Ethiopia’s Afar region has accused forces from neighbouring Tigray of crossing into its territory, seizing several villages and attacking civilians, in what it called a breach of the 2022 peace deal that ended the war in northern Ethiopia.
Between 2020 and 2022, Tigray was the centre of a devastating two-year war that pitted the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) against Ethiopia’s federal army and left at least 600,000 people dead, according to the African Union.
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In a statement released late on Wednesday, Afar authorities said TPLF fighters “entered Afar territory by force today”.
The group, which governs the Tigray region, was accused of “controlling six villages and bombing civilians with mortars”. Officials did not provide details on casualties.
“The TPLF learns nothing from its mistakes,” the Afar administration said, condemning what it described as “acts of terror”.
The conflict earlier this decade also spread into neighbouring Ethiopian regions, including Afar, whose forces fought alongside federal troops.
According to Afar’s latest statement, Tigrayan forces attacked the Megale district in the northwest of the region “with heavy weapons fire on civilian herders”.
The authorities warned that if the TPLF “does not immediately cease its actions, the Afar Regional Administration will assume its defensive duty to protect itself against any external attack”.
The renewed fighting, they said, “openly destroys the Pretoria peace agreement”, referring to the deal signed in November 2022 between Ethiopia’s federal government and Tigrayan leaders, which ended two years of bloodshed.
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While the fragile peace had largely held, tensions between Addis Ababa and the TPLF have deepened in recent months. The party, which dominated Ethiopian politics from 1991 to 2018, was officially removed from the country’s list of political parties in May amid internal divisions and growing mistrust from the federal government.
Federal officials have also accused the TPLF of re-establishing ties with neighbouring Eritrea, a country with a long and uneasy history with Ethiopia. Eritrea, once an Italian colony and later an Ethiopian province, fought a bloody independence war before gaining statehood in 1993.
A subsequent border war between the two nations from 1998 to 2000 killed tens of thousands. When Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018, he signed a landmark peace deal with Eritrea, but relations have soured again since the end of the Tigray conflict.
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