Why Is War Returning to Tigray?

Perhaps “the long-awaited war” is the most fitting name for what is now unfolding in northern Ethiopia. This war is the practical culmination of a media, psychological and diplomatic campaign waged among Ethiopia’s rival factions, and between the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments, ever since the Pretoria Agreement was signed in November 2022. Although many anticipated it throughout the years that followed, its shape, its intensity, its participants and its intended outcomes remained matters of speculation. Little wonder: the map of alliances and rapprochements among the rivals has changed dramatically since the last war erupted in Tigray in the autumn of 2020.

What few expected is the dissolving of the conceptual boundaries between West Asia, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Political files, diplomatic crises and the reach of regional players were once confined to each region separately. Now events and actors move seamlessly between them. We are witnessing a new “unity of arenas”, but in a negative sense.

The first Tigray war ended in 2022 without a decisive outcome and with an agreement whose contours were vague, leaving Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa with one likely prospect: renewed war in the north of the country.

This article examines the causes and factors behind the outbreak of war in Tigray, its objectives and likely outcomes, and the possible ways to end it.

Why has war returned to Tigray, and what drove it?

If we set aside the explanations offered by the parties to the conflict, and by those with a direct interest in seeing the north of Ethiopia burn, most of which reduce the causes to a single one, we find that many internal and regional factors worsened the situation and pushed the rivals to settle matters by force once again. The real question has become where and how this war would start, not whether it would.

The Pretoria Agreement

Inside Ethiopia, the most important factor in the deepening rift between the two sides was the Pretoria Agreement itself. It was ambiguous in many of its details and unclear in charting a path to peace. This allowed both belligerents, the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), to turn it from a peace agreement into a temporary truce through actions taken in bad faith.

Consider first the circumstances surrounding its timing. The parties reached the deal in South Africa only after the Ethiopian federal army had turned the tide of the war and halted the TPLF’s advance toward the capital, Addis Ababa. The last chapters of the war had not run long enough in a stalemate for the agreement to reflect a deep conviction on both sides.

As for the terms and spirit of the agreement, the federal government, deliberately or not, diluted it and let it dissolve into bureaucratic labyrinths and slow administrative procedure, in three systematic ways:

1. The siege on Tigray was not fully lifted. Those affected in the region did not receive humanitarian aid commensurate with the scale of the destruction of the 2020–2022 war, leading to widespread hunger among the population. This contravened Articles 7(d) and 5 of the Pretoria Agreement.
2. The federal army did not halt its military operations against the TPLF’s fighters, particularly its drone strikes, which had given it the ability to turn the tide in the final phases of the previous war. This contradicted Article 7(a).
3. No tangible step was taken toward transitional justice or the punishment of those responsible for atrocities committed during the war. On the contrary, some figures who played a clear role in escalating social tension continue to work within the federal government, in contradiction of Article 10(3).

The other side was no different. The TPLF spared no effort in undermining the Pretoria Agreement:

1. It cooperated with domestic actors to create a new situation on the ground that would help it topple the current federal government, contrary to Article 7(b).
2. It cooperated with external actors, contributing to the destabilisation of Ethiopia and violating Article 7(e).
3. It did not disarm its fighters, as required by Article 6.

Beyond the violations, the agreement overlooked a fundamental point: it did not include the other forces that had fought alongside government troops in the Tigray war, such as the Amhara Fano militias. They regarded the agreement as a betrayal, and moved into the ranks of the armed opposition against Addis Ababa.

A final reason the agreement lost its effectiveness is that the African Union panel that sponsored and guaranteed it did not follow up on its duties or hold the two parties accountable for violations committed in plain view.

The Pretoria Agreement thus became a truce, a prelude to the war to come.

Berbera and Assab: the shifting strategic weight of the Horn

The Horn of Africa lost its strategic importance when the joint US–British base at Diego Garcia was established in the early 1970s. It became a marginal, grey zone between three geographic spheres: the Middle East, the Nile Valley and the African Great Lakes. In recent years that has reversed. The region has become one in which, and for the sake of which, many strategic calculations are made, and regional and global political alignments are drawn along its fault lines.

The main driver of this unexpected change began with the memorandum of understanding between Ethiopia and Somaliland, signed on 1 January 2025. It set off a storm of diplomatic activity in the Horn and the Middle East, and ended with the memorandum being quietly suspended without ever becoming a formal agreement. That forced the Ethiopian government to widen its search for sea access to the rest of the region. Hence the question of the Eritrean port of Assab emerged, once Ethiopia’s most important port before Eritrea’s independence in 1993. It moved Eritrean–Ethiopian relations from coolness to mutual political escalation, and Ethiopia’s demand became the catalyst for a chain of events and measures taken by Ethiopia, Eritrea and, later, Somalia.

