The Amhara side of this escalation remains the geography that international desks still under-cover. Heavy clashes were reported in North Wollo Zone on Thursday, including around Lalibela, the UNESCO World Heritage district that holds Ethiopia’s rock-hewn churches. AFP said the army now claims it has killed more than 700 fighters of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, after earlier army statements put Thursday’s North Wollo counteroffensive at 272 TPLF fighters killed and 260 wounded. Those casualty numbers have not been independently verified, and the army has not published matching figures for federal soldiers or civilians. Readers should treat the jump from 272 to “more than 700” as an attributed claim, not a confirmed body count.
ACLED’s September 24 and 25 conflict alerts place the Amhara fighting in named woredas rather than in vague “north” language. Jalale Getachew Birru wrote that clashes continued in Gazgibela woreda in Wag Hemra Zone and in Gidan, Lasta, and Raya Kobo woredas in North Wollo, where ENDF units, Tigray Peace Forces, Amhara Riot Police, and local militia confronted the Amhara Fano National Movement and the Tigray Defense Forces. ACLED also described joint TDF and Amhara Fano National Movement pressure along the Kobo-Tumuga direction and related fighting on the Zata, Dinqa, and Sekota lines of the Tigray-Amhara border. When Fano and Tigrayan units share those Amhara place names, North Wollo stops being a side corridor and becomes a main front in Abiy Ahmed’s wider war.
A humanitarian source in Afar told AFP there was heavy fighting overnight around Abala, including drone strikes, as federal forces tried to stop rebels from entering the town. That Afar push sits beside analyst warnings that Tigrayan strategy again aims south through Amhara toward Addis Ababa while pressure on Afar threatens the Djibouti corridor that carries almost all of Ethiopia’s seaborne trade, including fuel. Edward Bach of Verisk Maplecroft told AFP the alliance is likely trying to seize settlements beside key infrastructure routes to undermine federal supply. For Amhara civilians near Lalibela, Kobo, and Wag Hemra, those “infrastructure routes” are the same roads that carry food, clinics, and market traffic.
The political cover for joint Fano-TPLF operations arrived with the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, announced Sunday and listed by ACLED, Al Jazeera, and Reuters as bringing together the Amhara Fano National Movement, the TPLF, the Oromo Liberation Army, and groups from Somali, Afar, and Benishangul-Gumuz regions. TPLF vice president Amanuel Assefa told AFP on Thursday that Tigrayan forces were in a “full-blown war” with the federal government and confirmed fighting alongside local armed groups in Afar and Amhara. Al Jazeera and Reuters carried the same full-blown-war language, and Reuters separately reported that Tigrayan leaders face internal discord even as they collect new allies, including overnight detention of veteran commanders who had expressed doubts about the war.
ACLED CEO Clionadh Raleigh said on Friday that she would not yet call Ethiopia “at war again” in the sense of an immediate state of emergency like November 2020, but she also said she could not see the brakes that would stop further escalation. “I don’t expect this to go back to a quiet, low-intensity conflict. There are too many interests involved now,” Raleigh said in ACLED’s September 25 update, language AFP also quoted. Jalale Getachew Birru added that the alliance’s members do not share one ideology and that even a successful push against Abiy Ahmed’s government would not automatically bring stability. Those cautions matter for Amhara readers who remember that Fano and the TPLF fought on opposite sides in the last war and still hold competing claims over western Tigray territories.
Federal messaging has stayed on rebellion and foreign interference. Ethiopian President Taye Atske Selassie Amde told the UN General Assembly the country faced “forces of destruction and mayhem” and interference by adversarial elements. The U.S. embassy said it was disappointed to see TPLF leadership launch a large-scale offensive after Washington had only recently lifted related sanctions. AFP noted the federal side’s drone arsenal, a large army, and support from external actors, notably the United Arab Emirates. Reuters analysts said federal forces still hold manpower and technology advantages, while prolonged Amhara fighting has already strained morale and resources. None of that advantage has stopped Fano from remaining active across Amhara for more than three years.
Zegabi’s English reporting on Thursday and Friday put Amhara civilian geography back into the same paragraph as the Tigray return to open war. One Zegabi piece tracked the army’s 272 claim through North Wollo and Lalibela and noted that Fano is now named beside TPLF units in parts of the zone. Another Zegabi piece followed Afar fighting toward supply routes and Abala. The Amhara Association of America’s September 14 to 20 war update, written before this week’s airport seizures, already logged battle events across more than 21 woreda or city administrations in eleven Amhara zones, with civilian casualties, abductions, and drone activity in named places including North Wollo. AAA also recorded the Alliance for Survival announcement. AAA is a U.S.-based advocacy NGO that documents Amhara-side harm, so its framing should be read carefully. Even with that caveat, its multi-zone ledgers undercut Abiy Ahmed’s long claim that Amhara operations are a contained cleanup.
AAA’s September 24 statement on Amhara prisoners of conscience adds a civilian file that battlefield briefings usually skip. The group said more than twenty-nine high-profile Amhara detainees remain held under Abiy Ahmed’s regime and described continued arbitrary detention tied to Amhara identity and political views since the Amhara war widened in 2023. That ledger does not prove every North Wollo claim this week, but it shows Amhara political space remains closed while Abiy Ahmed’s government asks the world to treat northern fighting as a sudden TPLF surprise.
Panic buying in Tigray sits beside that Amhara record as another civilian signal. Samuel Gebreslassie, a spice-shop worker in Mekelle, told AFP there was panic in the community and deep fear that banks, telecom networks, electricity, and basic goods could be cut off again. AFP said prices for basic goods had spiked as people raced to stock up. Internet disruption confirmed by Netblocks makes those fears harder to dismiss as rumor. During the last war, communications cuts helped hide atrocity patterns that later filled rights-group files, so a fresh telecoms shutdown while North Wollo and Abala burn is not a technical footnote.
Verification limits should stay on the page. AFP could not independently verify the army’s rising TPLF kill counts. Territorial control claims around Abala and Yallo rest partly on humanitarian sources and local reports rather than open satellite confirmation in the English wires above. ACLED’s woreda clash list is stronger than a single anonymous tip, but it is still not a street-level map every reader can check. Forced-recruitment accusations against the TPLF, repeated by rights groups and wire services, remain contested inside a closed information environment. What the public record does support is internet disruption in the north, SIM panic in Tigray, heavy fighting in North Wollo including Lalibela’s district, drone and artillery pressure around Abala, a Fano-TPLF combat partnership on Amhara approaches, and ACLED’s judgment that systemic brakes on escalation are hard to see.
For Amhara communities, the practical questions are immediate. Will joint Fano-TPLF operations draw more federal drones into woredas AAA already lists as active? Will Abiy Ahmed’s regime answer with wider air campaigns that hit farms, schools, and market days while Mekelle waits for SIM cards that work? Will IDPs who already say food aid has gone silent face another season of empty kitchens while North Wollo becomes a corridor in a larger northern war? Friday’s AFP and ACLED reporting finally put internet cuts, Lalibela, Abala, and Fano into one continuous map. That map centers Amhara civilian geography, not only Tigray airport politics, and it does not go quiet when Netblocks logs another outage.
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