The clashes that erupted before dawn on Aug. 1 near Shererina in northern Ethiopia have been described as one of the most serious breaches of the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (also referred to as the Pretoria Agreement) that ended the two-year long conflict between the Ethiopian government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Days later, Ethiopian forces conducted a drone strike in Merewa, in southern Tigray near the border with the Amhara region, which the TPLF denounced as “a serious escalation.”
Tensions increased further on Aug. 17, when Tigrayan authorities accused federal forces of a drone strike near the regional capital of Mekelle. These are not the first clashes since the Pretoria Agreement was signed in November 2022. But they have raised fears of escalation, given the mobilization of federal troops and Tigrayan forces in recent months, tensions both within the Tigray regional government and with the government of Ethiopia, as well as increasing regional tensions between Ethiopia and Egypt, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan. Combined, these factors have put the endurance of the Pretoria Agreement under strain and have raised the risk of regional fallout should the situation escalate.
The Unfinished Business of Pretoria
Amid wider concerns that the core provisions of the Pretoria Agreement were not being implemented, the accord did not settle the status of the contested region of western Tigray where these clashes took place, known to Tigrayans as Welkait. The area, located near Ethiopia’s border with Sudan, is claimed by Amhara nationalists, whose militia sided with the federal government during the Tigray conflict. The Amhara nationalists view the area as historically Amhara territory, as it formed part of administrative units aligned with the Amhara region. However, when the Tigrayan-dominated Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) came to power in 1991, the region was incorporated into Tigray.
The Pretoria Agreement stipulated that contested territories would be resolved in line with the constitution, yet no concrete steps toward a constitutional settlement have been taken. While some parts of northern Tigray remain under Eritrean military occupation, Amhara militia have controlled western Tigray since late 2020, and human rights investigations have documented mass displacement, killings, and other abuses against Tigrayan civilians there.
Nearly four years after the conclusion of a conflict that may have killed as many as 600,000 people and displaced 2.6 million, dissatisfaction with some of the concessions made by the Tigrayan delegation during the Pretoria peace process has contributed to discord within the regional government. The Interim Regional Administration established in March 2023 unraveled as Chief Administrator Getachew Reda’s camp, which was more amenable to working with the federal government, clashed with hardline TPLF figures around Chairman Debretsion Gebremichael, as the latter attempted to reassert control over regional institutions. This culminated in Getachew’s removal from his position as chief administrator of the Interim Regional Administration by TPLF hardliners in October 2024 and the federal government’s subsequent installation of Lieutenant General Tadesse Werede.
When the national electoral board subsequently revoked the TPLF’s registration as a political party citing its failure to convene a general assembly and elect new leadership within a required six-month window in May 2025, it effectively shut Tigray’s main political actor out of the June 2026 general elections, reviving fears of a repeat of the contested electoral process that preceded the Tigray war. By election day in June, insecurity in several parts of the country was such that voting could not take place in all polling locations.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party went on to dominate those elections, winning 90 percent of the seats in the legislature. By late 2025, the breakdown in relations between the federal government and the Tigray regional government had manifested in the form of continued deployments of both federal and Tigrayan forces around the region’s borders, federal restrictions on budget subsidies and fuel supplies, and a wider economic squeeze involving banking constraints and cash shortages.
Domestic Insecurity on Multiple Fronts
With Ethiopian security forces already active on multiple internal fronts, the federal government’s coercive capacity is limited to prosecuting what would inevitably be a multifront conflict. In Amhara, the Fano insurgency has shifted from loosely organized community militias that fought alongside the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) against the TPLF during the Tigray conflict into a decentralized armed movement targeting the federal state itself. That shift can be traced to Abiy’s decision in April 2023 to dissolve regional special forces nationwide, including the well-armed Amhara Special Forces, as part of a push to centralize the security services under federal command. Many Amhara feared that consolidation would leave them exposed to old rivals in Tigray amid unresolved territorial disputes in northern Ethiopia.
Meanwhile in Oromia, a splinter faction of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) refused to disarm after the group’s 2018 peace deal with Abiy, reconstituting itself as the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) and resuming an insurgency built on longstanding Oromo grievances over political exclusion, land, and underrepresentation despite being Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group. The ENDF deployments connected to the Tigray conflict opened space in Oromia, where the insurgency has persisted following failed peace talks in 2023.
