My New Yorker column this week is on the renewed fighting in Ethiopia between the central government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and an alliance of factions arrayed against it. (You’ll need to subscribe to The New Yorker to read it in full, and can do so here.) I am excerpting some of the explanatory context below. By Monday, forces loyal to Abiy were in control of Mekelle, the capital of the Tigray region and the seat of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which is one of the militias in the coalition that wants to oust Abiy. From my piece: Weeks of violence, stretching from Addis Ababa, the capital, to areas in Ethiopia’s north and east, have led to dozens of reported casualties, internet and phone disruptions, and fears of a humanitarian crisis. Friction between the T.P.L.F., which had once dominated Ethiopian politics, and Abiy’s government underlay a civil war that began in 2020 and saw estimates of as many as six hundred thousand people killed and allegations of war crimes. An internationally brokered peace in 2022 failed to hold, amid various turf wars, paving the way for fresh trauma. After my column published, it emerged that Eritrean troops, now nominally backing the rebels, had launched incursions into Ethiopian territory, provoking reprisal attacks from Ethiopian forces. All of Ethiopia’s neighbors have some sort of stake in the conflict: The situation is grim on its own, given the complexity of Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous nation and the home to dozens of different ethnic groups. But it’s made all the more fraught by the broader regional context. Shadowing the renewed fighting in Ethiopia is Sudan’s civil war next door. Abiy’s government has been reportedly involved with training troops belonging to the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary organization that controls swaths of western Sudan and has carried out numerous alleged atrocities and massacres of civilians during its protracted war with the Sudanese Armed Forces. Tigrayan fighters, meanwhile, have reportedly appeared alongside the Sudanese military in its battles against the R.S.F. In the earlier fighting over Tigray, Eritrean soldiers collaborated with their Ethiopian counterparts. Now Eritrea appears to be backing the Tigrayan rebels, and this prompted Ethiopia to expel ten Eritrean diplomats and to shutter its Embassy in Asmara, the Eritrean capital, last week; Eritrea, in turn, severed diplomatic relations. Last week, Ethiopia’s Army chief accused Egypt, Eritrea, and the Sudanese Armed Forces of fomenting the new insurgency. Their governments all issued denials, and, over the weekend, their leaders met in Egypt with the President of Somalia—who is also at odds with Abiy over the latter’s overtures to Somaliland, an autonomous self-declared republic that sits within Somalia’s internationally recognized borders. They issued a statement that aired shared grievances over Ethiopia’s designs on access to the Red Sea, which it had lost when Eritrea gained independence, in 1993, and its creation of a major dam on the Nile; the statement also rejected any recognition of or support for Somaliland. (Israel is the only U.N. member state to have established formal ties with the territory’s government.) On Monday, Abiy fired back, reiterating his view that Ethiopia must have “an outlet to the sea,” which it is now trying to regain through links with nearby Somaliland. And the geopolitical chessboard is far more crowded than that. As Alex Rondos, a former E.U. special representative to the Horn of Africa, told me, the region is becoming a “dysfunctional part of the fractured politics of the Middle East.” Here’s more from my column: Hovering in the background are the schemes and interests of a constellation of greater powers, including Gulf monarchies such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, as well as Turkey and Egypt. They are all players in an arc of conflict and opportunity that spans war-torn Libya on the Mediterranean Sea to war-torn Yemen on the Red Sea, fuelled by a scramble for control of strategic waterways and lucrative resources—oil, critical minerals, water—as well as broader tussles for geopolitical influence. Rivalries between these countries manifest in proxy struggles. In Sudan, the U.A.E., despite its denials, appears to have supported the R.S.F. with arms and funding, while the Saudis, Egyptians, and Qataris are far closer to the SAF; in Somalia proper, Turkey has a substantial military footprint, which eventually could be countered by the deployment of Israeli and Emirati assets in Somaliland. (At an event last month, in New York City, Somaliland’s President, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, told me that, despite the speculation, there was no Israeli military presence in his republic “at the moment.”) The Trump Administration is going through the motions of trying to forge peace in Sudan, but its engagement, analysts tell me, has been superficial. In Ethiopia, it’s already appeared to have taken Abiy’s side and can’t be seen as an even-handed player. Other Middle Eastern powers with leverage over Sudan’s warring parties have failed to exert it collectively, given their own rivalries and tussles for influence. The precarious state of affairs is a reflection of the broader geopolitical moment, where control over critical resources and geoeconomic chokepoints is paramount, where peacemaking is a consistently failing endeavor, and where more and more countries embrace a might-makes-right ethos. © 2026 Ishaan Tharoor |