Ethiopian army claims ‘thwarting armed attempt to disrupt construction of GERD’
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EDF claimed that the attackers carried light and heavy weapons as well as mines during their infiltration, but were thwarted by the Ethiopian army who are monitoring the area round the clock.
he Ethiopian army claimed on Friday it defeated an attempt by “elements aligned with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF)” to disrupt construction work on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD).
A statement by the Ethiopian National Defence Force – also known as the FDRE Defence Force – cited an army commander as saying that the “attackers have joined our ‘historic enemies’ in an attempt to stall the construction of the dam, but they have failed,” but without identifying who these enemies are.
The statement quoted Colonel Seif Ingi, the operations coordinator in the Metekel Zone in the Benishangul-Gumuz region, as saying that the Ethiopian army killed “50 terrorists” and wounded over 70 others as they tried to infiltrate through the Sudanese border to the area where the GERD is being built.
Inji said that “the attackers carried light and heavy weapons as well as mines” during their infiltration, but were thwarted by the Ethiopian army who are monitoring the area round the clock.
The coordinator claimed that a large part of the armed elements fled “back to the north” after their defeat and the Ethiopian army seized some of their weapons and destroyed others.
He said the TPLF attempted to attack GERD construction because they mistakenly assumed that the majority of the Ethiopian army troops had moved to the north.
