Ethiopian Prime Minister Abi Ahmed said on Monday that his country's forces have regained control of 3 strategic cities in the northern Amhara region of the country that were in the hands of the Tigray People's Liberation Front, while the front said that it withdrew from locations close to the capital, Addis Ababa.

In a statement from one of the fighting fronts, the Ethiopian Prime Minister stated that the government forces had recaptured the strategic cities of Disi, Kombolcha and Bati, and had tightened control over most of the regions of Amhara region and the entire Afar region, and had inflicted the Tigray Front militants with a heavy loss, as he put it.

Abi Ahmed added that "what the Tigray Front militants penetrated into from areas in the past five months, we recovered in 15 days."

The Ethiopian Prime Minister described the Tigray Front as bandits and terrorists, pledging to continue the military operation until the front is eliminated.

The Tigray Front had taken control of the cities of Disi and Kombolcha more than a month ago, and then threatened to advance towards the capital, Addis Ababa, which prompted the Ethiopian authorities to declare a state of emergency throughout the country.

The two cities are located on a highway linking the capital with the north of the country and neighboring Djibouti.

The government forces have achieved several victories since the Prime Minister announced that since the beginning of December, he has been managing the battles on the ground, and the Ethiopian Government Dispatch Corporation reported last Wednesday that government forces have restored the Lalibela site in the Amhara region, which is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List, which fell. Last August in the hands of the Tigray Front.

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On the other hand, the spokesman of the Tigray Front, "Getachew Reda", said in a tweet on Monday evening that the LTTE fighters withdrew from several cities, including Kombolcha and Disi, saying that this matter was "within our plan."

Tigray Front leader: We have not collapsed and are in the process of reorganizing a strategy for our ranks (French)

The leader of the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front, Gabr Mikael, denied on Sunday that the government is likely now, explaining that the front is in the process of conducting a strategic reorganization of its ranks and that it has not been defeated, and added that the forces of the front withdrew from locations close to the capital, Addis Ababa for strategic reasons and in order to restore deployment, stressing that the decision to withdraw these forces was not a result of diplomatic pressure, or as a result of secret contacts with the regime in Ethiopia.

In another context, the United States and 5 Western countries expressed deep concern over reports that Ethiopia has detained a large number of citizens on the basis of ethnicity, and the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Denmark and the Netherlands, in a joint statement, urged the Ethiopian government to stop those arrests.

In their statement, the states cited human rights reports stating that the government had arrested Orthodox priests, the elderly, women and children of the Tigray ethnicity, without charging them.

The conflict erupted in November 2020, when the Prime Minister sent forces to the Tigray region in the far north of the country to overthrow the Tigray Liberation Front, in response to its attacks on army camps.

In June, the front took control of most of the Tigray region and then advanced towards the neighboring regions of Afar and Amhara, and achieved many gains.

The United Nations estimates that, in 13 months, the fighting has killed thousands, displaced more than two million people, and left hundreds of thousands at risk of starvation.

So far, the diplomatic efforts of the African Union to reach a ceasefire between the two warring parties have not yielded any tangible progress.