Fighting has erupted in Ethiopia's northern region of Tigray between regional forces and the national army. Tigray residents, who have been trying to recover from a brutal two-year war that ended in 2022, fear a return to full-scale conflict. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.
There are reports of panic buying, and now internet and call services have been disrupted. This means people cannot get access to their money via digital apps in what has become a largely cashless society after ATMs stopped working several months ago.
It follows more than six months of worsening relations between the government and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), the party that runs Tigray. The African Union (AU) brokered a peace deal, known as the Pretoria Agreement, between the two sides, ending the war nearly four years ago - but several issues have remained unresolved that have inflamed tensions.
This year, both sides have been trading blame while troops have mobilised amid pockets of fighting. This week, major clashes erupted in Tigray and quickly spread into the neighbouring Afar and Amhara regions. The two sides disagree over who started the latest escalation. The TPLF says it was responding to a federal offensive, including drone strikes, while the government says Tigrayan forces attacked first after seizing control of airports in Tigray.
For much of Tigray's modern political history, it has been governed by the TPLF, which first emerged as an armed movement in the 1970s fighting Ethiopia's military government. It became a major force in the overthrow of the Marxist regime in 1991 and went on to become the most powerful component of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the coalition that governed the ethnically diverse country for nearly three decades.
At times this proved contentious as some felt the TPLF held too much sway as Tigrayans only make up around 6% of Ethiopia's population. When Abiy Ahmed became prime minister in 2018, he replaced the EPRDF with the Prosperity Party, significantly watering down the TPLF's influence.
Relations between Addis Ababa and the TPLF rapidly deteriorated until war erupted in 2020 in what was one of the most deadly conflicts this century. The AU mediator estimated some 600,000 people died during the war, which totally cut off Tigray from the outside world and drove the region to the precipice of famine. An uneasy truce was agreed in November 2022.
There are four key issues - and two concern the fertile area of western Tigray. The TPLF lost control of this territory in the early days of the war to Amhara, a region which neighbours Tigray to the west and whose fighters had fought on the side of the Ethiopian army. Many people in Amhara believe the territory of western Tigray should never have been incorporated into Tigray when regional boundaries were redrawn after the military regime was ousted in 1991.
When its fighters seized control during the recent civil war, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tigrayan people fled and are now living in homeless camps in Tigray and in the capital, Addis Ababa. The TPLF wants western Tigray back and for those displaced from the territory to return. The government says the future of the territory needs to be decided by a referendum.
For the government, a major matter of contention has been disarmament. It says the TPLF has only handed over old weaponry to the AU and has been hiding its arms. The two sides have also been at loggerheads over how Tigray should be governed. Under the terms of the deal, an interim administration was appointed by Abiy. But attempts by the prime minister to influence affairs caused disputes within the TPLF itself and just before the general election in May, which was not held in Tigray because of the security situation, it restored its pre-war administration, disbanding the one set up by Abiy.
This has meant that civil servants are longer being paid and other services have been seizing up, worsening economic conditions. A major development has seen the TPLF, once politically isolated inside Ethiopia, gain several key allies. Earlier in September, it joined six other armed movements in forming what is called the Alliance for Survival, which includes those actively fighting the government like Amhara's Fano militia and the Oromo Liberation Army. Members of the new alliance have different grievances, but they do share one objective: they want to remove Abiy's government from power.