Inside Ethiopia, the Tigray file shifted from the sphere of implementing the Pretoria Agreement to that of securing the country’s northern border, since Tigray adjoins Eritrea. On the other side, Eritrea and Somalia began forging alliances with states in the neighbouring Middle East. That pushed Ethiopia to strengthen its own partnerships with Middle Eastern states, and turned the Horn into an arena of contest between rival Middle Eastern powers.

The Middle East: a scramble among middle powers

The Horn of Africa has recently seen an influx of Middle Eastern players competing for influence, a situation reminiscent of the arrival of the European colonial powers in the nineteenth century, known in the political literature as the “Scramble for Africa”. This time the players come from the Middle East. Anyone following Middle Eastern affairs knows there are fractures in the positions, visions and ambitions of its states, and likewise in the alliances they have built with the parties in the Horn.

Egypt has not moved past the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam file and has turned to bolder, more strategic options against Ethiopia, such as forming alliances with the countries around it in order to encircle it. In August 2024 it concluded a military cooperation protocol and a defence agreement with Somalia and sent a shipment of weapons the same month, its first reaction to the memorandum between Ethiopia and Somaliland. Eritrea then joined through the Asmara agreement, which produced what was called the tripartite alliance of Egypt, Eritrea and Somalia in October 2024. It was meant for cooperation and coordination but soon developed into a joint defence alliance, and it was put into practice on the ground when an Egyptian military delegation was sent to Somalia under the banner of a peacekeeping mission, after Egypt had been absent from the Somali scene, militarily and politically, for more than three decades. Egypt also held joint naval exercises with Eritrea off the coast of Assab in May 2026.

Sudan borders the Horn and, like Egypt, has a long history of involvement in its political crises. This created fertile ground for a network of relationships with the region’s rivals, especially with the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, which has ruled Eritrea since independence, and with the TPLF, which left power in 2018.

The government of General Burhan in Sudan has succeeded in carrying Sudan’s internal conflict onto the regional stage by accusing both the United Arab Emirates and Ethiopia of supporting the Rapid Support Forces militia. The first aim was to settle scores with the UAE; their dispute is one of the most prominent battles now being fought in the region between the UAE and the factions of political Islam. The second was to create a legal and moral basis for interfering in Ethiopian affairs. Sudan translated this into action by hosting coordination and rapprochement meetings between Ethiopian rivals, above all between the TPLF and the leaders of the Amhara Fano militias, in Port Sudan between October 2025 and May 2026. These led to the formation, in September 2026, of the Alliance of Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces for Survival, known as “Tsmido”, or the Seven-Faction Alliance.

The Emirati–Saudi rift has also played a prominent part in widening the divisions among rivals across the region. The UAE was first to reach the Horn of Africa and the Nile Valley, cooperating with Somalia, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Eritrea on military and development files, while Saudi Arabia was entirely absent. But after the events in southern Yemen in December 2025, Saudi diplomacy made moves on several fronts. It signed a military cooperation memorandum with Somalia in February 2026 and stepped-up official visits between Asmara and Riyadh, in February and September 2026, amid Egyptian mediation efforts to push the two countries toward a joint defence alliance. In July 2026 it also rejected any military presence in the Red Sea for states that do not border it, an allusion to Ethiopia’s demand for sea access and the Ethiopian naval base that would follow. Anyone tracking Saudi moves in the Horn will find that the common thread running through all of them is curbing and countering the Emirati role in the region.

The international community: fluidity and an uncertain present

The current state of the international order, the erosion of the American presence on the world stage, and the declining ability, and perhaps willingness, of the United States to resolve conflicts and stop widespread abuses have contributed to the absence of any deterrent for the parties to the conflict. This helps explain:

1. The bloodiness of the first Tigray war, ranked as the deadliest war the world has seen in the twenty-first century.
2. The entry of competing Middle Eastern middle powers into the Horn of Africa and their alliances with local players, which narrowed the chances of understanding among the rivals.
3. The African Union’s neglect of the follow-up to the Pretoria Agreement, and the resulting accumulation of mutual violations by the signatories. It is well known that the United States and the West wield diplomatic, financial and security influence over the organisation, which draws most of its budget from them.

What are the aims of the latest war in Tigray?

