The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission put official weight behind the geography of this week’s war. In a September 25 statement, EHRC said it had confirmed that militants deployed by the group calling itself the Tigray People’s Liberation Front crossed into neighboring areas of Afar and Amhara beginning at about 3:00 a.m. on September 22. The commission said conflicts broke out between government security forces and militants in Wag Hemra Zone along the Tigray-Amhara border and in Lasta Woreda of North Wollo Zone. EHRC Chief Commissioner Berhanu Adello called the fighting deeply concerning and urged the parties, especially Pretoria Agreement signatories, to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure and to return to dialogue. The commission warned that the conflict is already harming civilians’ rights to life, physical security, freedom of movement, and daily livelihoods.
ACLED’s September 24 and 25 conflict alerts map the same Amhara corridor with named woredas rather than vague “north” language. Jalale Getachew Birru wrote that fighting had spread across Wag Hemra and North Wollo, with ENDF units, Tigray Peace Forces, Amhara Riot Police, and local militia confronting the Amhara Fano National Movement and Tigray Defense Forces. ACLED logged clashes in Gazgibela woreda in Wag Hemra and in Gidan, Lasta, and Raya Kobo woredas in North Wollo, plus joint TDF and Fano pressure along the Kobo-Tumuga direction and related fighting on the Zata, Dinqa, and Sekota lines. That pairing matters for Amhara readers. When Fano and TPLF-aligned units share those place names, Wag Hemra and North Wollo stop reading as side corridors and become main fronts in Abiy Ahmed’s wider northern war.
Kulu Media also underlined a distinction that English wires sometimes flatten. TPLF-aligned fighters are operating against federal forces in parts of Amhara, while the Tigray Peace Forces, described as a rival formation largely made up of former TDF members, have been reported fighting alongside the federal side. That split inside Tigrayan ranks does not soften the civilian map for Amhara towns. It does mean readers should be careful when an army communique or alliance statement speaks of “Tigrayan fighters” as if every Tigrayan unit shares one chain of command.
The army’s body-count claims have climbed quickly and remain contested. On September 24, Al Jazeera reported that the Ethiopian National Defense Force said it had killed at least 272 TPLF fighters in a counteroffensive in northwest Amhara, with another 260 wounded and several captured after attacks in North Wollo. By Friday’s AFP reporting, carried by Dawn on September 26, the army said it had killed more than 700 TPLF fighters in Amhara while giving no matching numbers for federal soldiers or civilians. Kulu Media separately reported a September 25 ENDF claim of 436 fighters killed, 220 wounded, and 44 captured in another round of fighting, and said it could not independently verify those figures. Readers should treat the jump from 272 to “more than 700” as successive attributed claims, not a confirmed body count. Abiy Ahmed’s regime has again asked the public to accept battlefield arithmetic without an open civilian ledger.
For Amhara communities, the practical geography is Sekota’s role as an administrative and transport center in Wag Hemra. Fighting around the town can disrupt movement between northern Amhara and areas bordering southern Tigray, the same roads that carry market traffic, clinics, and family visits. Kulu Media noted that clashes have also been reported around Gidan, Lasta, and Raya Kobo in North Wollo, while fighting near Lalibela has disrupted air travel. AFP said heavy fighting broke out in western Tigray at May Gaba and Tselimo according to ACLED, and a humanitarian source in Afar described heavy overnight fighting and drone strikes around Abala as federal forces tried to keep rebels from entering the town. Those Afar and western Tigray fronts sit beside the Amhara map rather than replacing it.
The political cover for joint 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. AFP said an eighth group, the Sidama Liberation Front, claimed it had joined on Friday. 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. ACLED CEO Clionadh Raleigh said 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 language AFP also quoted.
Zegabi’s English reporting has kept Amhara civilian geography in the same frame as the Tigray return to open fighting. A September 25 Zegabi piece tracked NetBlocks’ reading of a subnational internet disruption in northern Ethiopia matching reports of a telecoms blackout in Tigray, and it noted that for Amhara communities along the northern front in North Wollo and Wag Hemra, a northern communications blackout makes an already contested war harder to follow and harder for relatives to reach. An earlier Zegabi report on the Amhara Association of America’s September 7 to 13 weekly update logged battle events across eight Amhara zones, including North Wollo, and recorded civilian harm claims that undercut Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party claim that Amhara operations are a contained cleanup. 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 sit beside this week’s Sekota and Wag Hemra reports as evidence that Amhara has not been pacified.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres raised the alarm on Friday, AFP reported, with his spokesman saying he was “particularly troubled by reports of the use of drones as well as incidents of harm to civilians.” EHRC’s September 25 statement had already named Wag Hemra and Lasta as active conflict zones and linked airport seizures in Mekelle, Shire, and Axum to halted flights and cut land routes that create shortages and price spikes. Those institutional warnings matter for Amhara readers who remember that drone strikes and communications cuts in earlier rounds of Abiy Ahmed’s wars often arrived before full casualty lists reached English desks.
Verification limits should stay on the page. Kulu Media has not independently confirmed that TPLF-aligned forces have established full control of Sekota, only that fighters reportedly entered on Friday evening. AFP could not independently verify the army’s rising kill counts. 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 from outside the war zone. Telecom disruption and contested body counts make independent reporting harder at the same moment civilians need it most. What the public record does support is EHRC confirmation of conflict in Wag Hemra and North Wollo from September 22, ACLED’s named Amhara fronts including the Sekota axis, a reported fighter entry into Sekota on September 25, successive unverified ENDF casualty claims climbing past 700, a Fano-TPLF combat partnership on Amhara approaches, and Raleigh’s judgment that systemic brakes on escalation are hard to see.
For Amhara communities in Wag Hemra and North Wollo, the immediate questions are about roads, clinics, phones, and whether Abiy Ahmed’s regime answers a reported push into Sekota with wider air campaigns that hit farms and market days while civilian harm stays off the army’s Facebook tallies. Friday’s local and rights-commission reporting finally puts Sekota, Wag Hemra, EHRC, and contested army body counts into one continuous Amhara map. That map centers civilian geography in Abiy Ahmed’s Amhara war, not only Tigray airport politics, and it does not go quiet when a zonal capital becomes the next contested line.
Sources:
Kulu Media Ethiopian Human Rights Commission ACLED Al Jazeera AFP / Dawn Zegabi Zegabi