Ethiopian federal forces and allied Tigray Peace Force fighters seized control of Mekelle on Saturday after the TPLF withdrew from the regional capital, marking the most significant escalation since the 2022 Pretoria peace agreement. The TPLF confirmed its pullout, calling it tactical rather than a surrender, and said its regional administration would operate from an undisclosed location. Federal-aligned forces now hold the airport and key city installations. The Pretoria agreement, brokered by the African Union in November 2022, ended a war that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. But it left the hardest questions — disputed territories, disarming Tigrayan forces, returning displaced populations — for a later date that never arrived. By July, the TPLF declared the agreement effectively dead. The federal government rejected that characterization while accusing the TPLF of undermining it. Both sides had been trading accusations of troop movements and preparations for months before the dam broke. This is not a replay of 2020. The conflict has acquired new dimensions that make it structurally more dangerous. The TPLF is now part of a broader opposition alliance incorporating armed groups from several Ethiopian regions. Fighting has spread into Afar. Most critically, the Ethiopia-Eritrea relationship has ruptured: Ethiopia closed its embassy in Asmara, declared ten Eritrean diplomats persona non grata, and Eritrea severed diplomatic relations entirely. The two countries went from fragile cooperation to open hostility in a matter of days. Explosions were reported in Addis Ababa itself, with a source linked to an opposition alliance claiming drone strikes against military facilities in the capital — a claim that could not be independently verified. If accurate, it represents a dramatic expansion of the conflict's geographic scope, bringing the war to Ethiopia's political and economic center for the first time in this cycle. The federal government is moving to establish a new interim administration in Tigray. Abraham Belay, former president of the Tigray Interim Administration, said preparations were underway from the kebele level upward, with regional elections promised within months. This mirrors the post-2020 playbook: military seizure followed by administrative imposition, with elections as the legitimating endpoint. Whether that sequence can hold in a multi-front war with regional spillover is an entirely different question. For Tigray's civilian population, the recapture of Mekelle is not liberation but repetition. Residents described a security vacuum between the TPLF withdrawal and federal forces' arrival, with looting of government offices. A bajaj driver in Shire told Al Jazeera he felt heartbroken watching Tigray return to full-scale war. A college student in Addis Ababa said he feared Ethiopia was becoming another Sudan — a comparison that, given the multi-actor fragmentation and regional entanglement, is no longer hyperbolic. The Pretoria agreement's failure is not a failure of diplomacy in the abstract. It is the predictable result of signing a ceasefire that deferred every structural question — territory, disarmament, political power-sharing — while assuming goodwill would fill the gaps. What fills gaps when goodwill evaporates is guns. Ethiopia now faces simultaneous challenges: a dispersed TPLF fighting asymmetrically, a multi-faction opposition alliance, a hostile Eritrea, regional spillover into Afar, and drone strikes reaching the capital. The war that ended in 2022 did not end. It paused.
