Ethiopia is on the brink of a war that could turn into a major regional conflagration. Over the past several weeks, military forces have been moving into position across the region in a conflict that would pit the government of Ethiopia and some allied militias against Eritrea and a rebel faction from Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, among others.
There are several concurrent forces driving the region toward conflict: lingering resentments and unresolved disputes from Ethiopia’s civil war from 2020 to 2022; a move by the government of landlocked Ethiopia to potentially claim a Red Sea port in neighboring Eritrea; and spillover from the civil war in Sudan, where outside forces like the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia are seeking to expand their regional footprint. All of this is pushing the region, seemingly inexorably, toward war.
This would be a disaster. The civil war from 2020 to 2022 killed an estimated 500,000 people and exposed violent ethnic fissures in Ethiopia. This time around, many of the belligerents are the same—but they have switched sides. Back in 2020, Eritrea and Ethiopia allied to fight a rebellious group in the Tigray region. This time, Eritrea and Tigrayan rebels are joining forces to fight Ethiopia, with several other ethnic militias joining in. Also different this time is the active presence of malicious Gulf actors. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Ethiopia had established, with UAE backing, a training camp for the Rapid Support Forces militia that is ravaging Darfur in Sudan.
Several NGO groups, think tanks, and regional or specialty news outlets have picked up this story—and are sounding the alarm. But so far, we have not yet seen much Western media attention to this incipient crisis. That’s tragic, given the sheer human calamity that would unfold if Ethiopia and Eritrea once again descend into a conflict that reverberates across the region.
My interview guest today is journalist Zecharias Zelalem. We kick off by discussing recent moves that suggest war could break out at any moment, and then have a longer conversation about what is driving this conflict—and what might bring the region back from the brink.
Please share this conversation widely. It’s freely available, along with the transcript below. I do what I do to help bring attention to under-reported crises among the large policy community that congregates around Global Dispatches. Please listen/watch/share and, if you are able, support my work through a paid subscription.
Transcript edited for clarity
Mark Leon Goldberg: All right. It looks like we are live, Zecharias. Might as well get started. Welcome, everyone. My name is Mark Leon Goldberg. I’m the host of Global Dispatches, this very podcast. Zecharias, why don’t you introduce yourself?
Zecharias Zelalem: Sure. So, I’m Zecharias Zelalem. I’m a freelance journalist, and I cover human rights and migration for a host of international media outlets, including Al Jazeera and The Globe and Mail. And I’m also Ethiopian Canadian, and I’m keeping tabs on the deteriorating situation in the Horn of Africa.
Mark Leon Goldberg: And it’s deteriorating really sharply. I mean, you wouldn’t know it if you just scan the headlines on most major Western news outlets today. But the way in which I tend to come to stories is not just by looking at what’s happening in most major Western media outlets, but by reading NGO reports, think tank reports, specialty journalism of the kind that you do, Zecharias.
And over the last couple of weeks, there has been this growing sense of alarm that civil war might return, very soon, to Ethiopia and engulf the entire regions. All the warning signs are flashing read. And Zecharias, as you and I were preparing for this interview today, you emailed me yesterday saying that you’re glad that we’re speaking today because if we waited any longer, war might already have broken out. Can you explain what’s been happening really just over the last 24 hours, I suppose?
Zecharias Zelalem: So, yeah, there have been a lot of rapid developments just over the course of the past 24 to 48 hours. But in terms of war, you could ask any keen observer of affairs in the Horn of Africa, and it’s really since late 2023, early 2024, that everyone had begun predicting that war was inevitable. Various countries were ramping up the savor rattling, the warmongering rhetoric.
The Ethiopian government in particular, very aggressive expansionist claims to territory belonging to neighboring countries. And of course, the fallout between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the two countries who had agreed to reestablish ties in 2019, something that won the Ethiopian Prime Minister the Nobel Peace Prize then, they have since fallen out. So, war was always inevitable. That’s what anyone would have told you for some two or three years now. But what we’ve seen over the course of the past week or so, last weekend, so the weekend preceding the current one, we had the African Union Summit in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa.
And it seems like that summit served the Ethiopian government well to camouflage a host of preparations for war, mass deployments of troops northwards. That’s towards Tigray and towards the Eritrean border. There were lots of trucks requisitioned that were also sent northwards. There were advertisements being circulated in southern Ethiopia for former soldiers, former police officers to join a makeshift force to hold positions in southern Ethiopia where Ethiopian troops used to be, because they’re all being sent northwards.
