Word: eritreans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...will fight until there is only one bullet and one Eritrean left. After that, Ethiopia can take our country back...
...onetime Italian colony that was captured by the British in 1941, Eritrea was federated with Ethiopia, under a United Nations decision, in 1952 and a decade later was formally annexed by Selassie-an action that the Eritreans still regard as outright colonialism. Their outrage sparked a tiny guerrilla uprising that eventually became a full-scale war, perhaps the largest war now being fought anywhere in the world. In the process, reports TIME Correspondent Dean Brelis after touring the savanna and highland battlefront, the Eritreans have built an extraordinarily effective fighting machine of at least 25,000 men equipped with artillery...
...Tanks. Two years ago, the Eritrean forces had no vehicles at all; they relied on hundreds of camels for transporting supplies and ammunition and for evacuating their wounded. Today they have trucks, Land Rovers, an ambulance and two tanks, most of them hijacked from the Ethiopians. The Eritreans have learned to combat Ethiopian airpower effectively with everything from rifles and machine guns to captured missiles and conventional antiaircraft guns. In the territory they control, the rebels run schools, clinics, plantations and even small factories. At present, they are engaged in an all-out offensive to capture what they...
...Asmara, the city that Benito Mussolini called "the gem of the Horn of Africa," the Ethiopian army is increasingly nervous. The vital 56-mile highway to the port of Massawa, as well as all other roads, is frequently cut, if not actually controlled, by Eritrean forces. The railroad from the port of Assab carries no traffic; its bridges have been destroyed by guerrillas. Ethiopian army units dare not travel unescorted more than a few miles outside the capital. When they do go farther, they move by convoy with tank protection and air cover. Their supplies arrive only...
Other Fronts. The Eritrean rebels are not the only ones who oppose Mengistu's rule. Just south of Eritrea, 1,500 guerrillas of the Tigre People's Liberation Front (T.P.L.F.) control about one-third of Tigre province. In the western provinces of Goijam and Gondar, 2,000 men of the right-wing Ethiopian Democratic Union (E.D.U.) are fighting for a non-Marxist civilian government and deny charges that they plan to restore a monarchy under Haile Selassie's sole surviving son, Crown Prince Asfa Wossen, 60, who is now in London. About 1,000 shiftas-armed nomads...