When the forces of the seven-faction alliance, led by the TPLF, launched their latest offensive in late September, the declared aim of the operation was to topple the Ethiopian government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. This is a credible goal, especially given the positions the opposition forces have held toward Abiy’s government since the Tigray war. But the economic and military reality of those forces clearly indicates that other players are directing their moves, and that there are aims beyond the fall of the Ethiopian government.

The TPLF, the most important faction in the alliance, has lost a large part of the popular base that stood behind it from the 1970s, when it fought to overthrow the former president Mengistu Haile Mariam, through to its major role in sustaining support during the first Tigray war. This is the result of the severe exhaustion suffered by the people of Tigray from the 2020–2022 war and its aftermath, and of the political fragmentation among the Front’s members, the splintering of Tigray’s political elite and their differing visions of post-war Tigray.

The TPLF has also lost the financial means to run its affairs. It no longer receives the federal government support it enjoyed throughout the decades it ruled the country, particularly after the suspension of the Endowment Fund for the Rehabilitation of Tigray (EFFORT) and the federal government’s halt to budget transfers to the region. This drove the TPLF to seek aid and support from Eritrea.

The Amhara Fano militias are a collection of scattered factions that, until recently, had no single organisational umbrella. Their political position on the Pretoria Agreement matches Eritrea’s, which made it easier for the Eritrean government to recruit Fano leaders and back them in continuing the armed insurgency in the Amhara region, where large-scale guerrilla warfare has raged since the guns fell silent in Tigray.

The other five factions are in reality little more than splinters of political forces that chose political over military action at an earlier stage. They have no real field strength of any significance, but they hold longstanding ties with the Eritrean government, most of them forged before Eritrea’s independence in 1993.

The real player behind the seven factions is therefore the Eritrean regime. In light of recent developments and regional alliances, Asmara sees the Ethiopian state as a source of threat for two reasons. The first is the fear of the export of the Ethiopian model, the ethno-federal system adopted with the 1994 constitution; President Isaias Afwerki has made no secret of his opposition to that model from then until now. The second is anxiety over Ethiopia’s demand for sea access. On the other hand, despite supporting and recruiting Ethiopian opposition factions, Eritrea is not seeking to topple the Ethiopian government and replace it with anarchy as in Somalia, which would directly rebound on Eritrea itself.

Eritrea’s aims in fuelling this crisis therefore centre on:

1. Creating a buffer zone in northern Ethiopia that acts as a field barrier against any Ethiopian plan to advance militarily and seize sea access.
2. Encircling Ethiopia in a measured way that does not bring the Ethiopian state down outright but counters Ethiopia’s role in the Horn of Africa, which is also the aim of the Egyptian–Eritrean–Somali tripartite alliance.
3. Ending the Emirati–Ethiopian rapprochement, an aim Eritrea shares with several Arab states and with Somalia, all of which oppose the Emirati role in the region.
4. Draining the Ethiopian state, scattering its resources across wars on its periphery and stalling its development drive, which is widely admired among large sections of the peoples of the Horn, in contrast to Eritrea’s poor economic and development record. Ethiopia’s economy had already suffered a major setback during the first Tigray war, with total losses estimated at $44 billion and growth falling from 6% to 2%.

What are the likely outcomes of the war?

On the ground, the Ethiopian government holds the upper hand over the armed factions combined. That force is enough to impose federal authority in Tigray, but not enough to eradicate the factions for good. The modern Ethiopian state has failed to eliminate armed groups over the last six decades, for many reasons. The likeliest scenario is therefore a continuing guerrilla war in Tigray, Amhara and Oromia, to varying degrees and with the support of neighbouring states, remaining a constant source of threat and attrition for the Ethiopian army. This means the chances that the Ethiopian army’s operations against the armed factions will turn into a direct war on neighbouring Eritrea will shrink, if the Ethiopian state heeds logic and the realities on the ground.

Addis Ababa also lacks the option of direct war, despite the Ethiopian army’s superiority over its Eritrean counterpart, for several other reasons, chief among them:

1. The lifting of US sanctions on Eritrean leaders and the Eritrean army in September 2026, which means the Eritrean army can narrow Ethiopia’s advantage.
2. Eritrea’s membership of the tripartite defence alliance, and the alignment of Egyptian and Sudanese positions on the Horn crisis, mean a high probability that other states would enter the war and that hostile fronts would open against the Ethiopian army along its northern, western and south-eastern borders. That would be military suicide.
3. The fragile state of the Ethiopian economy, and the disruption to development caused by the first Tigray war, leave it unable to widen the war. Its economy suffered a major setback, with total losses estimated at $44 billion and growth falling from 6% to 2%, in a country whose gross domestic product does not exceed $130 billion.