Beyond stretching federal capacity, these conflicts also narrow the political space for compromise in Tigray – even if there was greater willingness to compromise on either side. The actual or latent threat of violence in these regions means that the ENDF needs to manage the risk of escalation across several fronts, which ties down units that might otherwise be available for deployments along the Tigray frontier. Previously, the ENDF has compensated for limitations in conventional capacity with the acquisition of unmanned aircraft systems from Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which turned the tide of the Tigray conflict as Tigrayan forces emerged from the highlands for an attempted march on Addis. In that sense, drones and other unmanned systems can ease some of the pressure on overstretched ground forces by providing long‑range strike and surveillance across multiple regions. However, they cannot manage the various domestic political grievances fueling insecurity or hold territory, making them a supplement, rather than a replacement for the coercive capacity the state needs to manage multiple internal fronts.
The federal government has rather performatively attempted to channel domestic grievances into two official processes, neither of which has gained much momentum. A National Dialogue Commission, established in December 2021, was intended to gather input on the country’s core political disputes. A transitional justice policy, adopted in April 2024, was meant to pursue accountability, reconciliation, and reparations for past abuses. By its own admission, the dialogue commission was unable to conduct discussions in parts of Tigray due to what it described as “unfavorable conditions.” The transitional justice process has fared little better, with the Justice Ministry pausing development of key implementing legislation as of early 2026. Nonetheless, it is entirely plausible that the country’s current fragmentation is by design, as Abiy’s mechanisms for centralizing power keep the government’s opponents divided even as they strain its own capacity to respond.
Regional Stakes
The overlap between Ethiopia’s internal fragmentation, deliberate or not, and its longstanding and emergent disputes with its neighbors make the situation in northern Ethiopia particularly worth tracking. Prior to the Tigray conflict (2020-2022), Ethiopia and Eritrea had been locked in a cold war since their 1998-2000 border conflict ended in a stalemate. Upon coming to power in 2018, Abiy had made several grand gestures to normalize relations with Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, which won Abiy the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019. That rapprochement soon found a darker purpose, as Ethiopia and Eritrea colluded to attack the TPLF during the Tigray conflict.
But following the Pretoria Agreement that ended the war, the two fell out over Abiy’s decision to make peace over Isaias’ objections, as well as, more recently, over Abiy’s bellicose rhetoric justifying Ethiopia’s access to the Red Sea. This would presumably threaten Eritrea’s territorial integrity, a sensitive matter given Eritrea’s protracted armed struggle for independence from three decades under Ethiopian annexation ending in 1993. So, Eritrea and the TPLF essentially have found common cause in the event of large-scale conflict. The Ethiopian government also has accused Eritrea of providing weapons to Fano and other armed groups operating in Ethiopia’s Amhara region since 2023. Isaias’ incentive to keep northern Ethiopia unsettled is straightforward, as an Abiy distracted by internal insecurity is less able to pressure Eritrea on access to the Red Sea.
A similar dynamic is unfolding along Ethiopia’s border with Sudan, where those two governments have spent recent months trading accusations that each is supporting armed groups in the other’s territory. In May, Sudan’s army accused Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) of orchestrating drone strikes on the Khartoum airport, saying the drones had been tracked to Bahir Dar airport in Ethiopia. Sudan’s military government recalled its ambassadors to both countries in protest. As further evidence of this cooperation, there have allegedly been cargo flights between Ethiopia and the UAE resupplying the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia, as well as allegations of organized RSF training camps on Ethiopian soil. Ethiopia rejected the accusation as baseless and counter-accused Sudan of harboring “anti-Ethiopian forces,” including the TPLF. The clashes between Tigrayan and federal forces near Shererina earlier this month occurred near the Ethiopia-Sudan border, underscoring the risk that any escalation may not remain an internal matter. Whichever side ends up holding the Ethiopian side of the border will maintain control of an overland route into territory controlled by the government-aligned Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) across the frontier, layering Sudan’s civil war onto an already combustible set of issues in Ethiopia.