And then what we saw yesterday was the Ethiopian government make a very controversial decision to basically state that some of the disputed territories between the Amhara and Tigray regions, flashpoints of the previous war a few years ago, the government decided that the electoral districts in those areas would no longer be under the jurisdiction of the Tigray region, which everyone is interpreting as yet another push towards war. It’s an antagonizing move. And as I said, that happened barely 24 hours ago. So, unfortunately, the situation looks very grim. And there’s very little anyone could do now. We’re almost on the brink.
Mark Leon Goldberg: What’s kind of odd, at least to me, about the potential outbreak of a new civil war, and it’s really, I shouldn’t even call it a civil war because it would most certainly involve Eritrea. And it would also, for reasons that you and I will discuss, involve some of the key regional players that are also fanning the flames in neighboring Sudan as well. So, this is not just a potential civil war we’re talking about. This is a war that is expanding throughout the Horn of Africa. And what’s sort of odd, at least to me, is that the key players in this potential new outbreak of violence are the same essentially as they were before, but of shifting alliances and on different sides.
Can you just explain how it is that the previous civil war, which essentially involved Ethiopia, military forces in Tigray, the region in northern Ethiopia that borders Eritrea, and Eritrea in that war from 2020 to 2022, essentially, and I’m simplifying things, you had the Ethiopian federal government teaming up with the Eritrean government against the Tigrayan forces? Now alliances have switched in a kind of dramatic way.
Zecharias Zelalem: Yeah, dramatic is putting it lightly. Som the last time when I was on your show, Mark, things were very different. And a lot of the regional power players that you brought up briefly just now weren’t involved. It’s one of the reasons why the conflict wasn’t really viewed with the international lens that it’s being viewed now because, as you said, you had the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments on one side, along with various militias from the Amhara region. Then you had Tigrayan rebels on their own, sealed off from the outside world.
And that was the war that killed some half a million people from 2020 to 2022. When that war ended with a ceasefire, the Pretoria ceasefire, negotiated in November 2022, that ceasefire led to a falling out between the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments. The Eritrean government absolutely wanted to end things militarily. It was unhappy with the fact that the Tigrayan rebels were not wiped out. And despite the fact that the ceasefire called for the Tigrayan rebels, the TPLF, that’s their acronym, to surrender their armaments, and they did to some extent, they have clearly still maintained the bulk of their arsenal.
And despite the fact that the Tigrayan rebels and the Eritrean government have a two-decade-old enmity, somehow they were able to strike an alliance quietly over the course of the past two years. And it’s caught a lot of people off guard. But suddenly, Eritrean forces and Tigrayan rebels, and these are the same rebels who had accused the Eritrean government of carrying out a genocide against their people only a few years ago. Now, suddenly, they’re allies. You know, it’s real politic at its finest. There’s not much that binds them. Of course, they do share cultural and linguistic ties. But politically, you would have thought that there’s nothing that would bring them together.
But that caught a lot of us off guard. And the Ethiopian government, the Ethiopian army, no longer has the ability to seal off the Tigray region, cut the Tigrayan rebels off from international frontiers the way it did some three and a half odd years ago. So, things have changed completely. The Amhara militias, the Fano that used to also be allied with the Ethiopian government, have also fallen out with the Ethiopian government. And actually, there’s been a war in the Amhara region for some three years now, an ongoing war that has seen a slew of atrocities, ongoing drone strikes that have killed thousands of civilians in the Amhara region.
So, things have shifted completely. And then the international angle, of course, is the fact that this was a war that did not really extend beyond the region some four or five years ago. But now, due to Ethiopia getting involved in Sudan on the side of the United Arab Emirates and the Rapid Support Forces, you have, on one side, the United Arab Emirates, which continues to be the primary funder and armorer and supporter of the Ethiopian government, and the Tigrayan rebels benefited from the partnership with the Sudanese government and allegedly Egypt as well.
And so, because United Arab Emirates has already fallen out with Saudi Arabia and with another of the other regional players over Yemen and Sudan, of course, to what extent their fallout might affect things in this yet-to-breakout war or just how involved some of these players will get isn’t clear for now, but it could make things far more devastating than they were four or five years ago.
