Escalating Regional Crises In Ethiopia And Sudan Threaten Africa Union
BY DONALD INWALOMHE
THE escalating, dangerous regional crises in Ethiopia and Sudan are threats to Africa Union. The involvement of Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt made the crisis in Ethiopia a regional conflict. Fighting in northern Ethiopia could also fuse dangerously with the war raging across the border in Sudan. African leaders backed by the U.S. and other outside powers should urge both sides to de-escalate and return to the negotiating table before hostilities spiral into a full-blown war that inflicts yet more suffering on civilians, while threatening to embroil other states. There are crises in Ethiopia, Somalia, Chad, Sudan, South Sudan and others that threatened the unity of Africa Union. The breadth of the new opposition alliance in Ethiopia – seven groups representing disparate ethnic groups and regions announced the coalition last week – presented a challenge to Addis Ababa.
Ethiopia has accused Sudan of supporting Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Sudan’s military also dismissed the accusations as “baseless” and levelled its own charge of destabilising behaviour at Ethiopia, accusing it of supporting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has been fighting the Sudanese Armed Forces since 2023. Ethiopia has denied those allegations.
As renewed fighting spreads across northern Ethiopia, the government has accused Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt of backing armed opposition groups, raising fears that the conflict could draw in regional powers. Over the weekend, Ethiopian army chief Birhanu Jula attributed his country’s unrest to those he called Ethiopia’s “historical and contemporary adversaries”.
The crisis has escalated sharply as Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) resume large-scale conflict, pulling in neighboring Sudan and regional powers. Long-simmering tensions have turned to large-scale fighting after coalition of armed opposition groups in Tigray, Amhara and Afar launched a multi-pronged offensive against Ethiopian government forces. It is not too late to avert a return to costly, bloody war.
Northern Ethiopia is slipping into renewed regional war. After months of building tensions, on 23 September, 2026 large-scale hostilities broke out between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and Amhara Fano militias, on one side, and the federal government and allied Tigrayan forces on the other. Responsibility for the escalation lies primarily with the TPLF, which launched ground assaults in coordination with other rebels with whom it has joined hands in a new alliance that vows to overthrow Ethiopia’s government. The upsurge in fighting comes almost five months after the TPLF retook power in the Tigray region, dealing a blow to a 2022 peace deal that had ended the last Tigray war and leading Addis Ababa to mount an intensifying drone campaign against TPLF forces. Much is unclear about how the two sides are faring on the battlefield, but many fear that further escalation in Tigray could draw in Eritrea, which is now closely aligned with the TPLF.
Collapsed Peace: The 2022 Pretoria Accord has effectively broken down, reigniting fighting in northern Ethiopia.
Cross-Border Proxies: Ethiopia accuses Sudan and Egypt of backing Tigrayan rebels.
Sudanese Denials: Sudan denies these claims and accuses Ethiopia of supporting the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that humanitarian partners are warning that escalating drone activity and air strikes across northern Ethiopia are putting civilians, critical infrastructure and humanitarian operations at growing risk.
There are also unconfirmed reports of an air strike near a military facility in the capital Addis Ababa early this morning, imperiling civilians in what is a densely populated urban area. Fighting continues as control of key towns in the north shifts, leading to intermittent road closures and disrupting movements of people and humanitarian supplies.
Large-scale displacement has also been reported. In the Afar Region, a Government-led assessment is nearing completion, with preliminary findings suggesting that tens of thousands of people have fled their homes. In the regions of Tigray and Amhara, no officially verified displacement figures are available so far.
In Amhara, limited improvements in security conditions have allowed humanitarian partners to assess whether operations can gradually resume in parts of Wag Hamra and North Wello zones.
In the Afar Region, partners are mobilizing emergency assistance in the areas of highest-priority locations where access allows. However, in Tigray, humanitarian operations are nearing a standstill because of insecurity and severe access constraints.
Ethiopia has accused Eritrea of being the go-between linking these external powers – including Sudan and Egypt, which he explicitly named – with armed groups inside Ethiopia.
Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt have all rejected the accusations. Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nader Zaki said that Egypt’s foreign policy was founded on “full respect for the sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of states, and noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries”. Zaki added that Egypt “is fully committed to the rules of international law and the Charter of the United Nations, and rejects any practices that would undermine regional security and stability”.
Ethiopia’s relations with the countries it has accused have already been strained by other disputes that predate the latest fighting. Relations between Cairo and Addis Ababa have remained tense as a longstanding dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) remains unresolved. Competition between the two has increasingly extended to regional security, the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the construction of which stoked fears in Cairo that Ethiopia could choke off the Nile River, September 9, 2025 [File:Tiksa Negeri/Reuters]
Sudan’s relations with Ethiopia are similarly troubled. Since the outbreak of the Sudanese civil war, Khartoum has accused Addis Ababa of providing training, supplies and the use of Ethiopian territory to the RSF.
Eritrea had fought alongside Ethiopia against rebel groups in the latter’s Tigray region during a war between 2020 and 2022, but relations between the two neighbours have since soured, with Eritrea alarmed by Ethiopia’s attempts to gain access to the Red Sea.
Against that background, some analysts and Ethiopian opposition figures say that Addis Ababa is pointing the finger at foreign conspiracies in a bid to rally support behind its national army.
Mohamed Selim, deputy chair of the Egyptian parliament’s African Affairs Committee, said that he believes the accusations were an attempt to shift attention from Ethiopia’s domestic problems by creating an external enemy and seeking to unify the internal front.
Amani al-Tawil, director of the Africa Programme at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, similarly described the accusations as “an understandable attempt to escape from internal crises”. She questioned why Egypt would choose this moment to intervene militarily in Ethiopia, given the two have been in dispute over GERD since 2011.
Inwalomhe Donald writes via inwalomhe.donald@yahoo.com
