War / Africa
Ethiopian Civil War
Ethiopia's multi-front war deepens as Pretoria collapses, a regional counter-axis hardens, and Abiy's supermajority locks in insurgent grievances.
Horn of Africa
Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a two-year border war from 1998 to 2000 over the town of Badme, killing as many as 100,000 soldiers before the Algiers Agreement froze the fight in place.
An international boundary commission awarded Badme to Eritrea in 2002. Ethiopia refused to withdraw, and the border hardened for sixteen years. A 2018 peace deal between Abiy Ahmed and Isaias Afwerki won Abiy a Nobel Prize and changed almost nothing on the ground. By 2023, Eritrea was again arming insurgents inside Ethiopia, this time in Amhara, while Egypt cultivated Asmara as the northern anchor of its encirclement of Addis Ababa.
The Horn's most dangerous rivalry is dormant, not resolved.
The Ethiopia-Eritrea standoff has crossed from diplomatic friction into a structured proxy war against Addis Ababa, with Asmara now coordinating across three simultaneous insurgent fronts it previously fought against.
The Egypt-Eritrea maritime cooperation agreement, signed during a high-level Egyptian ministerial visit to Asmara, establishes a new Red Sea shipping line and formalizes port upgrades at Assab and Doraleh, converting diplomatic alignment into physical infrastructure with strategic depth.
The TPLF-Eritrea-Fano realignment is a structural inversion, not a tactical shift: Eritrea fought alongside Addis Ababa against the TPLF in 2020-2022, and Fano militias were federal auxiliaries in that same war.
UAE has courted both; Gulf states have competing interests in the Red Sea littoral
War / Africa
Ethiopia's multi-front war deepens as Pretoria collapses, a regional counter-axis hardens, and Abiy's supermajority locks in insurgent grievances.
War / Africa
Sudan's war grinds on as US chemical weapons sanctions, Iranian drone contracts, and a Russian basing deal entrench both sides.
TPLF under Debretsion Gebremichael has restored prewar governance structures and its legislative council.
Amhara Fano militias, excluded from federal peace negotiations, have converged operationally with TPLF and Eritrean elements despite having fought alongside.
OLA (Oromo Liberation Army) sustains a third insurgent front in Oromia.
Eritrea coordinates materiel and political support across the TPLF, Fano, and OLA simultaneously.
Sudan's SAF serves as a geographic and logistical corridor within the Egypt-Eritrea strategic axis.