Thread by @althecat

Everyday a new fresh hell with this guy.

Now he is gaslighting the starving people of Wollo, TPLF 10s if not 100s of thousands of hostages, telling the world that he is trying to help the very people whose homes his forces have burned, whose food his forces have stolen.

And that this is somehow Abiy Ahmed Ali's fault, because with this guy everything is always Abiy Ahmed Ali's fault.

There is a strange joy that senior members of the TPLF seem to take in placing people in impossible moral quandaries.

The TPLF army invaded Wollo, found itself surrounded, attacked the civilian population, displaced much of it, but is now holding the remaining population as hostages.

The ENDF is in a bind because if it attacks it risks those remaining being used as human shields.

An army that is willing on multiple occasions to send in children to soak up the first round of fire and demoralise the enemy by making them killed drugged up children is a very difficult enemy to fight.

There is in fact some truth to the US/UN/EU assertion that in this case there is no military solution. There is only military carnage. Because this is not a military it is some kind of deep perversion of everything that any real military stands for.

The only solution to this nightmare that I have been able to see now for months is for the Western Powers who have mindlessly backed these monsters to engage with their brains and make a simple judgment.

What is/will cause more harm.
a) Continuing to support the TPLF
b) Switching their support to the legitimate legal govt. of Ethiopia.

Absent the active western public relations defence that the TPLF enjoys, they will quit. They are running on empty now.

The TPLF wants to recruit 30k new child soldiers to make up for the 30k they have killed already on the battlefield. They are stealing aid to feed themselves.

The ENDF has 2.5 million recruits of legal age in uniforms who have undergone training and who just need guns.

7 days ago the TPLF's Army 1 was defeated in North Gondar & failed in its effort to relieve Army 2, currently trapped in Wollo currently where it is causing a genocide through starvation.

Around that time a drone strike took out TPLF's rebel "Tigray President" Debretsion's car.

Also in Tigray an attempt to breakout to the West near Humera by TPLF forces resulted in the decimation of several more TPLF divisions, partly at the hands of Eritrean forces who are defending that area.

Meanwhile ENDF drones are steadily degrading TPLF's heavy weaponry.

The war is effectively over, at least the military part of it. The diplomatic side of this is rapidly metastasizing in multiple ways which are all harmful to the Western Powers who have so spectacularly miscalculated what is happening in this "Geopolitically Strategic" region.

My intelligence on all of this is doubtless a lot worse than there's unless there is an even bigger screwup going on here and the rich west is actually relying on deeply screwed up intel provided by @RabdiAnalyst and @Dibjir and @SahanResearch.

I would have thought this was impossible, but given the increasingly Joseph Heller/Franz Kafka nature of what I am observing is increasingly the only possible explanation for what I am seeing unfold before my eyes.

Much of my work over the past few months has focused on the media side of this, which is really where my expertise is sharpest.
But increasingly, as more and more crazy things start happening... e.g Everything Reda says / #Abdiwahad / #Wollo & now Djibouti's President dying....

.. and then today the shocked look on @RepKarenBass's face as she received a bog standard Amhara position briefing on the evils of the TPLF. Actually a very light one really.... and its obvious she knows none of this even though she sits on the U.S. HoR Foreign Affairs Cmtte.

I've come to the conclusion that the real problem in this war above all else is information. There is no common reality. Between the GoE and Tigray Diasporas, between the Govt of Ethiopia and the Govt's of US/EU and the UN.

It's not that there aren't facts. There is always a truth. But just as in America over the "Big Lie" when the diverging truths get so far apart that you can't see each others facts, have no idea what your opponent actually believes, then it is impossible to even talk/agree.

But in this case the crazy nut-job southern truthers/stop the steal/ anti-vaxers are the U.S. Govt, the State Dept., CNN, The Telegraph, The Guardian, Chatham House, HRW, Amnesty.

Surely that's not possible?

And it seems insane to say it. But from what I can tell its true. This war in Ethiopia has been fought in some kind of Maxwell Smart truth dome, where the truth can't escape from twitter into the real world.

Very odd indeed. But this really does seem to be what is happening.

/Rant ends

This rant was inspired by @Qnie_Addis so you can blame him.