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ADDIS ABABA — Ethiopia's federal armed forces have pledged to show restraint in the face of escalating fighting across the country's northern regions, even as analysts and residents warn the country may be sliding towards another full-scale civil war.
Army Chief of Staff Field Marshal Berhanu Jula, speaking publicly for the first time about the recent military developments, said the army was answering what he described as provocations from the Tigray front with "wisdom and restraint" — a phrase designed to signal deliberate caution to domestic and international audiences alike.
But the conciliatory framing sat alongside a sharper accusation. Jula blamed Eritrea for financing and backing armed factions inside Ethiopia in order to weaken the state, and described the emerging "Semedo" alliance as the latest expression of a decades-long pattern of hostile groupings that, in his view, has never been able to challenge the Ethiopian state without outside assistance.
Eritrea has rejected those claims. It has watched with particular anxiety the possibility that landlocked Ethiopia, which lost its maritime access after the 1993 Eritrean independence, might use instability as a pretext to secure a corridor to the Red Sea. Eritrean officials have repeatedly warned that such a move would be met with fierce resistance.
The immediate escalation follows the announcement of an alliance between seven armed groups, known as the Ethiopian Peoples' Forces Alliance for Survival, which has publicly committed to driving Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government from power. Since the alliance was declared, fighting has moved beyond Tigray itself and spread into the neighbouring Afar and Amhara regions, widening the theatre of conflict and heightening the risk that militant factions based elsewhere in the country could be drawn in.
In Afar, the most recent clashes have centred on the town of Abala, where government troops have been attempting to hold rebel forces at bay and prevent them from capturing the area. The battles around the town have been described as some of the fiercest engagements yet outside Tigray's borders.
North of there, in the North Wollo zone of Amhara region, which shares a long frontier with Tigray, the army announced on Thursday that it had killed 272 Tigrayan fighters and wounded a further 260 during a counter-offensive. The government said the operation inflicted heavy losses on fighters loyal to the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), the once-powerful movement that dominated northern Ethiopia for decades before the civil war.
The TPLF's Tigray Army has offered a markedly different account, saying the federal government has embarked on a "full-scale offensive" combining infantry sweeps, mechanised units and drone strikes. Abdisalam Balema, a member of the TPLF's central committee, told Al Jazeera that the confrontation had already developed into a "full war" in everything but name.
Fighting has also been reported around Sama, Soqota and Raya Alamata, with government forces said to be closing in on the town of Alamata. The advance has been slow and contested, reflecting how deeply fragmented the front has become since the TPLF's 2022 defeat.
Military commanders say they would rather pursue a policy of "strategic calm" than commit the army to a major confrontation. Their assessment is that popular support for the Tigray front is fading and that its political leadership is badly divided, making the movement weaker than its propaganda suggests. The approach contrasts with the huge mobilisations of the previous war, when tens of thousands of fighters were rushed to the front.
Civilians, however, are already bearing heavy costs. Internet access was reportedly severed across northern Ethiopia on Friday, a move that comes a day after the United Nations said it was alarmed by reports of drones being used against civilians. Blackouts in previous rounds of conflict have been widely criticised for hampering humanitarian access, communication and the ability of aid agencies to document abuses.
Underlying all of it is the breakdown of the 2022 Pretoria Agreement, which formally ended a brutal two-year civil war in Tigray. The deal has always been fragile — scholars note it settled the immediate fighting while leaving deep political, territorial and security disputes unresolved — but the current offensive is straining it further than at any point since it was signed.
The timing is particularly awkward for Addis Ababa. Weeks before the latest escalation, Washington lifted sanctions on Ethiopia and Eritrea imposed over atrocities committed during the previous war, declaring that the "national emergency … has expired." Critics argue the renewed violence undermines the logic of that decision, though the United States has not reversed course.
The fighting has also raised the spectre of a wider regional war, with armed organisations operating in other Ethiopian regions potentially joining in. At the United Nations General Assembly, Ethiopia's president sought to present his country as a pillar of regional stability, accusing unnamed external actors of interference in Ethiopian affairs while emphasising Addis Ababa's role in supporting peace efforts in neighbouring Sudan.
Alemayehu Weldemariam, a professor of law at Indiana University, argues that the federal government itself bears much of the responsibility for the collapse of the agreement. He told Al Jazeera that the war had been building for years and that key provisions of the cessation of hostilities were deliberately undermined from the start, pointing to restrictions on fuel, services and cash flowing into Tigray, as well as the government's failure to establish the interim administration the accord had promised.
"Supposedly temporary arrangements became permanent in practice," he said, noting that Tigray has been excluded from national elections since. Whether restraint holds, or whether the army's stated preference for calm survives another month of fighting, is likely to determine whether the 2022 settlement survives at all.
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