How Ethiopia's Tigray conflict reached a second war

For nearly three decades after the fall of Ethiopia's military dictatorship in 1991, the Tigray People's Liberation Front, or TPLF, was the most powerful component of the coalition that governed Ethiopia. Tigray itself is a relatively small region, but the TPLF sat at the centre of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front and played an outsized role in the federal state.²

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That balance changed after Abiy Ahmed became prime minister in 2018. Abiy reorganised much of the governing coalition into a new Prosperity Party. The TPLF did not join it, and the political dispute increasingly became a constitutional one: how much authority should sit with the federal government, and how much with Ethiopia's ethnically based regional states?²

The immediate break came during the Covid-19 pandemic. Ethiopia postponed national elections scheduled for 2020. Tigray's authorities rejected the delay and held their own regional election in September. The federal government said the vote was illegal. Each side increasingly treated the other as illegitimate.²

War began in November 2020 after a confrontation involving federal military bases in Tigray. Prime Minister Abiy said federal forces were responding to an attack by Tigrayan forces; the TPLF said the federal government had been preparing to move against it.²

What followed became one of the world's deadliest recent conflicts. Ethiopian federal forces fought alongside troops from neighbouring Eritrea and forces from Ethiopia's Amhara region. Tigrayan forces initially lost the regional capital, Mekelle, but retook it in 2021 and later advanced beyond Tigray.²

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The civilian consequences were enormous. Estimates of the death toll vary because access and record-keeping collapsed during the war; researchers and international reporting have put the total in the hundreds of thousands when deaths from fighting, hunger and the breakdown of health services are combined.²

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The war also produced repeated allegations of atrocities by multiple parties. Those claims, the displacement of civilians and arguments over humanitarian access became part of the political dispute that any peace process would have to address.

Eritrea's involvement turned an Ethiopian civil war into a regional one.

The history is unusually tangled. Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a border war from 1998 to 2000. When Abiy came to power he made peace with Eritrea's President Isaias Afwerki, a breakthrough that helped earn Abiy the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize. When the Tigray war began the following year, Eritrea fought on the federal government's side against the TPLF.²

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Eritrea was nevertheless not a party to the Pretoria agreement that ended the war in 2022. That omission mattered. Questions over Eritrean troops, disputed territory and the security of the border survived the ceasefire.

In later years Ethiopia's renewed interest in secure access to the Red Sea created another source of tension. Landlocked Ethiopia lost direct sea access when Eritrea became independent in 1993. Ethiopian discussion of ports, including Assab, has been viewed with deep suspicion in Eritrea.²

By 2026 the relationship had reversed: Addis Ababa was accusing Eritrea of supporting forces opposed to the federal government, while Eritrea denied the allegations.³

Formal African Union-led talks began in South Africa on 25 October 2022.⁴ Eight days later, on 2 November, representatives of Ethiopia's federal government and the TPLF signed the Agreement for Lasting Peace through a Permanent Cessation of Hostilities.¹

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The agreement did several things at once. It required a permanent end to hostilities, provided for the disarmament of Tigrayan forces, reaffirmed federal authority, called for restoration of public services and humanitarian access, and created a route back toward political normalisation.¹

The African Union later established a monitoring, verification and compliance mechanism to oversee implementation.⁵

The agreement succeeded at its most immediate task: the large-scale war stopped. Flights and public services resumed, humanitarian access improved and an interim regional administration was created.⁵

But a ceasefire is not the same thing as a completed political settlement.

Several disputes remained open after 2022.

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One was territory. Areas in western and southern Tigray had changed hands during the war, particularly involving Amhara forces. The peace agreement did not make every local territorial dispute disappear.

Another was the internal politics of Tigray. The post-war settlement required the TPLF and the interim administration to navigate disarmament, political authority and relations with Addis Ababa. By 2026, Reuters reported that splits inside the TPLF had deepened and a harder-line faction had reasserted control in the region.²

A third was Eritrea. It had fought in the war but had not signed the peace agreement. Its future relationship with both Ethiopia and Tigray therefore sat partly outside the structure designed to keep the peace.

By January 2026 the African Union was already warning all parties against actions that could undermine the "hard-won gains" of Pretoria and calling for unresolved issues to be handled through dialogue.⁶

The immediate 2026 escalation followed months of political strain. Tigrayan forces formed an alliance with several other armed groups opposed to Abiy's government, including groups that had been enemies during the earlier war.²

On 23 September Tigrayan forces seized the civilian airports at Mekelle, Axum and Shire and fighting spread into southern Tigray and neighbouring areas. The renewed offensive made clear that the ceasefire's military assumptions had broken down.⁷

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Federal and allied forces then counter-attacked. Control claims over towns such as Alamata shifted rapidly, while communications disruptions made independent verification difficult.

The humanitarian effects followed quickly. Associated Press reported hundreds of wounded people treated in hospitals and about 150,000 people displaced as fighting spread.⁸

The most important difference between 2020 and 2026 is the map of alliances.

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Eritrea was Ethiopia's military partner in the first war. It is now one of the governments Ethiopia accuses of supporting its opponents. Eritrea denies the charge and on 1 October severed diplomatic relations with Ethiopia, hours after Ethiopia expelled 10 Eritrean diplomats.³

Ethiopian officials have also accused Sudan and Egypt of supporting Tigrayan forces; those allegations are disputed. Egypt has a separate strategic dispute with Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. Sudan is itself at war. Ethiopia's pursuit of Red Sea access adds another dispute involving Eritrea and Somaliland.⁷

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None of those overlapping rivalries proves that a single regional coalition is directing the fighting. They do mean that a conflict once structured around Addis Ababa, Mekelle and Asmara now sits inside a much wider set of tensions.

That is why the African Union's continuing insistence on Pretoria matters. There is no newer agreed framework ready to replace it.

The 2022 agreement showed that the parties could stop a catastrophic war. Its weakness was that stopping the war did not resolve every dispute that had produced it.

The next test is therefore larger than whether one side holds an airport or a town. It is whether Pretoria can still function as a political mechanism when the military balance, Tigray's internal politics and Ethiopia's relationships with its neighbours have all changed.

If it can, the agreement remains a route back to negotiation. If it cannot, northern Ethiopia is no longer dealing with an unfinished peace process. It is dealing with a second war.