Residents count Eritrean trucks through Adigrat as Mekelle sits under the army

Residents of Adigrat, in northern Tigray, told the BBC this week that Eritrean soldiers have crossed from the border town of Zalambessa and are moving south toward Edaga Hamus, on the road to Mekelle. One resident said he saw about 40 trucks carrying soldiers. A second described 20 to 30 large trucks, some with Eritrean registration plates, seen first at night and then in the morning, plus vehicles with heavy weapons including anti-aircraft guns, and some troops on foot. A source in Mekelle, relaying relatives in Adigrat, put the movement as high as 60 trucks, later deployed in the hills near Edaga Hamus.

The BBC said it had not independently verified the truck counts or the social-media images of loaded military vehicles on the Adigrat, Edaga Hamus and Wukro roads. The accounts agree on direction. The convoys are described as moving south, into central Tigray, not back to the border.

Mekelle is already in army hands

Over the weekend, Tigray People's Liberation Front forces withdrew from Mekelle, the regional capital, 115 kilometres, or 71 miles, south of Adigrat. The city is now under the Ethiopian army, on multiple accounts. Sources in Wukro, on the same corridor, said national army soldiers and allied fighters entered the town on Wednesday after clashes about 15 kilometres to the south. An Edaga Hamus resident told the BBC that Eritrean troops had passed through and that drone strikes had hit soldiers nearby.

Fighting between the federal army and Tigrayan forces resumed about two weeks ago, after a long pause that followed the 2022 Pretoria agreement. That deal was supposed to end the 2020-2022 war, in which Eritrean troops fought alongside the Ethiopian federal army inside Tigray and were accused of atrocities that Addis Ababa and Asmara have disputed in detail and not in full. Residents speaking to the BBC this week described the return of Eritrean soldiers as a fresh version of that memory.

What an Ethiopian minister has said on camera

Abraham Belay, a senior Ethiopian government official, told Fana Television that Eritrea was participating directly, with full capacity and logistics, and that many Eritrean soldiers had been killed and captured. That is an on-the-record accusation from Addis Ababa, separate from the resident counts of trucks. Eritrea has not, in the BBC's account, confirmed a new incursion. The gap between Belay's interview and the unverified convoys is the current state of the public record: a minister says Eritrean units are in the fight, and people in Adigrat say they have watched the trucks.

A corridor, not yet a front line on a map

Zalambessa, Adigrat, Edaga Hamus, Wukro and Mekelle are the towns on the main road from the Eritrean border to the regional capital. If the resident accounts hold, Eritrean forces are already past the border town and through Adigrat, short of Mekelle, which the federal army holds after the TPLF pullout. That would put two outside forces, the federal army and Eritrean units, on the same road, with TPLF fighters withdrawn from the capital and still present elsewhere in the region.

The figures a reader can use without pretending they are confirmed are these. Mekelle is 115 kilometres south of Adigrat and under army control after a weekend withdrawal. Clashes were reported about 15 kilometres south of Wukro. Residents gave truck counts of about 20, 40 and 60. Belay said Eritrea had entered with logistics and had taken losses. The BBC has not verified the movement. The Pretoria pause, three years after the last war, is the arrangement these sightings cut against.