it goes to the heart of the narrative that Ethiopia and Eritrea have been positing right from the beginning of this conflict, that the Tigray People’s Liberation Front attacked Ethiopia in their Northern Command — which they did — but the TPLF have always said they attacked Ethiopia because there was a joint Ethiopian-Eritrean plan to attack them, to finish them, as was put at the time. Now, Ethiopia and Eritrea have always denied that. They say, November 4th, they were blindsided. They needed to launch this law enforcement operation. November 14th, the TPLF rocketed Asmara. And that was when the two former enemies turned allies came together.
What we found, it untangles, it dissolves all of that narrative, because we found, right from the first week of November, that these flights were going back and forth, gunrunning between the two allies. So, even before the TPLF hit Asmara, they were already planning on attacking Tigray, and Eritrea needed this weaponry to be able to come down from the north into Tigray. So this narrative that somehow the Ethiopian government was caught unawares begins to crumble.
Then you also have the reality of how Ethiopian Airlines has built itself up into the name that it is today, which is through its relationships, through its decades-long alliance with the U.S. and with American aviation giant Boeing. So, it is taxpayer-, U.S.-funded, favorable access to U.S. markets worth hundreds of millions of dollars that has built that fleet, that is
— source democracynow.org | Oct 07, 2021