In November 2020, Amhara regional forces and Fano militias moved into western Tigray alongside the Ethiopian federal army and Eritrean troops. They fought the Tigray People's Liberation Front. By the end of the war that followed, the TPLF had been beaten back to Mekelle and a peace was signed at Pretoria.
Today, federal forces are fighting an alliance that contains both the TPLF and the Amhara Fano National Movement.
The same Fano. The same TPLF. On the same side now.
How this happened, briefly
The Pretoria agreement ended the fighting between Addis Ababa and the TPLF and left the question of western Tigray — claimed by both Tigray and Amhara — unresolved. Amhara forces who had taken that territory were not party to the deal and did not accept what it implied.
Within months the federal government moved to dissolve regional special forces, including Amhara's. Fano formations refused and an insurgency began in Amhara in April 2023. For two years the federal army fought in Amhara the irregular forces that had fought for it in Tigray.
So by 2026 the government had two enemies who also had a reason to dislike each other, and the thing they shared was the government. Alliances are rarely more complicated than that.
Why it matters for reading the news
Three practical consequences.
First, a claim that "the rebels" did something tells you almost nothing. The alliance announced on 20 September has seven members and, until this week, only one was publicly named. RFI now names a second — the Amhara Fano National Movement. Five remain unidentified. An attribution to the alliance is an attribution to a name, not to an actor.
Second, geography stops predicting allegiance. Fighting in Amhara is not automatically Fano, fighting in Tigray is not automatically TPLF, and a front that spans Tigray, Amhara and Afar can involve forces that were killing each other three years ago.
Third, the Eritrea accusation becomes legible without becoming proven. Asmara fought alongside Addis Ababa against the TPLF. The charge now is that it backs an alliance including the TPLF. That sounds absurd until you notice that Eritrea's constant is not who it supports but who it opposes, and that Ethiopia's ambitions for a port have grown louder throughout. We assess the arming claim at roughly an even chance and have seen no published evidence for it. The pattern being coherent is not the same as the claim being true.
What this does not mean
Fighting on the same side is not a joint command. We have no visibility into how far operations are co-ordinated, whether these groups share objectives beyond removing the current administration, or what they intend for each other afterwards. Fano is not one organisation but a name covering many local formations that have never all acted together.
Alliances built on a shared enemy have a specific failure mode: they hold until the enemy is gone. The territory dispute that put Fano and the TPLF on opposite sides in the first place has not been settled by either of them joining the same coalition.
What we are watching
The names of the remaining five members. Any evidence, rather than accusation, of external supply. And whether the western Tigray question surfaces inside the alliance, because that is where it would break.