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The Battle of Afabet was fought from 17 March through 20 March 1988 in and around the town of Afabet, as part of the
Eritrean War of Independence The Eritrean War of Independence was a war for independence which Eritrean independence fighters waged against successive Ethiopian governments from 1 September 1961 to 24 May 1991. Eritrea was an Italian colony from the 1880s until the d ...
.


Background

The Nadew Command was one of four commands, or army corps, of the
Ethiopia Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the no ...
n Second Revolutionary Army. Led by Colonel Getaneh Haile, it was composed of three infantry divisions and accompanying support units, and some sources state it had between 20,000 and 22,000 soldiers. Gebru Tareke, noting that the morale of the soldiers was at an all-time low, and none of the divisions "had even half of the numbers that would normally constitute an Ethiopian division – ten to twelve thousand men", quotes
Ministry of Defense {{unsourced, date=February 2021 A ministry of defence or defense (see spelling differences), also known as a department of defence or defense, is an often-used name for the part of a government responsible for matters of defence, found in state ...
reports to state that there were 15,223 men in the three divisions.Gebru Tareke, ''The Ethiopian Revolution: War in the Horn of Africa'' (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press Yale University Press is the university press of Yale University. It was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day, and became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but it remains financially and operationally autonomous. , Yale Universit ...
, 2009), p. 251.
The
Eritrean People's Liberation Front The Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), colloquially known as Shabia, was an armed Marxist–Leninist organization that fought for the independence of Eritrea from Ethiopia. It emerged in 1970 as a far-left to left-wing nationalist group ...
(EPLF) had attacked the Nadew Command a few months previously, with limited success. On 8 December 1987, the EPLF had attacked one of the divisions of the Command, the Twenty-second, with a force that may have contained as many as five infantry brigades, one mechanized battalion and three heavy-weapon battalions. On the second day of the assault, Eritrean infiltrators destroyed the divisional control center. It required the assistance of the Nineteenth Mountain Infantry Division and the 45th Infantry Brigade to halt further advances and repel the EPLF forces. Ethiopian losses in this preliminary engagement were 242 killed, 291 wounded and 615 missing; Eritrean losses have been estimated at 125 killed and 269 wounded. However, the Ethiopian side suffered even graver losses in the aftermath: on
Mengistu Haile Mariam Mengistu Haile Mariam ( am, መንግሥቱ ኀይለ ማሪያም, pronunciation: ; born 21 May 1937) is an Ethiopian politician and former army officer who was the head of state of Ethiopia from 1977 to 1991 and General Secretary of the Work ...
's order twenty senior officers were transferred and the commander of the Nadew Command, General Tariku Ayne, who had been absent from Afabet for medical treatment, was executed outside of Asmara on 15 February 1988. The death of one of Ethiopia's most prominent generals surprised even the EPLF, whose Radio of the Masses broadcast that the Derg had "cut off its right hand with its left hand". The Twenty-second Division was moved to Keren, and replaced with the Fourteenth Infantry Division.Gebru Tareke, ''Ethiopian Revolution'', p. 252 By mid-March 1988 the Nadew Command had planned to launch an offensive campaign against the
Eritrean People's Liberation Front The Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), colloquially known as Shabia, was an armed Marxist–Leninist organization that fought for the independence of Eritrea from Ethiopia. It emerged in 1970 as a far-left to left-wing nationalist group ...
(EPLF); however, they were pre-empted by the EPLF.


Battle

On the morning of 17 March 1988, the EPLF deployed troops on three sides around Hedai Valley to encircle the Ethiopian garrison. The first unit attacked was the newly arrived Fourteenth Division. Upon their attack, the Ethiopian forces began to withdraw but were cut off. The battle continued while the Ethiopian garrison from Keren tried to reinforce their position, which was thwarted by the EPLF. A stumbling block for the EPLF was on the left flank, where their Eighty-fifth Division was held up by the dogged resistance of the Ethiopian Twenty-ninth Mechanized Brigade. It fought without reinforcement for most of a day until its commander gambled on a retreat to Afabet. Lacking time for careful reconnaissance before its withdrawal, the brigade was halted when a tank and truck were disabled by Eritrean 100mm guns, the burning vehicles blocking the road. The Ethiopians were forced to destroy their weaponry to prevent them from falling into EPLF hands. Ethiopian aircraft even bombed their own troops. The commander of the Second Revolutionary Army came to the battlefield himself to supervise opening the road to Afabet "until he allegedly 'escaped on a camel' just before the fall of the garrison."Gebru Tareke, ''Ethiopian Revolution'', p. 256 Once the Ethiopian troops were routed in Hedai Valley, the EPLF stormed and captured Afabet. As the town was a major garrison the EPLF also captured a large cache of weapons in addition to those captured in the valley. Killion estimates that by the end of the three-day battle, the Eritreans had killed over 8,000 Ethiopian soldiers. After losing Afabet, on the following days the Ethiopian troops abandoned the towns of Tesseneiei, Barentu and Agordat, since they thought they could not defend them any longer, and concentrated most of their forces on Keren.


Aftermath

Not long after this defeat, Berhane Woldemichael wrote in the periodical ''Review of African Political Economy'', : The significance to the Ethiopian regime of the loss of Afabet cannot be overstated. In this single battle, Ethiopia lost whole divisions of its best trained and armed troops. Worse still, it left behind a weapons stockpile that it had amassed to carry out what it believed was to have been 'a decisive offensive' against the EPLF. That 'decisive offensive' was being planned by Soviet military advisors. As it was, the EPLF, clearly outsmarting the Soviets, turned around the 'planned offensive' to their advantage. The Soviet Union had always denied direct involvement in Eritrea but was caught red-handed by the EPLF at Afabet by the capture of three Soviet military personnel, another one was killed in the combat. The victory over the Nadew Command is considered by the historian
Basil Davidson Basil Risbridger Davidson (9 November 1914 – 9 July 2010) was a British journalist and historian who wrote more than 30 books on African history and politics. According to two modern writers, "Davidson, a campaigning journalist whose fi ...
to be the most significant victory for any liberation movement since the Vietnamese victory at Dien Bien Phu. It has also been described as the largest battle in Africa since
El Alamein El Alamein ( ar, العلمين, translit=al-ʿAlamayn, lit=the two flags, ) is a town in the northern Matrouh Governorate of Egypt. Located on the Arab's Gulf, Mediterranean Sea, it lies west of Alexandria and northwest of Cairo. , it ha ...
. However, the Ethiopian historian Gebru Tareke disagrees with this comparison to Dien Bien Phu, pointing out that Davidson made his observation from the field as a guest of the EPLF, and that "the Ethiopian armed forces continued to fight, at times quite vigorously, for another three years." He concludes, "From a global perspective, Afabet was an ''event'' whereas Dien Bien Phu was ''eventful''."Gebru Tareke, ''Ethiopian Revolution'', p. 260.


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Afabet, Battle Battles of the Ethiopian Civil War 1988 in Eritrea 1988 in Ethiopia Battles involving Ethiopia Battles involving Cuba Conflicts in 1988 Eritrean War of Independence March 1988 events in Africa Ethiopia–Soviet Union relations