Federal police in Mekelle ask residents to help stand up a new administration

Federal police drove through Mekelle on Friday calling on residents, by loudspeaker, to help set up a new administration. The Tigray People's Liberation Front had pulled its fighters out of the regional capital over the weekend, after government-allied forces entered the city.

The Associated Press, reporting from Mekelle, described officers with rifles standing beside camouflage pickup trucks on a tree-lined road on Thursday, and others riding in open-backed vehicles while cars, pedestrians and three-wheeled taxis moved through an intersection. Local government offices were still shut on Friday. Members of a new civilian administration had arrived with the federal police on Thursday and said they were waiting for instructions.

The TPLF announced the withdrawal on Saturday. The move matched a choice it made in the last war, when it left Mekelle rather than fight for the city street by street. That war ended with a peace agreement in 2022. The weekend pullout was presented in the same terms: spare the city.

The sequence that led there is short. The TPLF joined six other opposition groups last month in an alliance whose stated aim is to remove Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. Fighting picked up late last month and cut into the 2022 deal. The rebels took Mekelle airport and then the city, one of Ethiopia's largest. By Saturday they said they were leaving. By Friday the federal police were the ones on the loudspeakers.

Security in the interval belongs to the police and to the Tigray Peace Force, a government-allied formation that includes former members of the TPLF's armed wing. That force imposed an overnight curfew on Wednesday. The split inside Tigray, between a rebel leadership that seized the airport and a peace force recruited in part from the same old units, is the local fact under the federal convoy.

Abiy and Eritrea's Isaias Afwerki were on opposite sides of the 2020-2022 war, then parties to the settlement that was supposed to hold. The renewed fighting has pulled both names back into the wire copy. The Washington Post's Friday account framed the police appeal in Mekelle against that wider break. What residents could see on Thursday was narrower: federal officers, pickup trucks, and offices that had not reopened.

A new administration that arrives and then waits for instructions is not yet a government. Salaries, courts, the airport the rebels held last week, and the curfew already in force all sit in that gap. The loudspeaker request is an admission that the police cannot staff the city alone. It is also a request made to a population that has lived through the last occupation, the 2022 agreement, and a fresh seizure of the same airport.

The 2022 deal, signed in Pretoria, stopped a war that had killed hundreds of thousands by the higher estimates used by humanitarian agencies during the fighting, and that had included a long siege of Tigray. The weekend withdrawal was read, by people who covered the last war, as a repeat of the earlier retreat from Mekelle. The city was spared street fighting then because the TPLF left it. The same reason was given on Saturday.

Friday's open question is administrative. Who gives the instructions the new civilian team said it was waiting for, and which offices reopen first. Until that answer is public, the curfew, the federal trucks and the shut offices are the government Mekelle has.

The alliance of seven groups, the TPLF plus six others, has not said it is disbanding because Mekelle was left. A pullout from a capital is a tactic the same organisation used before a settlement. On the record available Friday, it is a withdrawal from the city, not a stated abandonment of the alliance's aim against Abiy. The police appeal asks residents to help build the administration that would replace the one that left.