The Strategy of Strangulation

An analyst in Oslo says Ethiopia’s war is not coming soon. The chorus of brink-watchers says the fuse is already lit. The unsettling possibility is that both are describing the same powder.

By E. Frashie · 29 June 2026

The question that hangs over Ethiopia this June — is war coming? — carries a hidden assumption: that war is a future event, an arrival, something that crosses a border or a date on the calendar. Muhammad Omar, a Horn of Africa analyst speaking to Firstpost Africa from Oslo, quietly declined the assumption. Asked directly whether the tension around Tigray would tip into conflict, he gave an answer that flatters no camp. War, he said, is not coming soon. And then, almost in the same breath, he closed the door he had just opened: it is not about will there be war, but a matter of when and how.

That is not a contradiction. It may be the most honest sentence spoken about Ethiopia in weeks — and it deserves to be taken apart slowly, against the record, rather than swallowed whole.

I. The View from Oslo

Omar’s argument rests on a reading of Abiy Ahmed’s method rather than his intentions. The Prime Minister, he contends, has no need of a Tigray offensive because he is already winning by other means. Tigray is strangulated — his word — without cash, without much medicine, without humanitarian aid, its civil servants unpaid, its regional budget withheld, the off-switches for electricity and the internet still resting in federal hands and not yet thrown. Why march on a region you can quietly throttle? Better, on this account, to let the regions wear themselves down: Amhara against Amhara, Oromo against Oromo, and now Tigrayan against Tigrayan, as the Front splinters between Getachew Reda’s ousted moderates and the Debretsion hardliners who seized the regional administration in May.

The conscription drive, in this reading, is not a war drum but a confession. A movement that still commanded genuine loyalty would not need to round up its young men. That the TPLF — which prosecuted a seventeen-year bush war without forced recruitment — now resorts to coercion is, Omar argues, the plainest measure of how far its popular support has fallen. People are leaving rather than enlisting. The mobilisation, he says, is desperation, not strength.

It is not about will there be war. It is just a matter of when and how.

II. The Evidence Beneath the Claim

Here the Tribune’s own standard requires that we test the analyst against the record, and the record is unkind to comfortable readings. Omar’s portrait of a desperate, coercive mobilisation is, if anything, understated. On 5 May the TPLF reasserted control over Tigray and removed the federally backed interim administration. In June it pushed through a mobilisation proclamation — forty-four pages, reaching back retroactively to the first day of the 2020 war — that makes military service a legal obligation and threatens evaders, and journalists who question the drive, with sentences of fifteen and twenty-five years, and in its gravest clauses with death. Human Rights Watch describes door-to-door round-ups that sweep up children and punish the parents of those who flee; the European Union, on 27 June, called the whole exercise a breach of the Pretoria agreement. Opposition figures inside Tigray have been blunter still, calling the law Eritrean in spirit and a device to salvage a legitimacy already in ruins.

So the strangulation thesis holds. But notice what it actually describes. A region without salaries, medicine or fuel; a leadership compelling its youth into uniform on pain of death; families fleeing across the federal line rather than answer the call-up. If this is peace, it is peace only in the narrow, technical sense that the artillery has not yet opened. Strangulation is not the absence of war. It is war conducted by other instruments — and, more dangerous still, it manufactures the very desperation in which someone eventually decides that the open kind is preferable.

III. The Brink-Watchers

Against Omar stands a chorus that has spent the year insisting the moment is now. The Atlantic Council judged the two states to be on the brink of war again. The Horn Review wrote of a drift toward catastrophe in which open hostilities looked increasingly likely — a war the Ethiopian Defence Forces might be forced to fight on three fronts at once, against Eritrea, the TPLF and the Amhara Fano, inside a framework coordinated from Asmara: the alignment Ethiopian officials have taken to calling Tsimdo. Foreign Policy placed an Ethiopia–Eritrea war among the conflicts most likely to erupt in 2026. At a February parade in the capital, soldiers stood beneath a banner declaring, in Amharic, that Ethiopia would not remain landlocked whether its neighbours liked it or not. The Red Sea, Assab, the sixty kilometres between the Ethiopian border and a rusting, half-disused port — Abiy has named maritime access a question of national survival, and survival is not a register in which compromise comes easily.

And yet the soberest voices in this camp arrive, by a different road, somewhere close to Omar. David Shinn, the former American ambassador, doubts a war will actually break out: the costs are ruinous, and even the present talk of it frightens off the foreign investment Abiy cannot do without. Martin Plaut observes that the great northern mobilisation cannot be sustained for long without leaving the Oromo and Amhara fronts dangerously exposed — a clock runs against Addis Ababa, not for it. The risk analysts at RANE judge a full invasion of Eritrea unlikely this year, and locate the real peril not in anyone’s decision to attack but in an escalation that no one chooses: a clash along the border that runs away from both capitals. That is a different thesis from Omar’s, but it shares his essential intuition — that no rational actor wants this war, and that the danger therefore lies elsewhere.

IV. The Web That Would Catch Fire

Omar’s second argument is the one the brink-watchers should weigh most carefully, because it concerns not whether the war begins but what it becomes. A war in Tigray, he insists, cannot remain in Tigray. Eritrea, having backed the Front, will not wait for the fighting to reach Asmara; it will choose to wage it on Tigrayan ground. Sudan’s army, locked in its own ruin, already has a hand in the same theatre. Behind them stand the Gulf patrons — the Emirates aligned with Addis Ababa, the Saudis and Eritreans inclined toward Sudan’s generals — and behind them the Red Sea lanes already disordered by the war on Iran. Then the newest thread: Israel’s movement toward Somaliland, the reported interest in a naval presence at Berbera, and the Houthi promise to treat any such base as a target. The African Union, in Omar’s flat verdict, is almost powerless, absent from every mechanism that might matter.

On the particulars, an editor must be careful where an analyst, speaking live, was loose: the documented external sponsor of Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces is the United Arab Emirates, not the actor Omar named in passing, and the distinction matters for any honest map of patronage. But the architecture he sketches is sound, and it is corroborated daily. Washington has now imposed visa restrictions on hardline TPLF figures even as it edges toward a rapprochement with Asmara; the sea-lanes are contested; the patrons are arrayed. The question Omar leaves hanging is the right one: if the shooting starts, which of these sponsors stays on the touchline?

V. When, Not If

What, then, of the question we began with? The honest answer is that Omar and the brink-watchers are not, in the end, disagreeing about the facts. They are disagreeing about the verb. The kindling is not in dispute — a strangled region, a coerced mobilisation, a maritime grievance dressed as survival, a ring of foreign patrons, a continental body that cannot act. The dispute is only whether the fuse is already burning or merely laid in place.

Omar’s wager is that Abiy prefers the slow method, and that the slow method buys time. It is a shrewd reading of a ruler who has, again and again, profited from letting others bleed. But it underrates the logic of its own central metaphor. Strangulation does not relax tension; it concentrates it. A leadership convinced it faces extinction does not pause to weigh foreign investment or the price of oil; it reaches for the only instrument that still promises survival. Omar himself supplied the trapdoor: if any one of them feels there is an existential threat, then it is possible. In a Tigray stripped of salaries and medicine and ordered to the front on pain of death, the existential threat is not a hypothesis to be debated. It is the daily weather.

So perhaps the question is the wrong one. To ask whether war is coming presumes that war is an event still to arrive, and that someone, somewhere, is deciding whether to summon it. The more exacting question — the one that does not let power hide behind tempo — is whether anyone with the means to stop it actually wishes to. On the evidence of this June, the silence is itself an answer.

E. Frashie · The Ethiopian Tribune