Ethiopia slides back into all-out war
Seven armed groups announced an alliance to remove Abiy Ahmed and resumed offensives in Tigray, Afar and Amhara, burying the 2022 Pretoria agreement in practice.
Ethiopia is back at the center of the news with the announcement of a seven-group armed alliance against the government of Abiy Ahmed and renewed fighting in the north. Seen from afar, the scene looks sudden. Seen from inside, it closes a half-century cycle with no settlement.
The country has about 120 million people, the second largest population in Africa, and more than 80 ethnic groups sharing a central state that has almost always ruled by force. From Emperor Haile Selassie, deposed in 1974, to the military dictatorship of Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Derg, overthrown in 1991, Addis Ababa concentrated power while peripheries such as Tigray, Oromia, Amhara, Ogaden and Afar accumulated grievance.
In 1991, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), rooted in a minority representing about 6% of the population, seized power through the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front coalition. Under Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia grew and gained international standing, while real power stayed with the Tigrayan elite. To manage the tension, the regime enshrined ethnic federalism, with 12 formally autonomous regions drawn along ethnic lines, a design that gave local voice while hardening disputes over land and resources.
The 2018 break and the 2020 war
The arrangement collapsed in 2018, when mass protests, mainly Oromo, brought Abiy Ahmed, himself of Oromo origin, to power as a celebrated reformer and 2019 Nobel Peace Prize laureate for the rapprochement with Eritrea. Abiy dismantled the TPLF-led coalition, founded the Prosperity Party and pushed the old elite to the margins.
In November 2020, after the postponement of national elections and accusations of a Tigrayan attack on a federal base in Mekelle, Abiy sent the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF) north, backed by Eritrean troops and Amhara militias. What was announced as a limited operation became one of the deadliest wars of the century, with an estimated toll of about 600,000 dead presented by African Union (AU) mediator Olusegun Obasanjo, alongside widespread hunger and the displacement of millions.
The war ended in Pretoria in November 2022 but never produced a new political order. Tigray remained suspended between war and peace, with Eritrean and Amhara troops still present in the west, without full disarmament and without a full return of the displaced, as recorded in the Council on Foreign Relations conflict tracker.
Former allies turned enemies
Meanwhile, Abiy’s wartime allies turned against him. The Fano militia of the Amhara, which had fought alongside the government against Tigray, refused disarmament in 2023 and launched an open insurgency. The Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) kept up guerrilla warfare in the country’s most populous region. In June 2026, Abiy renewed the Prosperity Party’s parliamentary majority in an election hollowed out by war and opposition boycott.
What is new in September is not only the return of war in Tigray but the merger of fronts the government treated as isolated local rebellions.
On Sept. 21, 2026, seven groups announced the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, with the stated goal of removing Abiy and forming a transitional government, according to British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reporting on the new alliance. The front brings together the TPLF, the Fano National Movement, the OLA, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF), the Afar Revolutionary Democratic Unity Front, the Benishangul Peoples’ Liberation Movement and the Gumuz Peoples’ Democratic Movement, forces from half the country’s regions, including groups that once fought each other.
What changed this week
On Sept. 23, 2026, two days after the announcement, the alliance moved from paper to ground. Tigrayan forces seized federal airports in Tigray, including Alula Aba Nega International Airport in Mekelle, prompting Ethiopian Airlines to suspend flights to the region. Offensives were launched against federal positions in Afar and Amhara, with fighting confirmed by four independent sources heard by The Associated Press. Human Rights Watch records resumed fighting since Aug. 1, 2026, with near-daily drone strikes. On Sept. 19, a strike in Alamata, in southern Tigray, killed at least 14 civilians and wounded 22, according to local authorities cited in Al Jazeera’s analysis of the rebel alliance.
The government accuses the TPLF of breaking the Pretoria agreement and points to funding from Eritrea, its historic rival. The TPLF says it acts in a defensive posture after federal bombardment. Neither side has presented a verifiable casualty count, and humanitarian agencies have yet to release displacement figures for the new round.
Why it matters now
If the Wollo front in Amhara and the Tigray front connect, Addis Ababa loses the ability to frame each conflict as a compartmentalized internal matter, and regional missions lose any arbitration role. Ethiopia is the demographic anchor of the Horn of Africa, and a collapse at the center contaminates Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia, while choking humanitarian and trade corridors linked to the Red Sea.
The open question the case leaves is who sustains a new national settlement when the previous one collapsed without ever being implemented and when every relevant actor chose the armed path at the same time.