Ethiopia Blames Egypt for a War It Cannot Control. The Renaissance Dam Is Now in Rebel Country

The accusation also shows that Addis Ababa’s peace efforts have failed. The seven groups do not share one goal. The Tigrayans want their land back; the Amhara complain that they are denied justice and fair treatment; each movement fights the federal army for reasons of its own. What unites them is hostility to Abiy. The obvious strategy against such a coalition is to break it apart with separate deals, offering each group what it wants. Blaming Cairo instead is an admission that the separate deals have not worked.

Abiy has a reason to prefer a military solution. There is a reason some states, Sweden among them, avoid sending their armies abroad: an army that goes to war comes home with a bill. The wounded must be treated, soldiers honoured, salaries raised. Every government pays that bill to its own army, and a government that fights alongside militias and foreign allies pays far more. In the 2020–2022 war against Tigray, Abiy fought with Fano, Oromo forces and Eritrea’s army at his side. When it ended, each partner presented its demands, and the failure to meet them is part of why former allies are now in the same alliance as the TPLF.

This time Abiy has no partners. If he defeats all seven movements, he owes nobody anything and rules alone, stronger than ever. That is the prize. But the army chief’s accusation suggests the battle is not under control.

The federal army’s basic problem is that it faces not one enemy but many, each fighting on home ground. The Tigrayans fight in Tigray, Fano in Amhara, the Oromo Liberation Army in Oromia. Every group is capturing federal soldiers, and the army cannot defend everywhere at once. It appears to have chosen to concentrate on Tigray, the strongest of the movements.

Getting there is the hard part. Military convoys heading north climb narrow mountain roads, where columns are easily ambushed, cut off and captured. That is exactly what the rebels’ own videos show.

Sudan has little time for Birhanu’s accusations; it is fighting its own civil war. And Ethiopia’s crisis is helping it. A Reuters investigation reported in February that Ethiopia was hosting a camp in Benishangul-Gumuz where about 4,300 fighters for Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were being trained, with Emirati support, and RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo reportedly visited Addis Ababa in late August.

The compass has now flipped. Abiy, who was helping the RSF in its bid to take Sudan, has no allies at home and is drawing on RSF forces to face the Tigrayans. The result is visible across the border: the Sudanese army is advancing fast through Kordofan against RSF lines that are being drained for someone else’s war. On September 25 it retook Sodari, one of North Kordofan’s largest localities.

Nothing connects Egypt to these groups: no weapons, no planning, no intelligence operation. Cairo did not even dignify the claim with a Foreign Ministry statement. An Egyptian source told Asharq Al-Awsat that these were “allegations that do not merit a response” and that Cairo “has nothing to do with such polemics”. The Egyptian strategic expert Samir Ragheb made the obvious point to the same newspaper: if Egypt had wanted to intervene, it would have done so during the 2020 fighting, before the dam was finished.

Egypt’s silence is the right answer to an accusation this empty. Israeli media have tried to find the same link and come up with nothing but anonymous accounts and former commanders’ speculation. Neither Israel nor Ethiopia has been able to put a finger on any evidence.

For Egypt, Ethiopia’s war is good news and a danger at once. The good news is weakness. Ethiopia’s economy is in crisis. It defaulted on its only Eurobond in December 2023 and is still working through a restructuring nearly three years later. It is effectively bankrupt, unable to meet its debts, and now it is at war with itself.

Abiy puts on a show regardless. One Egyptian website claimed this week that he had “reached the Red Sea” with a deal in Djibouti. The deal is a fuel pipeline: a $660 million, 120 km line from Djibouti’s Damerjog port to Dewele in Ethiopia, and Ethiopia is not paying for it. Aliko Dangote, the Nigerian billionaire, is helping to fund it, and he will be repaid many times over.

The dams depend on the same borrowed money. In March the Water and Energy Ministry announced three more Blue Nile dams, Karadobi, Mandaya and Beko Abo. Abiy’s government has also turned to Italy, where three banks are lining up €400 million for the Koysha hydropower dam. Any lender now has to ask a simple question: will a government at war with seven armed movements repay? It will not, and the loans will dry up. Egypt has nothing to do with Ethiopia’s war, but it can see that the war is good for Egypt.

This is the risk Cairo cannot ignore. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Africa’s largest hydropower plant, inaugurated in September 2025 without a binding agreement with Egypt or Sudan, stands in Benishangul-Gumuz near the Sudanese border. Egypt depends on the Nile for more than 90 per cent of its fresh water. And two of the region’s armed movements are members of the alliance. If rebels take control of the area around the dam, the workers and engineers who run it will leave. A dam nobody operates is a dam whose gates nobody opens, and then Egypt’s share of the water does not arrive.

That is how a weak Ethiopia imports a foreign threat without noticing. A government too weak to hold the most important facility it has ever built, a project it presents as the nation’s pride while bitcoin miners consume almost a third of the country’s electricity rather than Ethiopian homes, risks provoking the anger of other states simply because it cannot manage its own dam in the middle of a war.

The most dangerous outcome for Ethiopia is a war of attrition, and that is the likeliest one. The federal army cannot win quickly. Its main weapon is the drone, and the TPLF has already fought through a drone war in 2022. The rebels are guerrillas, not a regular army with bases and bunkers. They move through mountains and forest on foot, in sandals, with nothing tying them to fixed positions. A drone can kill a man, not a division. This is not Russia and Ukraine, where drones hit facilities and armoured vehicles. Here there is little for them to hit.

Claims from the front contradict each other, as they always do in war: the army says it is advancing and has killed more than 270 fighters, the Tigrayans say the same of themselves, and neither account can be taken at face value. But a long war would be catastrophic for Addis Ababa in three ways. It would lose the RSF, whose real goal is Sudan; once the RSF is pushed back there and the Sudanese army recovers its strength, reopening that front becomes far harder. African governments that admire Abiy as the genius who built a dam would come to see him as the man who built a dam and could not pay his debts while his economy collapsed. And the money spent on the war would turn a distressed economy into an officially bankrupt one.

Then, with the north in flames, Ethiopia went to the UN to press an old demand. During the General Assembly week, Ethiopian officials put sea access on the global agenda, and Ethiopia’s envoy, a former foreign minister, asked to discuss the country’s right to reach the Red Sea. Secretary-General António Guterres put him in his place: pursuing sea access by force would violate international law, and the only thing the UN cares about in Ethiopia is its own people.

A violation of international law can be taken to the Security Council, and a united Council turns a regional dispute into a world problem for Ethiopia. And the demand itself is absurd. A government that cannot get from Addis Ababa to its own northern border wants to talk about reaching the Red Sea.