if you don't mind me asking as well.... why was Eritrea fighting the TPLF????
this always baffled me as I think all the Eritreans I met were Tigray and I actually didn't know there were other ethnicities in Eritrea... but even with that being so, Eritrea is very Tigray ethnically I assume... so why fight their own ethnicity???? very shocking to me
There aren’t any Tigrayans in Eritrea. The people you met were Tigrinya which is a very similar (some would say the same - very complex issue) ethnic group. Tigrayans and Tigrinya people have hated each other for centuries for a myriad of reasons.
During the independence war, the EPLF and TPLF aided each other because their common enemy was the Derg. Once the Derg had been dealt with, the TPLF installed themselves into power in Ethiopia while the EPLF secured Eritrean independence. In 1998 there were some disputes over the border leading to a second war however the causes ran much deeper. If you are wondering why Eritrean Christians sided with Muslim Eritreans (of varying ethnic groups) rather than Tigrayan Christians then we have to go back to the start of the independence struggle.
The independence struggle was launched by the ELF who were overwhelmingly Muslim. The Muslims were the ones being killed by Selassie and having their land seized as they lived in the fertile part of Eritrea. Once the Eritrean Christians saw the injustices their Muslim brothers faced, Christian recruitment into the ELF increased rapidly to the point where many units were majority Christian. They then fought together (however there were some hiccups along the way i.e the EPLF/ELF civil war) until 1991