On August 1st and 2nd, 2026, western Tigray witnessed its most intense fighting since Ethiopia’s brutal civil war ended in 2022. Ethiopian federal forces clashed with fighters linked to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, the movement that once governed the region, in and around Shererina, a strategic and long disputed town near the border with the Amhara region and not far from Sudan. Heavy artillery and explosions rocked the area for two days, with each side blaming the other for starting the violence. Analysts now consider it the gravest escalation since the war that killed an estimated 600,000 people according to the African Union.
Hundreds of civilians and fighters fled across the border into Sudan, echoing scenes from the darkest days of the earlier conflict. A precarious calm has held since, but few observers believe it is durable.
This flare up did not come out of nowhere. For months, federal and Tigrayan forces had been massing along the regional border, each accusing the other of preparing for renewed war. The Pretoria peace agreement, signed in November 2022 under African Union mediation, ended large scale fighting but many of its provisions were never fully carried out. Chief among them is the return of displaced people to territories still under dispute. More than a million Tigrayans remain uprooted, waiting for a homecoming the accord promised but never delivered.
The warning signs had been building for months. In January 2026, clashes broke out between the Ethiopian National Defense Force and Tigrayan regional security forces in the Tselemti and Laelay Tselemti areas in the northwest of the region, reportedly killing as many as a thousand people. The federal government responded with drone strikes and accused the TPLF of acting with Eritrean backing, a claim that fits a broader pattern of deteriorating relations between Addis Ababa and Asmara in recent months. On February 10th, the United Nations Human Rights Chief Volker Türk called for urgent de escalation, warning that civilians were once again trapped between rival factions.
Even before that, in late 2025, tensions had flared in Afar, another region bordering Tigray, which accused the TPLF of attacking its territory and seizing several villages. Some analysts read that assault as retaliation by the TPLF against rival Tigrayan forces stationed in Afar with backing from the federal government, a sign of how fractured and multi sided the security picture in northern Ethiopia has become.
What worries regional watchers most is the risk that this conflict spreads beyond Ethiopia’s borders. The proximity of the latest fighting to Sudan, itself gripped by its own civil war, raises fears that Sudanese factions could begin backing opposing sides inside Ethiopia, turning Tigray into the site of a proxy war layered on top of an already volatile Horn of Africa.
The renewed violence also lands amid a tense political moment at home. National elections held on June 1st, 2026, which the ruling party of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won as expected, did not take place in Tigray’s constituencies at all, with the electoral commission citing unfavorable conditions. Security had already deteriorated in the Amhara and Oromia regions, where armed groups continue to fight federal forces on separate fronts.
Three years after Pretoria was signed, the situation in Tigray shows the limits of a truce negotiated without resolving the underlying disputes over territory, displacement and deep mistrust between Addis Ababa and Tigray’s former leadership. The calm that has held since August 2nd may prove only a pause. As one former interim president of Tigray put it in a recent interview, the region cannot afford a full scale war. That warning applies to more than just Tigray alone.
