NAIROBI (Somaliguardian) – Ethiopia’s Tigray forces said on Wednesday they had agreed with Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) to form a military alliance against the government of the Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed, a move that could signal a widening of 9-month-long conflict in the northern war-wrecked region of Tigray that now spreads to other parts of Africa’s second most populous nation.
“We are in talks with the Oromo Liberation Army,” Debretsion Gebremichael, leader of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), told Reuters.
A spokesman for the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the region’s ruling party, whose forces have been fighting Ethiopian federal troops in the region since November of last year, said in an interview with Reuters that “some sort of agreement” was in the works. “It’s only natural that we work together with people who have a stake in the future of the Ethiopian state.”
It comes after the leader of Ethiopia’s Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) said the armed group struck a military alliance with the TPLF in push to remove the current Ethiopian prime minister from power.
“The only solution now is overthrowing this government militarily, speaking the languague they want to be spoken to,” Oromo Liberation Army leader Kumsa Diriba, also known as Jaal Marroo, told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
“We have agreed on a level of understanding to cooperate against the same enemy, especially in military cooperation.”
A spokesperson for OLA revealed that the group shares intelligence information and coordinates strategy with Tigray forces, but the agreement “was at a very early stage”. The military alliance is “based on mutual understanding that Abiy’s dictatorship must be removed”, he told Reuters.
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