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| ©Al Jazeera: Military cargo offloaded from Ilyushin planes. |
Satellite imagery obtained
by Al Jazeera has revealed that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has opened an
air bridge to provide extensive military support to the Ethiopian government in
its fight against forces from the northern Tigray region.
The investigation found that between September and November, there were more than 90 flights between the UAE and Ethiopia, with many intentionally concealing from where they took off and where they landed.
The UAE has carried out the
extensive operation with the support of two private shipping companies: a
Spanish firm which organised 54 military-support flights between the UAE and
Ethiopia in less than a month, and a Ukrainian one which organised 39 military
cargo flights in two months.
Flight charts and satellite
images show aircraft recently arriving from Sweihan Base in Abu Dhabi, UAE, to
Harar Meda base, just south of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.
The images show a
Chinese-made Wing Loong drone, the first ever documented in Ethiopian military
bases. They also show the offloading of military cargo from Ilyushin cargo
aircraft.
The imagery also reveals
that the Samara and Axum bases were inoperative following clashes with the
Tigrayan forces, which said this week they were some 200km from Addis Ababa.
Much of northern Ethiopia is
under a communications blackout and access for journalists is severely
restricted, making battlefield claims difficult to verify.
Ethiopian state media said
on Wednesday that Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had gone to the front lines to lead
the Ethiopian army against the Tigrayan forces.
After months of tension,
Abiy in November 2020 sent troops to Tigray to remove the region’s governing
party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). The TPLF dominated the
federal government for nearly three decades until Abiy took office in 2018.
The prime minister, a 2019
Nobel Peace Prize laureate, promised a swift victory. His troops seized
Tigray’s capital, Mekelle, in late November but by June, the Tigrayan forces
had retaken most of the region and pushed into the neighbouring Amhara and Afar
regions.
In recent weeks, the
Ethiopian government has intensified a mass army recruitment drive amid hopes
that a reported shopping-spree acquisition of an arsenal of drones and other
weapons would give it an edge.
Ethiopia’s government signed
a military cooperation agreement with Turkey in August, amid reports it wanted
to deploy drones in the war.
“There have already been a
number of claims of the Chinese arming the Ethiopians with Wing Loong drones,
and the Turks have also been providing drones for the Ethiopians,” Martin
Plaut, senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the
University of London, told Al Jazeera.
“I think they [the UAE] are,
in a sense, a staging post for these weapons supplies. Some of them come
directly, some of them go through the UAE; but the UAE is clearly underwriting
what is happening.”
The year-long conflict has
killed tens of thousands of people, displaced more than two million and left
hundreds of thousands facing famine-like conditions.
United Nations
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday called for an immediate end to
the fighting in Ethiopia, as the United States warned there was “no military
solution” to the war.
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