Ethiopia Goes Back to War

n Sunday, September 20, after several skirmishes and mutual drone strikes with the government, seven armed groups in Ethiopia announced they were banding together under the name the “Ethiopian People’s Forces Alliance for Survival” to remove Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed from power. Shortly after, forces of the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) launched an offensive and reportedly seized three regional airports. This was followed by counterattacks from the federal military—the Ethiopian National Defense Force (EDNF)—as well as allied groups. While more optimistic voices characterized the conflict as being merely a “risk of return to war,” on September 24 Addisalem Balema, a member of the TPLF central committee, told Al Jazeera that the situation had become a “full war.”

Ethiopia may be seen by Americans as the ultimate backwater, but the latest happenings there come at a particularly fraught time for U.S. power in the Horn. The broader Red Sea region is in turmoil due to a dizzying array of local conflicts and the Trump administration’s war against Iran, while the U.S. government just signed a new defense agreement with Ethiopia a month prior and certainly does not want to see Abiy’s government fall.

Ethiopia, which has a population made up of four main ethnic groups as well as many smaller ethnicities, has for many years been facing a variety of regional insurgencies. But the “full-scale” civil war in the northern Tigray Region, one of the deadliest conflicts of the 21st century with an estimated 600,000 fatalities, had been in an unsteady ceasefire since the Pretoria Agreement was signed in 2022. Though Ethiopian history is complicated, the short story behind that war was that the TPLF—representing an ethnicity that makes up only 5 percent of Ethiopia’s population—dominated Ethiopia after an alliance of regional Liberation Fronts overthrew communism in 1991, but was sidelined after Abiy took power in 2018. (In Ethiopia family names come before Christian names.)

Abiy is by all accounts an unusual leader, as was explained in depth in the book The Abiy Project by Tom Gardner. He has described himself as taking inspiration from Silicon Valley CEOs, and he has turned out to be quite a lot like them: He promised the public freedom, to great international acclaim, but instead delivered tyranny, surveillance, and high-tech warfare. He also has the distinctly Trumpian tendency to make exciting handshake deals, bask in the praise and photo ops, but to not have actually worked out any of the fundamentals.