A year of conflict in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than two million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine.
Forces under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — the Ethiopian military, ethnic militias and troops from neighboring Eritrea — are fighting to oust the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or T.P.L.F., from its stronghold in the northern region of Tigray.
The tide of the civil war has fluctuated wildly. The government teetered in early November when fighters from Tigray surged south toward the capital, Addis Ababa, forcing Mr. Abiy to declare a state of emergency. Foreigners fled the country and the government detained thousands of civilians from the Tigrayan ethnic group.
But weeks later Mr. Abiy pulled off a stunning military reversal, halting the rebel march less than 100 miles from the capital, then forcing them to retreat hundreds of miles to their mountainous stronghold in Tigray.
Mr. Abiy succeeded partly by mobilizing ordinary citizens to take up arms to block the Tigrayan advance. “Nothing will stop us. The enemy will be destroyed,” Mr. Abiy, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, told a group of soldiers at the battlefront while dressed in fatigues.
But Mr. Abiy’s fortunes were greatly boosted by a fleet of armed drones, recently imported from the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Iran, that pummeled the Tigrayan forces.
Drones have also hit refugee camps in Tigray and killed dozens of civilians. Despite recent releases of political prisoners by Mr. Abiy, which prompted a phone call with President Joe Biden, the prospect of a cease-fire seems distant.
The conflict threatens to tear apart Ethiopia, a once-firm American ally, and further destabilize the volatile Horn of Africa region. Here’s a look at how Tigray became a flash point in Ethiopia and the broader region.
Why did Ethiopia’s prime minister begin an offensive in Tigray?
Even before the war, Mr. Abiy appeared bent on breaking the power of the T.P.L.F., a political group of rebels turned rulers who had dominated Ethiopia for nearly three decades.
A former intelligence officer, Mr. Abiy had once been part of the T.P.L.F.-dominated government. But after he took office in 2018, he set about draining the group of its power and influence in Ethiopia, infuriating the Tigrayan leadership, which retreated to its stronghold of Tigray. Tensions grew.
In September 2020, the Tigrayans defied Mr. Abiy by going ahead with regional parliamentary elections that had he had postponed across Ethiopia.
Two months later, T.P.L.F. forces attacked a federal military base in Tigray in what they called a pre-emptive strike against federal forces preparing to attack them from a neighboring region.
Hours later, Mr. Abiy ordered a military offensive against the Tigrayan leadership. But his promises of a swift and bloodless victory quickly crumbled. The T.P.L.F. and its armed supporters fled to rural and mountainous areas, drawing Mr. Abiy into a quagmire.
The Ethiopian military suffered a major defeat in June when it was forced to withdraw from Tigray, and several thousand of its soldiers were taken captive.
By early November, the rebels were advancing on the capital, Addis Ababa. But then Mr. Abiy, backed by armed drones, dramatically turned the tide and forced the Tigrayans back to their northern homeland.
Through it all, civilians have suffered most. Since the war started, witnesses have reported numerous human rights violations, many confirmed by a U.N.-led investigation, of massacres, ethnic cleansing and widespread sexual violence.
Who are the T.P.L.F. and the Tigrayans?
The T.P.L.F. was born in the mid-1970s as a small militia of ethnic Tigrayans, a group that was long marginalized by the central government, to fight Ethiopia’s Marxist military dictatorship.
Tigrayans make up just 6 or 7 percent of Ethiopia’s population, compared with the two largest ethnic groups, the Oromo and the Amhara, which make up over 60 percent. Yet the T.P.L.F. became the dominant rebel force, eventually leading an alliance that toppled the Marxist government in 1991.
The rebel alliance became Ethiopia’s ruling coalition, with the T.P.L.F. at its head. Under Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia emerged as a stable country in a turbulent region. It enjoyed significant economic growth and allied with the United States, sending troops into Somalia to fight Islamist militants in 2006.
