A week after African leaders met in Luanda to talk up conflict prevention, Human Rights Watch warned that northern Ethiopia is already testing whether the African Union can turn early warning into action. In a 9 September note, HRW said disputes over the November 2022 Pretoria agreement (contested territories, return of displaced people, and disarmament) have grown for more than a year between the Ethiopian government and the TPLF. August fighting near the Sudan border brought artillery and drone strikes back into the open. The AU had flagged Tigray tension as early as March 2025. HRW’s own April work documented continuing abuses against Tigrayans in Western Tigray, and a July brief accused TPLF authorities of forcibly recruiting civilians, including children as young as 15.
The mediation channel itself is wobbling. HRW says efforts to revive dialogue have raised doubts about whether the existing AU arrangement still has both parties’ confidence. The Peace and Security Council, of which Ethiopia is a member, just validated a new “Trigger Model” for early warning in August and then hosted Luanda language on prevention. HRW’s ask is concrete: intensify engagement with Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party government and the TPLF, review the mediation setup, and demand public reporting from the AU’s Monitoring, Verification and Compliance Mechanism on remobilization and civilian abuse allegations.
While Addis Ababa talks deterrence, it is building the tools. AFP reported on 8 September that Ethiopia has manufactured drones at two factories since last year and is thought to field thousands, on top of Turkish Bayraktar and Akinci buys, Chinese Wing Loong, and Iranian Mohajer-6 systems. Abiy inaugurated SkyWin Aeronautics in March 2025 and later Aeroabay for cheap weaponised FPV drones. ACLED counts 102 federal drone strikes in Amhara since the Fano war began in 2023, and at least 14 in Tigray this year, seven of them in August. International Crisis Group’s Magnus Taylor says Abiy Ahmed’s regime can keep a war of attrition going because drones fly essentially unopposed. Pretoria paper and Luanda speeches do not rewrite that hardware map.
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