Eritrea withdrawing troops from Tigray

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Eritrean troops are leaving major cities in Ethiopia's northern region of Tigray, ruled by the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), a Bloomberg report said on Friday.

The Eritrean soldiers had been helping the Ethiopian government in Addis Ababa in its fight against the TPLF, but now they have turned to abandon the cities of Shire and Adwa on Ethiopia's northern border with Eritrea, a source told Bloomberg on the condition of anonymity.

The spokesperson for Ethiopia's government, Selamawit Kassa, refused to comment, and the Eritrean authorities also remained silent on the topic, according to the media. A representative of Tigray rebels said they could not confirm the full withdrawal of Eritrea from the region.

Both the Ethiopian government and the Eritrean authorities have remained silent on the topic, while a Tigray representative underlined that they could not confirm that Eritrea fully withdrew from the region.

The Ethiopian government and Tigray People's Liberation Fron (TPLF) announced on November 2 that they agreed on settling their dispute which has crippled Ethiopia over the past two years.

They took the resolve to "permanently silence the guns" by setting up a program of disarmament and integration of rebels and "end the two years of conflict in northern Ethiopia," the two parties said in a joint statement after marathon talks in South Africa.

Both parties had "concluded a peace agreement" following "intensive negotiations", the statement read, adding that they had agreed on a program of "disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration for TPLF combatants, taking into account the security situation on the ground."

"The agreement signed today in South Africa is monumental in moving Ethiopia forward on the path of the reforms we embarked upon four and a half years ago," Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said.

Meanwhile, days later, the Ethiopian government said the federal army now controlled 70% of the war-torn Tigray region in the country's north.

"70% of Tigray is under ENDF (Ethiopian National Defence Force)," Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's national security advisor Redwan Hussein said on Twitter. "Aid is flowing like no other time."

The six million-populated Tigray is still inaccessible to journalists, and access to northern Ethiopia is severely constrained.

Due to a severe humanitarian crisis brought on by a lack of food and medicine, the northernmost region of Ethiopia has limited access to basic services like electricity, banking, and communications.

Earlier in the week, however, a high-level Ethiopian team arrived in the capital of rebel-held Tigray for a first official visit following a peace deal aimed at ending a brutal two-year conflict.

An Ethiopian government statement said the delegation visiting the Tigrayan capital Mekele will "supervise the implementation of major issues in the peace agreement" signed on November 2.

The statement highlighted that "the delegation is the first of its stature as a high-level federal government body heading to Mekele in two years."

The war began in November 2020 when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sent troops into Tigray after accusing the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), the ruling party in the region, of attacking army bases.

The conflict has unleashed one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters in recent times. According to UN figures, more than two million people have been displaced, hundreds of thousands have been driven to the brink of famine and around 13.6 million people are dependent on humanitarian aid.

Of these, 5.4 million are in Tigray, seven in Amhara, and 1.2 million in Afar.