Ethiopia's government has accused three neighboring states — Eritrea, Sudan, and Egypt — of backing armed opposition groups as renewed fighting spreads across Tigray, Amhara, and Afar regions. Army chief Birhanu Jula named Eritrea as the conduit linking external powers to internal insurgents, framing the conflict as a product of Ethiopia's "historical and contemporary adversaries." All three accused nations have flatly denied the charges. The accusations land against a backdrop of pre-existing bilateral fractures that make them simultaneously plausible and convenient. Egypt and Ethiopia remain locked in an unresolved dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a conflict that has simmered since 2011 and now extends into competition over Red Sea access and Horn of Africa security architecture. Sudan accuses Ethiopia of supporting the Rapid Support Forces in its own civil war. Eritrea, once a military partner against Tigray rebels during 2020-2022, has watched Addis Ababa court Red Sea access — a direct threat to Eritrean strategic interests. The timing matters more than the claims. Last week, seven opposition groups representing different ethnic constituencies announced a coalition against the federal government. This breadth — spanning ethnic lines and regions — represents exactly the kind of coordinated domestic challenge that a foreign-conspiracy narrative is designed to paper over. Amani al-Tawil of the Al-Ahram Centre described the accusations as "an understandable attempt to escape from internal crises," while Egyptian parliamentarian Mohamed Selim called it a textbook external-enemy gambit to unify a fracturing internal front. The geography of the conflict is what elevates this from internal crisis to regional concern. The three affected regions — Tigray, Amhara, and Afar — collectively hold an estimated 38 million people and border both Djibouti and Eritrea. Mohammed Hussein of the ruling Prosperity Party's Afar branch explicitly raised the specter of regional war. The proximity to Djibouti, which hosts military bases for the US, France, China, and Japan, adds an international dimension that purely internal Ethiopian conflicts have not previously carried. The extraction pattern here is classic blame-deflection mechanics operating at state level. The Ethiopian government converts genuine bilateral tensions — real disputes over dams, ports, and proxy forces — into a narrative shield against domestic accountability. The cost falls on 38 million civilians in the conflict zone who get war instead of governance, while the federal government buys time and the accused neighbors get diplomatic ammunition for their own grievances. Writer Ammar Arki identified the most dangerous dynamic: if Addis Ababa persists in framing its internal crisis as external conspiracy, and neighbors respond symmetrically — Sudan already has, accusing Ethiopia of backing the RSF — then the conflict logic becomes self-fulfilling. Each state's accusations of proxy warfare by the other become justification for actual proxy warfare. The Horn of Africa has seen this escalation spiral before. Egypt's denial was notably elaborate — invoking sovereignty, the UN Charter, and international law through multiple spokespeople. Sudan's was blunter, calling the charges "baseless" while firing back its own accusations. Eritrea's response was conspicuously absent from the reporting. The asymmetry in denials is itself a signal worth tracking.
