By Abel W. Sugebo
Ethiopia once called reports of Eritrean troops in Tigray false. Now its officials assert them as fact. Neither verdict is evidence.
On 7 October, residents of Adigrat, a Tigrayan town near the Eritrean border, told the BBC they had watched convoys of soldiers moving south on the road toward Mekelle. Days earlier, Abraham Belay, a senior Ethiopian official, had told the state-affiliated broadcaster Fana that “the Eritrean army has participated with its full capacity and logistics”, in the BBC’s translation. Eritrea’s information minister, Yemane Gebremeskel, replied that Addis Ababa was “fabricating various allegations against Eritrea” to justify a war.
Both governments spoke with certainty. The public evidence was far thinner. The BBC, which cannot report from Tigray, could not independently verify the reported troop movements or the images circulating online. On 8 October, the Associated Press reported a government-allied Tigray Peace Force commander’s account of Eritrean forces entering Adigrat and Edaga Hamus, and a conflict monitor’s claim of Ethiopian drone strikes on Eritrean troops. AP could not verify either.
The allegation may prove true; several separately sourced witness accounts point the same way. But the authorities calling it fact or fabrication are both parties to the conflict, and Ethiopia’s own record shows why that matters.
The verdict that collapsed
In December 2020, the Ethiopian army’s Northern Command chief told a meeting in Mekelle that Eritrean forces had entered Tigray. On 20 January 2021, the Foreign Ministry called reports of Eritrean soldiers’ involvement “false and unfounded”. Two months later, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed told parliament the Eritrean army had crossed the border. In April, Eritrea, which had called an AP massacre report “outrageous lies”, admitted its forces were fighting. In May, Ethiopia’s attorney general attributed 110 civilian deaths in Axum to Eritrean troops.
While the two governments were allies, the official verdict trailed the evidence. As adversaries, it runs ahead of it: Abraham Belay asserted full Eritrean participation days before any news organization in my sample reported a sighting. That does not prove motive. Eritrea’s line has barely moved since 2021, interrupted only by that one admission. A government that denied a deployment it later acknowledged has shown that its denials are not evidence either.
What the platforms show
I reviewed 41 posts on X and 28 public Facebook posts published between 22 September and 8 October, plus the titles and descriptions of 35 YouTube videos. The sample is purposive, not representative, but the patterns matter for anyone responsible for platform integrity.
Each government spoke mainly on a different platform. Ethiopia’s allegation reached Facebook through state broadcasters in Amharic, Tigrinya and English within about 19 hours. Eritrea’s denial was argued on X and reached Facebook second-hand, through Somali- and Arabic-language accounts, among others. A trust and safety team watching one platform saw half the contest.
One wire story is not six confirmations. A single AFP report, resting on a local official and residents, appeared on six Facebook news pages within about eight hours. Certainty also rose as the claim left newsrooms: six of seven Facebook news posts attributed it to witnesses or officials, while four of seven commentator, creator and group posts stated it as fact without citing any source.
The week’s key images, of trucks carrying uniformed men, show the problem most sharply. Nine hours after they appeared, analysts at the Critical Threats Project geolocated one image to Edaga Hamus but could not verify when it was taken or who was aboard. That is disciplined open-source work: one variable established, two left open. About four hours later, an account called Eritrean Post recast it as “no confirmed incursion”, while accounts on the other side had already moved from “reportedly” to “confirmed”. Nothing in the sample pointed to coordinated inauthentic behavior; the pull in both directions is consistent with ordinary partisan sharing.
What should change
Words such as false, fabricated and disinformation carry authority because they imply a check against evidence. When a party to a war issues them as verdicts, it spends that authority, and erodes trust in the journalists and fact-checkers who use the same words with a method behind them. The cost falls hardest on people in Tigray deciding whether a road is safe.
Platforms should treat statements by parties to a conflict as claims, not verification, in labels, fact-check programs and authoritative-source treatment. They should label provenance, not only truth: “location verified; date and identity not” serves users better than silence or a binary verdict. They should staff the languages where this contest is happening, from Afaan Oromo to Somali and Arabic, and share signals across services in a crisis. Newsrooms should carry caveats into social posts and distinguish their own sourcing from wire copy. Funders and policymakers should press for independent access to Tigray, which would settle more of these questions than any official statement.
In 2021, the official answer to whether Eritrean troops were in Tigray was wrong. In 2026, it may prove right. In neither year was it evidence. Information integrity work in this conflict has to apply one standard to every claim, whoever makes it, and say plainly when the honest answer is that we do not yet know.
The full report, with methodology, a cross-platform register of ten claims, a timeline of official statements since 2020 and 48 sources, is below.
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About the Author
Abel W. Sugebo is Executive Director and Founder of Inform Africa/HaqCheck, a research organization focused on disinformation, digital rights, and information integrity in Sub-Saharan Africa. With over 12 years of experience in OSINT, influence operations analysis, and investigative journalism, Abel has partnered with major social media platforms on content verification and misinformation detection programs. His work focuses on AI governance, trust and safety, and platform accountability in complex political environments. He has authored multiple reports on digital rights and disinformation in the Horn of Africa. He is a 2015 CPJ Press Freedom Award recipient and co-founder of Zone Nine, Ethiopia’s pioneering digital rights blogging collective. He currently works from Washington DC, United States.
Contact: abelwabella@gmail.com