Mark Leon Goldberg: I do want to get to that broader regional angle involving the UAE, Ethiopia, the rapid support forces, the Sudanese armed forces, and Egypt, because that’s a really important part of the story. But one other kind of driving factor in this potential march to war seems to be Abiy Ahmed, the leader of Ethiopia’s ambitions for a seaport. Ethiopia is a landlocked country. Correct me if I’m wrong, but their access to the Red Sea typically has gone through Djibouti.
But now, over the last couple of years, Abiy Ahmed has set his sights potentially on Eritrean territory that borders the Red Sea, and has been explicit in his intention to capture or somehow seek access to the Red Sea, taking what is internationally recognized as Eritrean territory. And that seems to be at least one contributing factor as to why the Eritrean government is now siding with their old arch enemies, the Tigrayan militias, against Ethiopia. Can you flesh that out a bit? And what are the Ethiopian government, Abiy Ahmed’s intentions regarding access to the Red Sea? It seems to be taken on a really important political position of his.
Zecharias Zelalem: So, to make things clear, even for those of us who follow the region as our day job, the exact intentions behind Ethiopian government’s very explicit claims to territory in Eritrea and even in Somalia, the reasoning behind it isn’t clear because when Abiy Ahmed came to power, he came to power promising compromise and even a willingness to surrender territory that Ethiopia had occupied for two decades, but that under international law-
Mark Leon Goldberg: Then again, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in like 2017 or 16-ish.
Zecharias Zelalem: 2019, correct.
Mark Leon Goldberg: 2019, yeah.
Zecharias Zelalem: That was for agreeing to reestablish ties between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which was a first in 20 years. And to enable that, he had promised to surrender the territory of Badme, which, under international arbitration, was awarded to Eritrea. But the Ethiopian forces hadn’t vacated the territory in two decades. So, he came to power, willing to make compromises and to basically honor international arbitration and international treaties. So, suddenly following the fallout between Ethiopia and Eritrea in early to mid-2023, suddenly a shift came and suddenly a rhetoric that really had, for decades, had belonged to a very fringe element of Ethiopian society, expansionist rhetoric questioning Eritrean independence in 1991 as a whole.
So, that’s something that had been, like I said, very fringe elements, very far-right nationalist elements of Ethiopian society that had been gone from the mainstream media and the country for at least the entirety of the 21st century. So, those points of views started to make a comeback. A lot of the political scientists of the region, over the past few years, are of the opinion that because of the fallout with Eritrea, the Ethiopian government might be pandering to a more nationalist element of Ethiopian society really to ramp up support in the country for a possible war with Eritrea, which, as I told you earlier, had been seen as inevitable for a couple of years now.
It’s not exactly clear what his intentions are. I think anyone would say that if Ethiopia had a very credible claim to some of these territories or the Port of Assab or the port of Massawa in Eritrea, I think by now the issue would have probably been raised at the United Nations Security Council, and the same for its territorial claims in other neighboring countries. Ethiopia has never raised these issues there. And, as anyone who’s a historian would tell you, a lot of the borders were drafted up by the colonial powers of the day a century or so ago.
And during that era, Ethiopia signed maybe three or four treaties that clearly demarcated the border and placed these ports in what was then Italian East Africa, which is a territory that’s today inherited by Eritrea. So, it’s unclear, as I said, because this was not part of his ideology. This was not part of the mandate that he came to power on. He came promising reform and compromise. And then he became a very hardened nationalist between mid to late 2023. As I said, that could have probably been with the war in mind. It could have probably been to foster enmity with Eritrea.
And today, for instance, on the front page of the Ethiopian Herald, which is the state media daily paper, an image from the Ethiopian military parade, the Ethiopian military celebration. It was the 65th anniversary last weekend. And the picture on the front page contains a message which reads, “We will not remain boxed in.” And that is a clear reference to the fact that Ethiopia is landlocked, and that’s an open threat to regain access to the sea. So, as I said, that kind of rhetoric had not been seen in mainstream media or mainstream political discourse in Ethiopia for some decades, maybe two or three decades now.
And it’s made a comeback. And I think, as I said, the likelihood is that this is primarily to ramp up support for war, which could be days or hours away now.
Mark Leon Goldberg: So, I mean, you have all the domestic kind of considerations and pressures for a war that you just articulated. We did discuss briefly, I want to flesh out, the kind of role of the same kind of external forces, the UAE, Egypt, that are supporting the conflict in Sudan on opposite sides, playing a key role now in Ethiopia. Because to a certain extent, the reason why I’m reluctant to call this a civil war is that there seems, to a certain extent, if war does break out, to be an extension of a wider regional conflict that’s underway.
