An outbreak of factional fighting in northern Ethiopia has led Africa’s second most populous country back to the brink of civil war and threatens to reignite a conflict with neighbouring Eritrea, regional officials have warned.
A dissident faction of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the ruling party in the state of Tigray, has seized parts of the regional capital Mekelle and taken control of the area’s second-largest city Adigrat, in what regional officials and experts said amounted to a “coup”.
Ahmed Soliman, a Horn of Africa expert at UK think-tank Chatham House, said the situation posed grave security concerns for both Ethiopia and Eritrea.
“We’ve got a very fragile peace agreement which is unravelling at the moment,” he said, adding that Tigray’s chief administrator Getachew Reda had essentially been hounded out of office by a rival TPLF faction led by its chair Debretsion Gebremichael.
“This may lead to a war between Addis [Ababa] and Tigray and the suggestion is that Debretsion’s TPLF has struck up an alliance with their biggest enemy, the Eritrean government. An alliance on the basis of my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”
Ethiopia’s two-year civil war between 2020 and 2022 claimed as many as 600,000 lives, making it one of the world’s deadliest conflicts of recent times. Eritrean troops fought on the side of the Ethiopian federal army and were accused of mass killings and rape.
Relations between the two countries have steadily worsened since the civil war came to an end in November 2022, after a peace agreement that Eritrea was not party to. There are consistent reports of a build-up of troops on both sides of the border.
Ethiopia’s former chief of army staff General Tsadkan Bayru, who fought on the Tigrayan side in the civil war, warned in a column published last week by the Africa Report magazine that “at any moment war between Ethiopia and Eritrea could break out . . . and the security of the Red Sea will be directly affected”.
Getachew, who has been in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa since last week, wrote on X on Tuesday that the fighting in Tigray was part of a “hare-brained plan to install an illegal faction of TPLF into the position of power”, which risked escalating into “another round of devastating war”.
In a veiled reference to Eritrea, he added that “there is every reason to believe external forces are trying to take advantage of this crisis”.
Eritrea’s government spokesperson Yemane Gebremeskel has denied claims that soldiers from his country had remained active inside the Ethiopian border in Tigray and said another war between Eritrea and Ethiopia would be “senseless”.
But he added that the accusations could be a pretext for Ethiopia to unleash a hostile agenda and attempt to take back control of the Massawa and Assab ports, which it lost when Eritrea gained independence after a 30-year liberation war in 1992.
“The constant sabre-rattling is too intense to shrug it off as simple posturing,” said Gebremeskel.
Soliman of Chatham House said if Ethiopian federal forces intervened in Tigray on behalf of Getachew it could suck in Eritrea, triggering a regional war.
“There’s talk of a build-up of forces, with some evidence of a mobilisation on the Afari-Eritrean border. The worry of that would be a regional confrontation. It’s the last thing the people of Tigray or the region need,” he said.
Cartography by Ian Bott
