The Eritrean troops withdrew fully from Ethiopia’s Tigray region, eyewitnesses have told Mereja.com
According to eyewitness accounts, the troops played victory songs as they drove out of the Tigrayan towns including Axum, Adwa and Shire.
Video footage had shown the neighboring troops have left Tigray while loaded on Scania buses, Sinotruks and Isuzus while weaving the Eritrean flag.
The residents in the towns had been told to avoid the main street as “Eritrean forces were leaving,” the eyewitnesses said.
The presence of Eritrean forces was seen as an obstacle to the enforcement of the peace deal signed in South Africa in November between Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front.
Eritrean forces entered Ethiopia’s devastating conflict in its earliest days. The Ethiopian and Eritrean governments denied the participation of Eritrea until Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed acknowledged it in March 2021.
Rights groups, ethnic Tigrayans and some Western countries expressed alarm over the presence of Eritrean forces, which were blamed for right abuses.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had accused the TPLF of dragging Eritrea in the two-year conflict by firing rockets in the direction of the capital Asmara, during the first days of the onslaught.
TPLF had demanded the withdrawal of the Eritrean forces from Tigray as a precondition to give up heavy weapons as part of the peace deal.