And you saw earlier this kind of remarkable report in Reuters, I believe it was last week, in which Reuters kind of discovered training camps for the Rapid Support Forces, this kind of genocidal militia that’s been terrorizing Darfur and controls most of the west of the country. They’re training in Ethiopian territory with the support of the United Arab Emirates. There’s like a very direct link there. And then you’ve also seen reports of the Eritrean government supporting and receiving the support of the Sudanese army, which controls most of the eastern part of Sudan right now, and is backed by Egypt. So, this is all part of one broader regional conflagration.
Zecharias Zelalem: Yeah, absolutely. And anyone would argue with you that Ethiopia has been a client state of the United Arab Emirates since Abiy Ahmed has come to power. And as such, it was hardly ever surprising that Reuters discovered RSF camps. I mean, they had been rumored for a while, for much of last year, actually. Most of the journalists who cover the Horn of Africa said it was just a matter of time before someone came across and identified the camps. I actually learned of their location, the same ones, in the Reuters report sometime in December. Reuters scooped us to that. It’s hardly a surprise. What would be interesting here is that despite the fact that Ethiopia has a very, very close partnership with the United Arab Emirates, it also enjoys security ties with some of the countries that have fallen out with the United Arab Emirates over the role that it’s playing in arming the genocidal RSF forces.
And among those is Turkey. So, if you recall, during the 2020 to 2022 civil war, the Tigrayan rebels came close to launching an assault on the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, but were pushed back due to an Ethiopian military counterattack that was backed by Turkish Bayraktar drones. The delivery of Turkish drones arguably saved the Abiy Ahmed government from possible overthrow in 2021. And the Ethiopian government has only extended its partnership and has also enhanced its drone arsenal, thanks to Turkey.
It’s now built new drone hangars that have been discovered at the main Ethiopian Air Force base in the city of Bishoftu. And I think it was days or barely a week after the Reuters report came out, very high level delegation from Turkey, and then eventually Erdogan himself came to Addis Ababa. And despite the fact that the Ethiopian media in Addis Ababa covered the event as Ethiopia and Turkey strengthening their relationships, I have it on good authority that the only reason why the Turkish delegation and their leader came to Addis Ababa was to scold Abiy Ahmed and to warn him of the consequences of continuing to arm and support the RSF in Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz’s region. And a Saudi delegation came shortly afterwards with the same demands, to immediately cease assisting the RSF.
So, what role these two countries could play, both countries who have extremely close ties with Ethiopia? Saudi Arabia is a critical source of forex for Ethiopia at a time when the Ethiopian economy is close to ruin. Remember, just two, three years ago, the country defaulted on its debts. And Turkey is the primary source of the country’s drone arsenal. They could play a role, obviously, in influencing Ethiopian policy. What could that lead to? It leaves the prime minister of Ethiopia between a rock and a hard place, definitely. It’s really hard to say what decisions he’d be making in the coming days and weeks. But yeah, that could lead to a fallout.
And these regional powers, who were, at times in the past, as recently as two, three years ago, sometimes seen as neutral powers, for instance, Turkey, just two years ago, negotiated or mediated the dispute between Somalia and Ethiopia when Ethiopia threatened to recognize the breakaway republic of Somaliland. Turkey mediated that dispute. Turkiye may no longer be a neutral player in the region, especially considering its fallout with the United Arab Emirates. So, a lot at stake.
Mark Leon Goldberg: So, earlier you mentioned that the kind of first iteration of this war from 2020 to 2022 probably killed about 500,000 people. Most people were killed as a result of the humanitarian fallout from this conflict. Tigray in particular was cut off, mass starvation, death, disease, killed just hundreds of thousands of people during this time. I have to imagine that given the circumstances of this conflict or this potential new conflict, as you described it, things would probably be much worse.
Zecharias Zelalem: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s hard to say. So, for what happened between 2020 and 2022, a lot of researchers will say that the bulk of the horrors and the bulk of the death and the suffering was caused by the fact that the entire Tigray region was put under a two-year Gaza-style humanitarian siege that blocked all medicine and humanitarian aid from entering the region. As things stand now, with the fact that the Tigrayan rebels have suddenly allied alongside Eritrea, that won’t happen. Eritrea helped maintain that blockade from 2020 to 2022. And now suddenly, the Tigrayan rebels have reportedly been able to amass armaments through Eritrea.