But at home, the Tigrayan-dominated government systematically repressed political opponents and curtailed free speech. Torture was commonplace in government detention centers.
After Mr. Zenawi died in 2012, the T.P.L.F’s grip on power began to weaken, leading to an eruption of antigovernment protests in 2016 that eventually paved the way for Mr. Abiy to become prime minister in 2018.
Mr. Abiy, a onetime T.P.L.F. ally, moved quickly to purge the old guard. He removed Tigrayan officials from the security services, charged some with corruption or human rights abuses and in 2019 created a new political party. The Tigrayans refused to join.
At the same time, he strengthened his ties to President Isaias Afwerki, the authoritarian leader of Eritrea, who nursed a bitter, longstanding grudge against the Tigrayans.
The outside world lavished praised on Mr. Abiy and Mr. Isaias for the landmark peace deal they signed in 2018, ending two decades of hostilities between their countries and paving the way for Mr. Abiy’s Nobel Peace Prize win a year later.
Understand the Conflict in Ethiopia
But by mid-2020 that peace pact had become an alliance for war on Tigray.
How is this conflict affecting Ethiopia and its neighbors?
Despite international demands to end the conflict, fighting continues in Tigray, the epicenter of a worsening humanitarian crisis.
Children are dying of malnutrition, soldiers are looting food aid, and relief workers have been prevented from reaching the hardest-hit areas, according to the United Nations and other aid groups. Since July, a government-imposed blockade of Tigray has kept desperately needed aid from reaching the area. In late November, the World Food Program announced that 9.4 million people across northern Ethiopia required food aid.
In western Tigray, ethnic Amhara militias have driven tens of thousands of people from their homes as part of what the United States has called an ethnic cleansing campaign.
More recently, Human Rights Watch accused Tigrayan rebels of executing dozens of civilians in captured areas, adding to the war’s dismal toll of atrocities.
Ethiopia’s ties to the United States, once a close ally, have come under great strain. Mr. Biden has cut off trade privileges for Ethiopia and threatened its leaders with sanctions. Neighboring African countries worry openly that Ethiopia, long the anchor of a volatile region, could become a source of instability.
Mr. Abiy is also contending with outbreaks of ethnic violence in other parts of Ethiopia, where hundreds of people died in clashes last year. His greatest worry is in Oromia, the most populous region, where a local insurgent group, the Oromo Liberation Army, entered an alliance with the T.P.L.F. in August aimed at toppling Mr. Abiy.
For several weeks last fall, the two groups united in a drive toward Addis Ababa until they were repelled by Mr. Abiy’s military and its drones.
How has the war changed Mr. Abiy’s global standing?
At 45, Mr. Abiy is among the youngest leaders in Africa, and in the first years of his rule he excited great hopes for transformational change in Ethiopia.
He freed political prisoners, abolished controls on the news media and helped mediate conflicts abroad. His peace deal with Eritrea and its authoritarian leader, Mr. Isaias, caused the Ethiopian leader’s international profile to soar and led to his Nobel Peace Prize in 2019.
But the war in Tigray has battered that glowing reputation. In November 2020, the peace prize committee issued a rare — if tacit — rebuke of one of its honorees.
But even before the war erupted in Tigray, Mr. Abiy had resorted to old tactics of repression — shutting down the internet in some areas, arresting journalists and detaining protesters and critics.
As the war with the T.P.L.F. expanded in 2021, the security forces rounded up thousands of ethnic Tigrayans and detained them in makeshift camps, citing security needs. Mr. Abiy used increasingly inflammatory language, denouncing his foes as “cancer” and “weeds.”
In a stark speech in November, Mr. Abiy called on soldiers to sacrifice their “blood and bone” to bury his enemies in “a deep pit” and “uphold Ethiopia’s dignity and flag.”
Reporting was contributed by Simon Marks, Marc Santora, Eric Nagourney and Richard Pérez-Peña.
