Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on Wednesday said that the government troops had left Tigray’s regional capital Mekelle as the city was no longer the “centre of gravity for conflicts”, reported Reuters.
The statement comes after Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) forces took Mekelle under its control earlier this week in a major turn of events in the ongoing conflict.
“When we entered Mekelle seven or eight months ago, it was because it was the centre of gravity for conflicts,” Abiy said in a video posted on his website on Wednesday. “It was the centre of a government. A centre for known and unknown resources. But by the time we exit, there is nothing special about it except that there are some 80,000 people, and those who loot people … It has lost its centre of gravity in the current context.”
A spokesman for the TPLF refuted Abiy’s statement saying that the government troops lost and were forced to leave Mekelle. He also said government-allied Eritrean troops had not withdrawn from the region as an Ethiopian official had claimed.
TPLF spokesman Getachew Reda said Ethiopian forces were forced to withdraw.
“The fact that he’s claiming to have withdrawn from Mekelle is an absolute lie,” Getachew told Reuters on Wednesday. “We bested them in their own game. They lost.”
Abiy’s government has been fighting the TPLF since November last year when it accused the TPLF of attacking military bases across the region.
The Ethiopian government declared victory over the TPLF at the end of November after driving its forces from Mekelle at the end of November, but clashes have persisted since in areas outside the regional capital. The nearly eight-month-long conflict has claimed thousands of lives so far.
The Tigray conflict has been marked by massacres, widespread sexual violence, and other abuses. The United Nations has also warned that roughly 350,000 people face starvation.
