Ethiopia and Tigray accuse each other of launching offensives, reigniting war fears

The airports in Tigray went dark on Wednesday morning. Local forces seized control of the federally administered facilities, and within hours, Ethiopian Airlines cancelled all flights to the region. It was the kind of move that signals something has broken—not gradually, but suddenly, with intention.

What happened next was a cascade of accusations that pulled the curtain back on a peace that was never quite stable. Ethiopia's government, speaking through Getachew Reda, a cabinet minister and adviser to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, said Tigrayan fighters had taken the airports and launched offensives into neighboring Afar and Amhara regions. The Tigray People's Liberation Front, the party that controls the northern region, countered that they had been forced into a defensive posture. The trigger, they said, was drone strikes—multiple strikes over recent days that had left the region bracing for something worse.

This is the second time in four years that these two sides have stood at the edge of open war. The first conflict lasted two years and ended in 2022 with a ceasefire brokered by the African Union. That war killed an estimated 600,000 people. It drove the region toward famine. It was, by any measure, one of the deadliest conflicts of this century. The peace agreement that followed, called the Pretoria Agreement, was supposed to hold. Instead, over recent months, both sides have been accusing each other of violations—small breaches that accumulated into something larger.

On Sunday, the TPLF announced an alliance with six other armed groups in Ethiopia, declaring their intention to remove the government in Addis Ababa. Getachew responded with a statement that carried the weight of someone who had once worked inside Tigray's administration before falling out with the TPLF in 2025 and joining the federal government. He described the TPLF's move as an "all-out offensive" launched despite international efforts to prevent another round of fighting.

The human toll arrived quickly. On Tuesday, drone strikes hit Alamata, a town in southern Tigray. The mayor, Mogos Shiferaw, told the BBC that more than five drones and a fighter jet carried out more than twenty strikes starting before dawn. At least fourteen people were killed and twenty-two injured. Shiferaw said all the dead were civilians. He said the strikes targeted two secondary schools, which he believed federal forces suspected of being used by Tigrayan fighters. But the schools, he insisted, were empty—the academic year had not yet begun. They had served as military bases during the earlier war, but not now. The BBC has not independently verified these claims, and the government has not commented.

At the United Nations General Assembly, Ethiopian President Taye Astike Selassie spoke of his country's "immense restraint" and called on "forces of destruction and mayhem" to respect the region's right to peace. He did not name who those forces were. The US ambassador to Ethiopia condemned the TPLF for making "the poor decision to launch a large-scale offensive," calling it an "unwinnable fight." The US State Department separately condemned a drone strike on Monday that it said targeted a convoy of Catholic vehicles carrying food aid.

The African Union's chairperson called for immediate de-escalation. Both sides have faced criticism for failing to implement key parts of the Pretoria Agreement. In July, Prime Minister Abiy accused the TPLF of preparing for renewed conflict. Just before the May elections, which were not held in Tigray due to security concerns, the TPLF restored its pre-war administration. There have also been reports of forced recruitment of young men into Tigrayan forces. What was supposed to be a region rebuilding is now a region rearming, and the international community is watching to see whether the next chapter will be negotiation or catastrophe.