Ethiopia faces a broader national threat after seven armed groups announced they have joined forces in a coalition they call the Alliance for Survival and said their aim is to remove the federal government in Addis Ababa.
The coalition brings together major actors from several of the country’s most contested regions, including the Fano militia in Amhara, the Oromo Liberation Army, and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, along with four smaller armed groupings. Collectively the groups are active across Oromia, Amhara and Tigray as well as Ogaden, Afar and Benishangul-Gumuz, covering six of Ethiopia’s 12 regional states.
The groups said the government has presided over conditions they described as war, genocide, mass destruction and utter poverty, and warned that Ethiopia faces the danger of disintegration. Federal authorities have not issued a public response to the manifesto announcing the alliance.
The announcement links conflicts that have simmered for years. Federal forces have been fighting the OLA since 2018. Amhara’s Fano fighters fought alongside government forces during the Tigray war but rejected orders to disarm and turned against Addis Ababa within a year of that conflict’s end. The two-year war in Tigray, which ended with an African Union-brokered peace deal in 2022, left hundreds of thousands dead and displaced millions, and has seen renewed tensions in recent months.
The new coalition follows months of reports about an alleged alignment between the TPLF and neighbouring Eritrea, a development that prompted Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to tell lawmakers in July he had faith in Ethiopia’s "defensive capabilities" and that he had not an iota of fear regarding Ethiopia’s sovereignty.
The Alliance for Survival also directly challenges the political legitimacy of the June general election, which returned Abiy’s Prosperity Party to an overwhelming parliamentary majority even as the vote was overshadowed by conflict, accusations of repression and limited opposition participation. The Fano and OLA explicitly rejected the poll; the Tigray region and its six million residents were excluded from the ballot.
What happens next is uncertain: the coalition expands organised armed opposition across much of the country, but federal authorities have yet to respond publicly. The immediate risk is renewed large-scale violence as groups that have fought separate wars coordinate across multiple regions.
