Zemene Kassie, chairman of the Amhara Fano National Movement (AFNM), has ruled out any political settlement with Addis Ababa as long as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed remains in power. Speaking from inside the Amhara region, Kassie told The Africa Report that Fano's objective is the "total removal" of Abiy's government — not a ceasefire, not dialogue, not a revised power-sharing arrangement.
The position is significant because it forecloses the diplomatic off-ramps that international mediators have repeatedly tried to construct. Over roughly three years of armed conflict in the Amhara region, Fano has evolved from what Kassie describes as a dispersed survival network into a structured fighting force with a formal national leadership body, the AFNM, whose creation he says has improved coordination and operational planning.
Kassie's account of the battlefield, published as a viewpoint by The Africa Report on 19 August 2026, credits Fano's resilience to a fundamental asymmetry in motivation: fighters defending what they regard as their people's survival against soldiers he characterises as unwilling conscripts enforcing a regime's will. He claims government forces have suffered heavy losses, surrendered weapons, and shown declining willingness to fight — assertions that cannot be independently verified but that align with the broad pattern of a conflict that has failed to produce a decisive federal military victory after three years.
On the government's military toolkit, Kassie is specific. He says Ethiopia's air force has conducted thousands of drone and air strikes over the course of the war, almost all targeting Amhara civilians and public infrastructure — schools and health facilities. He directly implicates the United Arab Emirates, alleging that UAE personnel have been operationally involved in drone strikes and that Emirati-supplied armed drones, logistical assistance, and technical support have been central to the federal campaign. The UAE's role in Ethiopian drone operations has been reported elsewhere, but Kassie's framing — that the Amhara people have become a "testing ground for emerging military technologies" — sharpens the accusation into an argument about sovereignty and complicity.
His critique of Emirati strategy is also calibrated to an audience beyond Amhara. He argues that Abu Dhabi's support for Abiy, driven by short-term Horn of Africa positioning, risks damaging its long-term influence across Ethiopia and the wider region once the current government falls — an implicit warning to Gulf investors and policymakers who have bet heavily on Abiy's stability.
Kassie catalogues the pressures he says are now compressing the federal government: heavy battlefield losses, territorial setbacks to Fano, deteriorating relations with the Tigray region following the Pretoria agreement's fragile aftermath, and sustained armed conflict in Oromia. He adds a legitimacy dimension — describing Abiy's 2025 election as a "fake" exercise conducted while much of the country was outside effective government control, and the national dialogue process as a sham staged amid active war.
On Ethiopia's regional posture, Kassie makes a notable geopolitical claim: that Abiy's government has provided support to Sudan's Rapid Support Forces during that country's civil war, a charge that, if substantiated, would constitute a serious violation of regional security norms and further isolate Addis Ababa diplomatically. He characterises the federal government as a "destabilising and perceived revisionist power" across the Horn — language that mirrors how Ethiopia's neighbours, particularly Egypt and Eritrea, have framed their own anxieties about Abiy's ambitions.
Fano's maximalist stance creates a hard problem for any post-conflict planning. Kassie insists that after regime removal, any transition must be inclusive, accountability-based, and rights-protective — the standard checklist for internationally supervised change-of-government processes. But Fano is one of several armed actors operating in Ethiopia simultaneously, alongside Tigrayan forces, Oromo Liberation Army factions, and others. A transition framework acceptable to all of them, while protecting minority communities, preserving federal structures, and satisfying creditors and aid donors, would be extraordinarily complex to engineer.
Why it matters: Three years without a decisive federal military victory, combined with Fano's refusal to negotiate while Abiy leads, means Ethiopia's largest internal conflict has no near-term exit. For investors, aid agencies, and regional governments, Kassie's interview is a data point confirming the war is structural, not episodic — and that any scenario planning for Ethiopia's Horn of Africa role must now seriously price in a post-Abiy transition rather than treat continued federal stability as the base case.