Ethiopia accuses Egypt and Sudan of sustaining rebel alliance
Ethiopia's army chief, Birhanu Jula, says the seven-group front cannot advance without supplies from Egypt and Sudan, and that Eritrea serves as a bridge. Cairo denies it; none of the accusations have been independently verified.
The Ethiopian army was reported to have retaken Sekota, in northern Amhara, on Sunday, September 27, 2026, and the military command presented the moment as proof of containment: the war in the north is being waged with “wisdom and restraint,” according to Al Jazeera. In the same round of statements, the chief of staff, Birhanu Jula, said that the fighting is not decided on Ethiopian soil. He was referring to the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), which governs the region, and to neighboring Eritrea.
“Neither Shaebia (Eritrea) nor the TPLF can achieve anything on their own, even as allies, unless they are pushed, supported and supplied by Sudan, Egypt and other external powers,” said the chief of staff of the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF), in remarks broadcast on the army's YouTube channel and recorded by France 24.
The statement circulated in Ethiopian outlets between Friday, September 25, 2026, and Sunday, and the Arabic daily Asharq Al-Awsat recorded the accusation against Cairo and Khartoum while reporting Egypt's response. Jula also assigned Eritrea the role of bridge between the external patrons and the armed groups operating inside Ethiopia.
Egypt's response came from an unnamed source
Egypt rejected what it called an insinuation, and an informed Egyptian source told Asharq Al-Awsat that the Ethiopian commander's remarks are “allegations that do not merit a response” and that Cairo “has nothing to do with this controversy.” The same source recommended that Ethiopian authorities attend to their own internal crises instead of attributing their domestic failures to external agents, and reaffirmed a policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries.
An expert on Egyptian strategic and military affairs, Samir Ragheb laid out the argument that matters to those who deny the claim: if Cairo wanted to intervene in Ethiopia to pressure it on other issues, it would have done so in 2020, when the previous war was at its height and before the Blue Nile dam's construction phases were completed. Ragheb attributed Ethiopia's mention of external support to geography, since Tigray borders Sudan and Eritrea to the north.
The accusation does not fall into a void
Cairo and Khartoum have accumulated open disputes with Addis Ababa, and that is what gives weight to the commander's remarks even without proof.
Egypt depends on the Nile for its fresh water and lost the diplomatic battle over the dam. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), on the Blue Nile, was inaugurated on September 9, 2025, after filling stages carried out without the binding agreement that Cairo and Khartoum had demanded. In September 2026, a new exchange of statements soured the issue: Ethiopia's minister of water and energy, Habtamu Itefa, said that Ethiopians had taken “the key to the Abay,” the Ethiopian name for the Blue Nile, and that the river could no longer flow as it pleased. Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty evoked Egypt's right to self-defense, and former Foreign Ministry aide Mohamed Hegazy read the statements as a warning that any additional dam on the Blue Nile would be an unjustified hostile act and an existential challenge to the country's water security. Ethiopia has three projects announced on the Blue Nile — Karadobi, Mandaya and Beko Abo — with combined capacity greater than that of the GERD, and Cairo has no coercive instrument to stop their construction.
With Sudan, the rupture is more recent and more raw. Since May 2026, Khartoum has accused Ethiopia of allowing drones to depart from Bahir Dar airport to strike Sudanese targets, including Khartoum International Airport, and the Sudanese government recalled its ambassador in Addis Ababa for consultations. Ethiopia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected the accusations as baseless and responded that the Sudanese army armed and financed Tigrayan fighters, besides maintaining that Sudan serves as a base for anti-Ethiopian forces. On September 17, 2026, Sudanese chief of staff Yasser al-Atta went further and said that Ethiopia is seeking to exploit the Sudanese civil war to seize territory on the border. Neither side has produced public proof that would end the dispute, and investigations into bases on Ethiopian territory used by Sudanese forces — such as Reuters' from February 2026 and that of the Yale School of Public Health laboratory from April 2026 — remain contested by Addis Ababa.
The problem with the thesis for those who state it
The accusation of external sponsorship has a practical difficulty: the army making it is not a poor army. France 24 describes the Ethiopian government at war with about 500,000 soldiers, a drone arsenal and significant external support, notably from the United Arab Emirates. If the rule is that those who receive help from abroad do not decide their own war, Addis Ababa would have to explain how its own material advantage escapes that rule.
Sunday's statement is, above all, a diplomatic act. Attributing the sponsorship of three neighboring states to a rebellion is what allows it to be denied political status, what allows the front of seven groups to be treated as an instrument of third parties, and what allows a claim to the right to defend territorial integrity against aggression from outside. Each side's vocabulary does this work: the Ethiopian command speaks of “wisdom and restraint,” the TPLF speaks of a “defensive war” against what it calls an open invasion, and much of the international press calls the whole thing a civil war — a label that erases precisely the patrons Addis Ababa says exist.
What the war has already changed without any patron
The escalation steps of the past month do not depend on the accusation to be verifiable. On September 20, 2026, seven groups announced the Alliance of Ethiopian Peoples' Forces for Survival, with the declared aim of removing Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and installing a transitional administration, bringing together forces that fought one another in the 2020–2022 war, among them the TPLF, the Fano National Movement and the Oromo Liberation Army. On September 22, 2026, federal airstrikes, some with drones, hit five schools in Tigray, and a mortar attack in Kobo, in Amhara, killed civilians, according to United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk. On September 23, 2026, Tigrayan forces seized three federal airports in Tigray, and Ethiopian Airlines suspended flights to the region. The fighting spread along the Kobo-Tumuga, Zata, Dinqa, Sekota and Tonsa lines, and internet and telephone services were cut across nearly all of Tigray.
The Ethiopian army claims to have killed 272 Tigrayan fighters and wounded 260 others in North Wollo. Türk also recorded “mass forced recruitment of civilians, including children, by the TPLF throughout Tigray,” which places the other party under the same type of accusation it levels at the government. The UN envoy to the Horn of Africa, Guang Cong, is trying to reopen the dialogue envisioned in the Pretoria agreement of November 2022, with support from the African Union, while Secretary-General António Guterres follows the case.
What limits both sides is symmetrical in form and unequal in content. The alliance has no single command and brings together projects that exclude one another, such as the independence of Oromia and the TPLF's return to power, and it would need coordination to sustain an offensive for months. The government holds the material advantage and says it prefers not to commit it — which also describes the limits of anyone who must contain several fronts at once across several regions of the country.
The Pretoria agreement governed the relationship between two parties. The Ethiopian commander's statement asks that the next order be negotiated in Cairo, Khartoum and Asmara as well, and that the dispute over the Nile's waters be read as part of the war. No one has presented proof that the patrons exist, and the cost of raising that hypothesis as an official accusation is already on the record: from September 27, 2026, onward, Ethiopia's neighbors have had to answer publicly whether they back the fall of Abiy Ahmed. Only Cairo has answered that it does not. The tally of who supplies whom remains open on the ground, and it is that tally that decides how long this war lasts.