In reply to angels:
As someone who was also on the Easter trip - Al Shabab would be doing well to get past the quite tooled up, but friendly (to us at least) locals in the more remote parts of Tigray, who i get the impression would not take kindly to outsiders wandering about causing trouble.
Ethiopia is a massive country though and I think care is needed in some areas - we didn’t go near the Danakil for that reason (and it it costs a fortune). We ran out of time and never made it to Bale so i can’t comment there - the climbing looked pretty cool though