A Peace That Was Never Peace
Ethiopia is at war again. The images emerging from the country’s northern highlands are horrifying: bodies buried in displacement camps, grain lorries struck twice in the same spot, children killed as they walked home from school. But to understand how Ethiopia returned to the battlefield less than four years after a peace deal that was supposed to end the deadliest conflict of the twenty first century, one has to understand that the Pretoria Agreement of 2022 did not resolve the fundamental disputes that caused the war in the first place. It merely paused them. The 2020 2022 Tigray war pitted Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s federal government against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the party that had dominated Ethiopian politics for nearly three decades before Abiy came to power in 2018.
When the TPLF withdrew from the capital, Mekelle, and signed the Pretoria deal, it left behind unresolved questions about territory, security arrangements, and the political future of a country built on a fragile ethnic federal system. Nearly 600,000 people had died, according to some estimates, and millions more had been displaced. The peace was always fragile. It has now shattered.
New Alliance, an Old Enemy
What makes this war fundamentally different from the last one is that the TPLF is no longer fighting alone. On September 20, the TPLF joined six other armed and political groups to form the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, a coalition explicitly committed to removing Abiy from power and establishing a transitional administration. The alliance brings together the TPLF, the Amhara Fano militias, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA), the Ogaden National Liberation Front, the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front, the Benishangul Peoples’ Liberation Movement, and the Gumuz Peoples’ Democratic Movement. The inclusion of the Fano is particularly significant. During the 2020-2022 war, the Fano fought alongside the federal government against the TPLF. But since 2023, the Fano has been fighting the federal government in Amhara, angered by what it sees as Abiy’s attempts to centralise power and weaken regional autonomy.
The TPLF and the Fano were enemies. Now they are allies, united by a shared determination to bring down a prime minister they accuse of presiding over “war, genocide, mass destruction, and utter poverty”. Three days after the alliance was announced, on September 23, the TPLF led coalition seized the airports of Mekelle, Axum, and Shire and launched coordinated offensives into Amhara and Afar. It was the first time the TPLF and the Fano had coordinated militarily, a development that fundamentally altered the balance of power in northern Ethiopia.
The Drone War
The federal government’s response has been swift and, according to witnesses and human rights groups, devastating for civilians. Ethiopia possesses a large arsenal of drones, and it has used them to devastating effect. On Thursday, four consecutive drone strikes hit a camp for internally displaced people in the Amhara region, about 400 kilometres northeast of Addis Ababa. Witnesses described burying 14 people at the camp itself, with two more dying later of their injuries. Children and pregnant women were among the dead. The strikes occurred, one witness said, “just as the students were coming home from school”. The following day, in the Tigray town of Rama, a drone struck a lorry carrying sorghum that had already been hit the night before. As people gathered to collect the scattered grain, a second strike hit them, killing at least 11. “It was very sad and shocking,” a local resident told AFP. “There was another drone strike yesterday targeted armed fighters, and that did not surprise us. But today’s attack was heartbreaking because it hit young civilians”.
The Ethiopian army has not responded to requests for comment. But the pattern is clear. The government’s use of drones, a technology it acquired in large numbers during the previous war has given it a decisive military advantage. It has also made civilians disproportionately vulnerable. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, has expressed alarm at the civilian impact of the hostilities, noting that airstrikes, some carried out with drones, hit five schools in Tigray in a single day in September.
Eritrea and the Brink of a Wider War
If the internal conflict were not dangerous enough, it is now threatening to ignite a regional war. Ethiopian federal forces, having retaken Mekelle in early October, continued their advance north toward the Eritrean border. Eyewitnesses observed a substantial convoy of tanks and heavy weaponry moving from Adigrat toward the strategic border towns of Fatsi and Zalambessa. The Critical Threats Project reported that Ethiopian troops had advanced approximately 37 kilometres north of Adigrat without encountering substantial resistance, and that Eritrean troops had established defensive positions north of Zalambessa. Ethiopia accuses Eritrea of sending troops into Tigray and supporting the TPLF led rebellion, allegations Asmara denies.
Eritrea, for its part, accuses Ethiopia of pursuing “an unprovoked war of aggression” and has urged the UN Security Council to take deterrent measures. The diplomatic confrontation is compounded by Ethiopia’s longstanding demand for access to the Red Sea, which Eritrea views as a potential threat to its territorial integrity, particularly regarding the strategic port of Assab. The two countries fought a devastating border war from 1998 to 2000, and though relations were restored in 2018, the scars have never fully healed. The renewed military buildup threatens to undermine the Pretoria agreement entirely and raises the terrifying prospect that the fighting inside Ethiopia could spread across the border into a full-scale interstate war.
A Country at the Precipice
Ethiopia today is a country teetering on the edge. The federal government, led by a prime minister who once promised a new era of peace and prosperity, is now fighting on multiple fronts against a coalition of armed groups that span the country’s largest regions. The economy is in crisis, nationalism is eroding, and the public policies of the Abiy government have alienated many of the communities that once supported him. The international community has called for deescalation, but its appeals have so far gone unheeded. The African Union, which brokered the Pretoria agreement, has urged the parties to resume direct talks. The European Union has called for immediate deescalation on all fronts. The International Crisis Group has warned that northern Ethiopia is facing a “dangerous descent back into war” and that a new conflict would impose “unbearable costs on northern Ethiopia’s long suffering civilians”. But words from abroad have not stopped the drones.
The TPLF has described its withdrawal from Mekelle as a tactical step, not a surrender, and has warned that the fighting will continue. The federal government has vowed to crush the rebellion. The Eritrean border remains tense. And the people of northern Ethiopia, the farmers, the schoolchildren, the displaced families are once again caught in the middle of a war that shows no signs of ending.