Fighting has erupted once again in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region, jolting a population still struggling to recover from a devastating two-year war and raising the prospect that the country could slide back into a wider conflict.
Residents in Tigray, where memories of the 2020-2022 war remain raw, are reporting panic buying as fears spread that the latest clashes between regional forces and the national army could escalate quickly. Internet and call services have also been disrupted, cutting off access to information and making it harder for people to reach family members or move money through digital platforms in what has become a largely cashless society after ATMs stopped working several months ago.
The renewed violence follows more than six months of deteriorating relations between Ethiopia's federal government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front, or TPLF, the party that dominates politics in the region. Although the African Union brokered the Pretoria Agreement in 2022 to end the war, several of its most sensitive provisions have remained unresolved, leaving both sides locked in a cycle of accusation, mobilization and mistrust.
This week, major clashes erupted in Tigray and quickly spread into neighbouring Afar and Amhara regions, underscoring how easily local fighting in Ethiopia can spill across regional boundaries. The two sides disagree sharply over who triggered the latest escalation. The TPLF says it was responding to a federal offensive, including drone strikes, while the government says Tigrayan forces attacked first after seizing control of airports in Tigray.
The stakes are high because Tigray's last war was among the deadliest conflicts of the century. The AU mediator estimated that some 600,000 people died during the fighting, which cut the region off from the outside world and pushed it to the brink of famine. The conflict also deepened Ethiopia's internal fractures, inflamed ethnic tensions and left a legacy of displacement, trauma and political bitterness that has not been fully addressed.
The TPLF's role in Ethiopian politics helps explain why the current crisis is so fraught. The movement emerged in the 1970s as an armed force fighting Ethiopia's military government. It later became a central player in the overthrow of the Marxist regime in 1991 and went on to dominate the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, the coalition that governed the country for nearly three decades. But its influence was always controversial in a country where Tigrayans make up around 6% of the population, and many Ethiopians believed the TPLF held too much power.
That balance shifted sharply when Abiy Ahmed became prime minister in 2018 and replaced the EPRDF with the Prosperity Party, significantly reducing the TPLF's influence. Relations between Addis Ababa and the TPLF rapidly deteriorated, and war broke out in 2020. An uneasy truce was finally agreed in November 2022, but the peace has remained fragile and incomplete.
At the heart of the current dispute are four unresolved issues, two of them tied to the fertile and strategically important area of western Tigray. The TPLF lost control of the territory in the early days of the war to fighters from Amhara, the neighbouring region to the west whose forces had fought alongside the Ethiopian army. Many in Amhara argue that western Tigray should never have been incorporated into Tigray when regional boundaries were redrawn after the fall of the military regime in 1991.
For the TPLF, western Tigray is a core grievance. It wants the territory returned and for the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tigrayans displaced from the area to go home. The government, by contrast, says the future of the territory should be determined by referendum. That disagreement has become one of the most combustible issues in the peace process, feeding suspicion on both sides and leaving displaced families in limbo.
Another major point of contention is disarmament. The government says the TPLF has only handed over old weapons, a claim that reflects broader doubts in Addis Ababa about whether the regional leadership has fully complied with the Pretoria deal. The TPLF, for its part, has accused the federal government of failing to meet its own obligations and of using force rather than negotiation to settle disputes.
The latest fighting has now raised the possibility that Ethiopia's north could once again become the centre of a broader national crisis. With communications disrupted, civilians are left with little reliable information and even less certainty about what comes next. For many in Tigray, the fear is not just of another battle, but of a return to the kind of all-consuming war that once brought the region to the edge of catastrophe.