The Pretoria Cessation of Hostilities Agreement that paused Ethiopia’s deadliest war is looking thinner by the week. Just Security’s late-August brief puts the 1 August clashes near Shererina among the most serious breaches since November 2022, and it notes a federal drone strike days later in Merewa in southern Tigray, which Tigrayan authorities called a serious escalation. On 17 August, Mekelle accused federal forces of another strike near the regional capital. France 24’s 4 September report warned that a month of such strikes is putting Tigray’s unfinished recovery at risk again, in a region that never rebuilt after a war estimated to have killed around 600,000 people.
A 29 August piece in The Conversation argues that federal and Tigrayan forces have effectively resumed fighting after failing to turn Pretoria into a political settlement. Western Tigray fighting in August, plus drone strikes and attacks on civilians around southern Tigray and Mekelle, sit on top of unresolved displacement, Amhara and Eritrean control of contested ground, and almost no accountability for wartime abuses. Reports of forced recruitment of young people by both the Ethiopian government and Tigrayan authorities only harden the path back to mass mobilization.
Just Security fills in the structural picture Abiy Ahmed’s government has left unfinished. Western Tigray, known to Tigrayans as Welkait, was never settled despite Pretoria’s constitutional language. After Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party dominated the June 2026 elections, federal restrictions on budget subsidies, fuel, and banking deepened the squeeze on the region, while the TPLF’s deregistration shut Tigray’s main party out of the vote. Amhara’s Fano war and the Oromo Liberation Army fight in Oromia keep federal capacity stretched, which is exactly when drones become a tempting substitute for politics the regime in Addis Ababa would rather not negotiate.
AfricLaw’s Derara Roba, writing on 3 September, notes that the Ethiopian National Dialogue Commission still ran its July conference in Addis Ababa while guns stayed loud in Amhara, Oromia, and the north. Tigray has largely stayed out of that process. A dialogue that convenes while Abiy’s multifront wars continue is not neutral scenery. It is a claim about who counts as the nation.
Pretoria stopped the bloodshed once because monitors and pressure existed. Restoring that pressure, protecting civilians from forced recruitment, and refusing to treat drone strikes as routine housekeeping are the minimum if another full-scale war is to stay avoidable.
Sources:
