazeera did not report a death toll on Sunday. That absence is itself a fact: the claim of control is ahead of any public accounting of who was killed on the way in.

Addis Ababa has also accused Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt of backing the rebel alliance. None of those governments confirmed a role in the Mekelle operation in the Sunday reporting. The accusation is part of the political case Abiy's government has made since the September offensive, and it is still an accusation.

What control of the capital does and does not do

A capital in federal hands changes three practical things. Aid agencies that paused movement when the airport was contested can ask for access again, though a military holding the city is not the same as a corridor. The TPLF's claim to be the regional government now has to be made from outside the buildings that issue stamps and salaries. And the alliance that set 23 September as the start of a push on Abiy has lost the city it treated as its base, eleven days after that push began.

It does not decide the war. The TPLF statement kept a government-in-being alive by saying the move was temporary. Federal forces have held Mekelle before and lost it. The prime minister's office has not yet said what administration will sit in the city, or whether the Tigray Peace Forces will be given a formal role. Until that statement exists, Sunday's fact is narrower and harder: the alliance that wanted a transitional government in Addis Ababa no longer holds the capital of the region it started from.