Ethiopia’s Tigray region has plunged back into war, with rebel forces seizing three regional airports and threatening to unravel a peace deal signed less than four years ago, according to multiple international reports. The renewed fighting is being watched closely by Canada’s Tigrayan community, which numbered nearly 32,000 people at the last census and has spent years pressing Ottawa to intervene.
Heavy clashes broke out Sept. 22 between Ethiopian federal forces and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF, which went on to seize the Mekele, Shire and Axum airports, according to Al Jazeera and Africanews. Ethiopian Airlines suspended flights to all three. The TPLF said it was responding to federal “bombardments” and an “invasion,” while a government adviser accused the group of triggering the airport shutdowns itself. Fighting has since spread into the neighbouring Afar and Amhara regions, with the TPLF announcing a new alliance with six other anti-government armed groups, Al Jazeera reported.
The Ethiopian military said Wednesday it had killed 272 Tigrayan fighters in Amhara, a figure that could not be independently verified. Ethiopian authorities have also accused the TPLF of allying with Eritrea, a claim Africanews said has not been confirmed independently.
The clashes mark the most serious breach yet of the November 2022 Pretoria peace agreement, which ended a two-year civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced roughly a million more, a toll the region has still not recovered from, according to Al Jazeera. The United Nations said it is “particularly troubled by reports of the use of drones as well as incidents of harm to civilians,” spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said Thursday, citing a drone strike on a food-aid truck, airstrikes on five schools and a mortar strike that killed civilians in the town of Kobo. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is engaging regional leaders directly and has called for a return to the 2022 accord, the UN said. Human Rights Watch’s deputy Africa director, Laetitia Bader, said all sides must “take all necessary measures to protect civilians and civilian infrastructure” and called for international actors to support monitoring of the conflict.
For Canada, the stakes go beyond diplomacy. Statistics Canada’s 2021 census counted close to 32,000 people of Tigrayan ethnic origin in the country, with a significant community in Winnipeg. Members of that community have lobbied Ottawa since 2021 to formally recognize the earlier war’s atrocities as genocide and to accept more refugees fleeing the region, according to New Canadian Media, arguing the government has been slow to respond to their outreach. Global Affairs Canada’s standing travel advisory already tells Canadians to avoid all travel to Tigray and non-essential travel to the rest of Ethiopia, citing civil unrest, violence, armed conflict and crime, and warns that restrictions can change without notice.
Despite that exposure, Global Affairs Canada had issued no public statement on this week’s fighting as of Friday, based on a review of its news releases and country page, a contrast with Washington, whose embassy in Addis Ababa issued security alerts on Sept. 23 and again on Sept. 25, and with the UN’s direct diplomatic push. Canada allocated $30.7 million in humanitarian assistance to Ethiopia in 2024 to address crises affecting more than 21 million people, according to Global Affairs Canada, aid that could be strained if the fighting widens.
The question now is whether the TPLF’s broader alliance and Ethiopia’s expanded drone arsenal, built up since the last war, make this round harder to contain than the last one, and whether Ottawa will weigh in before it does.
via Al Jazeera, with additional reporting from UN News, Human Rights Watch, Africanews and New Canadian Media.