On the other side, the prospects for the seven-faction alliance of armed opposition groups surviving in its present form are weak. The factions are deeply divided, and some of them fought direct military clashes against one another until recently. The chance of political and ideological reconciliation among them is slim, unless they carry out comprehensive internal reviews and move from ethnic discourse to a national one.

What solutions are available?

As we have seen, many immediate factors and chronic causes led to the crisis in northern Ethiopia, which may develop into a direct confrontation between the neighbours Ethiopia and Eritrea. Given the region’s current circumstances and the fluidity of the international community, solutions to the chronic causes lying beneath the surface may not be found. But a breakthrough is possible if efforts focus on dismantling the immediate factors that aggravated the present crisis.

The international community, led by the United States and Western countries, did little to stop the bloody war in Tigray in 2020–2022, which killed an estimated 600,000 people in northern Ethiopia and displaced millions more. The Pretoria Agreement therefore turned out feeble and unsustainable, and encouraged the signatories to break it and hollow it out from within. Perhaps the best and most suitable mediator to resolve the crisis in northern Ethiopia is the People’s Republic of China, which has old, well-established ties with Ethiopia, Eritrea and the TPLF, built over the last six decades. China is also the largest trading partner of both countries, and so has the means to act as guarantor of any future agreement.

The Ethiopian government was not well served in raising the question of sea access, either in timing or in manner. The timing was very poor, as the issue was raised at the height of the dispute among Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia over the Renaissance Dam. Egyptian and Sudanese conduct toward Horn of Africa files may be a classic pattern, but both states gained a strategic justification to re-enter the region and to engage with its contradictions. The manner was also unfortunate. The Somaliland question remains unresolved, and Somalia still considers it an integral part of its national territory. Ethiopia, though it enjoys good relations with Somaliland, was never decisive and never moved to recognise it, so signing a memorandum with Hargeisa was a political mistake. It handed Somalia a diplomatic victory and forced the Ethiopian government to retreat and informally cancel the memorandum to save face. Raising the Assab question was equally ill-judged: it coincided with the Ethiopian–Eritrean dispute over the Pretoria Agreement and revealed a shallow reading of the ruling regime in Eritrea, the very regime that, ironically, Addis Ababa had called on to intervene militarily and help end the TPLF threat in 2020.

It would have been better to raise sea access in a calmer, friendlier atmosphere, in which the ruling elites of the Horn could come to accept Ethiopia’s right to an outlet and see it as a factor for the region’s stability rather than a cause of catastrophic wars.

For their part, the ruling elites in Somalia and Eritrea were ill-advised in summoning outside powers through their alliances, even though they know well, and understand historically, what happened in the Horn of Africa over recent decades. Those interventions eroded their sovereignty and turned them into tools for settling scores with the upstream state, ultimately leading to the collapse of the Somali state in 1991 and the creation in 1993 of a fragile state with no strategic depth, Eritrea.

The TPLF’s attempt to turn back the clock by reproducing an armed struggle against Addis Ababa with foreign backing, its failure to read the Ethiopian landscape that it was itself the most important player in shaping since 1991, and its decision to make a narrow ethnic outlook the starting point for change or for the birth of a new Ethiopia, together amount to a strategic error. The people of Tigray have paid its price, and citizens in the other regions will pay it too if these factions continue as they are.

Conclusion

Ethiopia and the rest of the Horn of Africa live in a chronic state of civil and inter-state wars. They are the product, first of all, of local factors, and then of external factors that stimulate and energise existing internal contradictions. The Horn has long been held hostage to the duality of coast and interior, and the wars fought between them across history are still etched in the memory of the region’s people. External interference has also played a role in fuelling this ruinous conflict, as the Portuguese, the Ottoman Empire, Muhammad Ali’s Egypt and the Middle Eastern states of the modern era demonstrate.

Ethiopia’s sea access crisis will continue to loom. The country suffers the consequences of agreements struck between rival local leaders and arriving European powers, which produced a landlocked state. A population explosion, rapid population growth, high unemployment and inflation have driven the government to pursue sea access doggedly as a way out of its economic crises.

The Ethiopian army’s extension of control over all of Tigray is a matter of time. But a new phase will then begin, in which Ethiopian and Eritrean forces stand in direct contact, and the risk of a military miscalculation is very real. The Ethiopian–Eritrean war itself broke out because of a small error in military judgment and calculation, made on 6 May 2000.

About the Author

Dr. Ahmed Hirad is a journalist, writer and researcher on Horn of Africa affairs.

Disclaimer: The viewpoints expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions or perspectives of Somaliland Chronicle and its staff.

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