So, things have changed a lot. Eritrean soldiers have been seen taking positions up in Tigray, which is far a cry from the situation three or four years ago. But at the same time, these are countries that are putting everything they have into their armies. Just a few weeks ago, reports emerged of new Russian drones suddenly being delivered to Ethiopia. I put out a policy paper that I published last year for the European Council on Foreign Relations that highlighted the devastating impact of drones, cheaply manufactured drones. They’ve killed thousands of civilians in Ethiopia over the course of the past six years.
And many of those deaths were during lower scale wars, including the war in the Amhara region, which has not killed half a million people, but has been devastating, nonetheless. If the conflicts intensify, then you can imagine that the toll will be horrible on the population, already still reeling from the effects of war and what actually what a lot of human rights scholars say amounted to a genocide.
Mark Leon Goldberg: So, this kind of nightmare scenario, though looking like it is going to erupt any moment now, has not yet erupted, at least at time of recording Tuesday, February 24th at like three o’clock Eastern time. What can be done to prevent the kind of worst-case scenarios from unfolding at this point? What can the international community do? What can key regional actors do to prevent this slide towards a devastating conflict?
Zecharias Zelalem: At this point, a lot of people might say any action taken now might be a little too late. Everyone is at the brink. Forces have been pushed towards the northern frontier. But I think, especially for countries in the EU, there’s a great need for a neutral player, a neutral power player. I think a neutral power player would be listened to by the warring factions, despite the fact that EU and member states have really lost their strategic hold in the region. They no longer have the pull that they might have had years ago. The likes of Turkiye, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia are far more influential now in the region.
But with the impending conflict we have now, these players all have a stake. They all want one faction or the other to win. We may unfortunately see something play out like what played out in Libya years ago, where competing Gulf powers back different factions. So, there are no neutral players from the usual Middle East and extended regional power players. So, there really is a place for a neutral voice to come in and bring the various factions to dialogue. That’s not something now that’s being done by the Emirates or Turkiye or especially Egypt with its stake and its desire to see Ethiopia’s Nile River dam ambitions be curtailed.
Unfortunately, though, the Europeans don’t have a common stance. A lot of the powers don’t have a common stance here. You have the likes of France, for instance, who have been investing heavily in East Africa and Ethiopia too. Their primary interest is just keeping a foothold in Africa. They’ve been basically booted out of Western Africa. Their military presence in six or seven countries in the west of the continent has been lost. They’re just keen on maintaining a presence at all cost. And you have some other countries that could have played a role in cooling things down, like Canada, for instance.
My colleague Geoffrey York at the Globe and Mail published a story where Canadian intelligence officials wanted to maintain ties with the Ethiopian military elite, primarily because they view the country as nothing more than a strategic partnership with a country very close to the Middle East and the Bab al-Mandab Strait. So, if you have too many countries like that viewing the various countries as tokens to pursue interests, well, then it’s going to be very hard to pursue peace, to bring the various parties to dialogue, to prevent the war from becoming as devastating as it could be, or to prevent it from becoming what war became four or five years ago.
If there was a common call, like Team Europe, that used to exist way back in the day, if the international community could at least unite and call for dialogue, call for talks, there is a place for it. I can tell you, and I can tell you this exclusively, that right now there are talks between the various rebel factions. I don’t think this has been reported, but the various rebel factions, I’ve heard, are currently discussing the creation of an alliance. That would bring at least three different rebel groups under one umbrella. And if that happens, it would be at least easier to bring numerous factions. That’s rebel forces in three separate territories in Ethiopia, Tigray, Amhara, and Oromia regions, that’s three war zones, to the table, if that can happen.
But somebody with the political clout needs to make a move. And the EU is preoccupied, obviously with the uncertainty around NATO, the subtle threats by the Americans to invade Greenland and all that, but sooner rather than later.
Mark Leon Goldberg: Well, Zecharias, thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise with me and with this audience. Again, I just want to convey how little attention this is getting commensurate to the potential devastation that might be wrought throughout the entire region should this conflict erupt. So, the policy community that congregates around this show, just please take notice and spread the word as well. Zecharias, thank you.
Zecharias Zelalem: Thank you, Mark. Thanks for inviting me back.
Mark Leon Goldberg: All right, and thank you all who are watching the live stream. Take a moment to subscribe to Global Dispatch as well. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, please become a paid subscriber so we can keep bringing you these kinds of expert insights into news from parts of the world about issues that don’t get the attention they deserve. Thank you all, and we’ll see you next time. Bye.
