The Ethiopian Army is poised to use tanks to encircle TPLF controlled Mekelle, and is warning civilians it may also use artillery on the city.

Speaking to journalists on the front, he said the Ethiopian army was too careful previously not to hit civilian targets “Not even a single plant of sorghum was destroyed”.

“However, this might not be the case for Mekelle. There will be no mercy,” he warned.

The Tigray conflict began in early November in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia, between the Tigray Region special forces (led by Tigray People's Liberation Front) and the Ethiopian National Defense Force, in alliance with the Amhara Region special forces.

The conflict stemmed from the attempt of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to distance the country's politics from ethnic federalism, a power-sharing system based on ethnicity that gives regional control to individual ethnic groups that had been marginalized before, yet one that had been advantageous to the Tigray minority on the federal level.

By merging the ethnic and region-based parties of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, that had governed Ethiopia for 30 years, into a nationwide Prosperity Party, Abiy threatened the power of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), a military and politically powerful entity inside Ethiopia, representing, by ethnicity, about 6% of the population.

The TPLF refused to join the new party, creating tensions between the two, and alleged that Abiy Ahmed was an illegitimate ruler due to him rescheduling the general elections that were to be held on 29 August 2020 to an undetermined date in 2021, on account of COVID-19.

The TPLF went ahead with regional elections in Tigray in September 2020 — in defiance of the federal government, which deemed the election illegal.

The immediate cause of the conflict was an alleged attack on 4 November 2020 by the organized Tigray forces on the headquarters of the Northern Command of the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF), the defense wing of the Government of Ethiopia.