Ethiopian government soldiers ride in the back of a truck during the recent war in Tigray, near Agula, Ethiopia, May 8, 2021 (AP photo by Ben Curtis).
Hundreds of people fled Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region into neighboring Sudan, after Ethiopian troops clashed with fighters from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the regional ruling party that fought Ethiopia’s national government during the 2020-2022 civil war. Both sides blamed each other for initiating the recent clashes.
The fighting, involving drones and heavy artillery, marks the most serious confrontation since the war, which killed an estimated 600,000 people before ending with an African Union-brokered peace deal. Under that agreement, an interim administration was set up to govern Tigray, but the TPLF later retook control of the region.
With key parts of the peace deal still unimplemented, the clashes have raised fears of a return to full-scale conflict. There are also concerns that the fighting could draw in neighboring Sudan, embroiled in its own civil war since 2023, with its rival factions accused of backing opposing sides in Ethiopia.
As WPR’s Elliot Waldman wrote in a March newsletter, the region’s web of tensions raises the risk of a “regional mega-war” engulfing much of the Horn of Africa. As such, there is an urgent need for de-escalation and diplomatic offramps from all sides, though for now, that appears to be an unlikely scenario.