Farther to the north, Egypt has its own set of grievances with Ethiopia tied to its concerns about the alterations to the flow of the Nile that could impact its own food security – and more broadly, its national security. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) constructed along the Blue Nile and inaugurated in September 2025, has kept alive a long-running regional dispute. In recent years, Egypt has invested significant political capital in encircling Ethiopia, including by cementing deals to improve ports in Assab (Eritrea) and Doraleh (Djibouti), with upgrades reportedly including berths for warships and small military contingents. Not coincidentally, Djibouti has been Ethiopia’s main means by which to access the sea since the 1998-2000 conflict between Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Egypt’s overtures to constrain Ethiopia also found fertile ground to the south. Ethiopia’s ties with Somalia ruptured in January 2024, when Abiy signed a memorandum of understanding in which he sought Red Sea access through Somaliland in exchange for the prospect of recognizing the region’s independence from Somalia, which it declared in 1991. Turkey subsequently brokered a reconciliation, with Abiy and Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud signing the Ankara Declaration affirming Somalia’s territorial integrity in December 2024. Already by that point, Egypt and Somalia had signed a security agreement in August 2024, through which Cairo deployed military advisers and equipment on a bilateral basis, followed by Egypt’s February 2026 deployment of troops to Somalia for the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM). These moves give Egypt pressure points on three of Ethiopia’s flanks, positioning Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to squeeze Abiy on the Nile dispute should he feel the need to do so.
What to Watch
Given the Ethiopian government’s unresolved issues with Tigrayan authorities, simmering insurgencies in Amhara and Oromia, increasing tensions with Eritrea and Somalia over access to the Red Sea, and accusations that Ethiopia and Sudan are providing support to armed groups in each other’s countries, East Africa and the Horn have been on high alert for resumed conflict for several months. None of this means a second Tigray war is imminent, and a former U.S. deputy special envoy for the Horn of Africa assesses the preventative diplomatic engagement to de-escalate matters between the federal government and the Tigrayan authorities as exceeding what occurred prior to the outbreak of the Tigray conflict in November 2020, citing extensive shuttle diplomacy between Addis Ababa and Tigray’s capital Mekelle by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo as African Union (AU) envoy and others.
Considering the understandable reluctance on the part of some Tigrayan civilians to return to conflict and the federal government’s other domestic and regional entanglements, one might expect to see a continuation of periodic low-intensity flare-ups like Shererina in the near-term, rather than an immediate return to full-scale conflict. Militarily, indicators that clashes were evolving into a multi-front regional confrontation would include:
- a sustained federal offensive to retake or heavily garrison contested areas around Shererina;
- coordinated redeployment of TPLF units allegedly based in Sudan into Tigray in preparation for broader operations;
- verifiable evidence of Eritrean forces moving beyond already documented frontier positions into new areas of Tigray; confirmed, structured coordination between TPLF and Fano-aligned forces;
- large‑scale Ethiopian and Eritrean troop and equipment deployments toward the Tigray frontier.
Politically and diplomatically, additional warning signs would be formal steps by either side to repudiate the Pretoria Agreement or visible breakdowns in AU‑backed shuttle diplomacy between Addis Ababa and Mekelle. Additional warning signs would be escalated restrictions on humanitarian, transport, or press access to Tigray, or a full telecommunications or internet shutdown.
Internal fissures notwithstanding, Abiy has demonstrated genuine skill converting external regional confrontations into domestic cohesion, as the GERD and Red Sea access sustain a narrative of national economic transformation that transcends ethnic and regional divides. However, these maneuvers require a delicate balance — and many of the aforementioned regional variables lie outside of his control, imbuing his domestic and regional moves with heightened risk. Leaders in Cairo, Asmara, Mogadishu, and Khartoum each now have independent, yet aligned, incentives to see Addis Ababa weakened, and Ethiopia’s simultaneous insurgencies in Amhara and Oromia, alongside the standoff in Tigray, leave the federal government with limited room for error.
Notwithstanding support from outside the region — namely the UAE and Turkey – Ethiopia’s situation of finding itself largely surrounded by hostility in the Horn is a direct byproduct of choices Abiy himself has made. Should domestic unrest and regional confrontation converge, the fallout would not stay confined to Ethiopia’s borders, but would instead compound an already deteriorating regional picture. That would essentially layer a new crisis onto a Horn of Africa already managing the world’s largest humanitarian crisis in Sudan and a potentially destabilizing electoral impasse in Somalia. Much as when the Tigray conflict broke out in November 2020 amid a pandemic already consuming global attention, this potentially catastrophic combination would arrive at a moment when the world’s bandwidth is already stretched thin.
