Tigray fighting risks igniting wider Horn of Africa conflict, experts warn

Fighting returned to Ethiopia's Tigray region on September 23 when Tigrayan forces launched a major offensive, shattering the ceasefire that had held since the 2022 Pretoria peace agreement ended the previous war. The new hostilities quickly spread beyond Tigray itself—clashes were reported in the neighboring regions of Afar and Amhara—signaling that the fragile peace was unraveling faster than many had anticipated.

But the immediate question facing analysts and diplomats is not simply whether Tigray will descend into renewed civil war. It is whether that war will pull the entire Horn of Africa into a wider conflagration. Martin Plaut, a British journalist who has spent years studying the region's conflicts, laid out the nightmare scenario in stark terms: if fighting between Ethiopia and Eritrea ignites, Sudanese forces could be drawn in as well, transforming a localized conflict into a regional catastrophe. Jalale Getachew Birru, a senior analyst at the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, echoed that concern, emphasizing that Ethiopia's crisis cannot be understood in isolation. The conflict is already embedded in a web of neighboring instabilities—Sudan's civil war, Somalia's turmoil, shifting alliances across the Red Sea—that make containment unlikely if tensions escalate.

The African Union moved quickly to sound alarms. On September 23, AU Commission Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf warned that new military and political alliances risked undoing progress made since 2020. The organization called for immediate restraint and renewed direct talks under the Pretoria framework, and tasked former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, the AU's high representative for the Horn of Africa, with supporting diplomatic efforts. The urgency reflected a real fear: that Ethiopia's internal conflicts could metastasize into something far larger.

The architecture of that risk is complex. The TPLF, the Tigrayan rebel group, has recently joined six other Ethiopian armed movements in an alliance aimed at removing Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government. One of those groups is the Amhara Fano movement—a former enemy of the TPLF during the previous war. The alliance is fractious and its members have competing political goals and territorial claims, but its formation means the Ethiopian government could soon face multiple fronts simultaneously. Fighting in Afar, a northeastern region that borders both Eritrea and Djibouti, carries particular weight because it contains the main transport corridor linking landlocked Ethiopia to Djibouti, through which the bulk of Ethiopia's international trade flows. Sustained combat there would strangle a vital economic artery.

Eritrea looms as a potential flashpoint. During the 2020-2022 Tigray war, Eritrean troops fought alongside Ethiopian federal forces against the TPLF. Since then, relations between Addis Ababa and Asmara have deteriorated sharply, fueled by Ethiopia's ambitions for Red Sea access and Eritrea's corresponding security anxieties. Ethiopia has accused Eritrea of backing armed groups opposed to the government; Eritrea denies the charge. Plaut assessed that Eritrea could easily become directly involved if the conflict escalates, though the extent of current Eritrean support remains difficult to verify independently.

The Sudan dimension adds another layer of danger. Sudan has been at war since 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, a conflict that has already drawn in regional powers and created one of the world's largest humanitarian crises. Plaut argues that Ethiopia and Eritrea are already indirectly involved on opposing sides—Ethiopia supporting the RSF and its commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, with evidence suggesting a base in western Ethiopia supplies and trains RSF fighters, while Eritrea, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia back the Sudanese Armed Forces. The UAE has faced allegations of supporting the RSF, which it denies. If Ethiopia and Eritrea were to enter direct conflict, Sudan's warring factions could see opportunities to exploit the chaos, potentially putting new pressure on Sudan's eastern frontier and reshaping military calculations across the region.

The Red Sea itself becomes a strategic prize in this calculus. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait, one of the world's most critical shipping chokepoints, connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean. Eritrea and Djibouti sit on its western shore, Yemen on the eastern side. Eritrea's control of the port of Assab gives it strategic weight far beyond Ethiopia's borders. Any major deterioration in Ethiopia-Eritrea relations could ripple across the entire Red Sea security architecture, especially given that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have developed extensive political, economic, and security interests throughout the Horn of Africa—interests that sometimes align and sometimes conflict, particularly over Sudan.

Plaut warned of a chain reaction: the UAE backing the RSF, the Saudis backing Eritrea and the Sudanese Armed Forces, each conflict feeding into the next until the entire region becomes engulfed in generalized war. Yet he stopped short of predicting inevitability. There is no evidence of a single unified military alliance stretching from Tigray to the Gulf. Ethiopia's armed groups have competing interests. Eritrea may choose to avoid direct intervention. Sudan's warring parties have their own priorities that may not align with escalation elsewhere. Conflicts do not require a common command structure to become interconnected, but neither are they predetermined to spread.

What is certain is the human toll at stake. The previous Tigray war, from 2020 to 2022, killed approximately 600,000 people and displaced millions. The Pretoria agreement halted the large-scale fighting, but many of the political and territorial disputes that sparked the war remained unresolved. Now Tigray is at war again, Ethiopia faces multiple armed movements, Eritrea stands as a potential military actor, and Sudan is already engulfed in civil conflict. Plaut warned that the humanitarian consequences could again be severe, though he expressed hope that the death toll would not match the previous war's devastation.