The TDF retakes Mekelle. The blockade begins.

The siege replaces the war

Federal forces withdraw from Mekelle on 28 June 2021. The Tigray Defence Forces retake the city in triumph. Within hours, the federal government cuts off telecommunications, banking, electricity, fuel, and food. Two and a half years later, the question of how many died from the resulting famine will still not be settled.

Filed mid-July 2021

The federal government’s “law enforcement operation” had been declared complete on 28 November 2020. On 28 June 2021 — seven months to the day after the declared completion — the Tigray Defence Forces marched back into Mekelle. Federal soldiers had withdrawn the previous day in what the government characterised as a strategic redeployment and a “unilateral humanitarian ceasefire.” The TDF and the celebrating Tigrayan civilians who poured into the streets characterised the same events as the federal-allied army’s defeat. Both characterisations were operationally accurate. The federal coalition had been expelled from the city it had taken seven months earlier. The federal government had, simultaneously, decided to replace direct military occupation with a different instrument of pressure — a siege that would, over the next two and a half years, produce a famine whose casualty count has not been settled in 2026.

The seven months between the federal capture of Mekelle on 28 November 2020 and the TDF retaking of the city on 28 June 2021 were an interval in which the federal-government framing of the war progressively collapsed under the weight of accumulating documentation, while the operational situation on the ground progressively shifted in the TPLF’s favour. Both processes are worth setting down clearly.

The framing collapse began with the November 2020 federal advance itself, which had been characterised as a brief “law enforcement operation” against a “TPLF criminal clique” but had, by January 2021, been demonstrated to involve a foreign army (Eritrea) conducting documented mass killings of civilians. The CNN authentication of the Mahbere Dego video in late February 2021 — showing 39 unarmed Tigrayan men being executed over a cliff by ENDF soldiers, recorded on a phone by one of the perpetrators — was the first piece of public evidence the federal government could not deny. The Amnesty International Axum report on 26 February 2021 established EDF responsibility for the killing of “many hundreds” of civilians. The BBC Africa Eye investigation of the Dengelat massacre, broadcast in April 2021, documented EDF responsibility for the killing of more than 100 worshippers at Sunday mass at the Mariam Dengelat church on 30 November 2020. The Reuters and Financial Times reporting through spring 2021 progressively documented the systematic sexual violence pattern that Amnesty International would summarise in its August 2021 report. By April 2021, the international information environment around the war had moved past the November 2020 federal framing and was operating on the basis of an evidentiary record that placed federal-Eritrean conduct alongside, and in some respects beyond, TPLF-aligned conduct as the war’s central atrocity pattern. [Lawfare, “Ethiopia’s Tigray Conflict: Alleged Atrocities, Law of War Violations and Regional Implications,” 18 January 2023, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/ethiopias-tigray-conflict-alleged-atrocities-law-war-violations-and-regional-implications]

The operational shift on the ground tracked the framing collapse but was driven by independent factors. The TDF that had been driven from Mekelle in late November 2020 had not, in any meaningful sense, been destroyed. It had withdrawn to the rural areas of central and eastern Tigray — Tembien, Wajirat, Hawzien, Gere’alta — and had begun rebuilding from a base of: surviving TPLF-era military formations, defectors from the Northern Command (including senior officers like General Tsadkan Gebretensae, who had been the ENDF Chief of Staff during the 1998–2000 war and was now the TDF’s principal military planner), returned 1980s-war veterans (the men who had fought against the Derg and were now in their fifties and sixties), and a substantial wave of new recruits radicalised by the EDF and ENDF atrocities. By April 2021, the TDF had reconstituted as a force comparable in size to the pre-war Tigray Special Forces and was conducting effective guerrilla operations against ENDF and EDF formations across Tigray. By May 2021, the TDF was conducting conventional military operations against the federal-Eritrean coalition in eastern and central Tigray. By June 2021, the TDF had taken back substantial territory and was positioned to retake Mekelle.

The federal-government decision to withdraw rather than fight for Mekelle in late June 2021 was, in the operational sense, a recognition of the changed balance. The ENDF formations in Mekelle had been heavily depleted by the six months of TDF guerrilla activity and by the broader pattern of ENDF attrition that the Lawfare and ICG analyses had documented. The Eritrean Defence Force units were not committed to holding Mekelle; they were holding their own positions in western and northern Tigray. The Amhara regional forces that had occupied parts of western Tigray were not committed to defending eastern Tigray. The federal coalition lacked the force concentration required to hold Mekelle against a TDF push and lacked the political will to commit additional forces to a defence that would have produced major casualties without changing the strategic situation. On 27 June, federal forces began withdrawing from Mekelle. On 28 June, the TDF entered the city. Crowds of Tigrayan civilians poured into the streets to celebrate.

The federal government’s framing of the withdrawal as a “unilateral humanitarian ceasefire” was, on the operational record, a retroactive characterisation of a forced retreat. The federal government had not announced a ceasefire in advance. The withdrawal had not been negotiated. The TDF had not agreed to any cessation of hostilities. The framing was, like the “law enforcement operation” framing eight months earlier, a political instrument designed to convert an operational defeat into a moral position. The international press, by June 2021, was more sceptical of such framings than it had been in November 2020; the New York Times, Reuters, and the Financial Times reported the withdrawal as a federal defeat in headlines that did not adopt the federal characterisation.

What followed the withdrawal was the most consequential federal-government decision of the war.

Within hours of the federal withdrawal from Mekelle, the federal government implemented a comprehensive siege architecture against Tigray Region. The architecture was not, by federal-government public statements, a deliberate policy; the federal-government framing was that the cessation of services was a consequence of the war’s operational disruption and that the federal government was committed to restoring services as soon as security conditions permitted. The factual record, established by ICHREE, the joint EHRC-OHCHR investigation, the Human Rights Watch documentation, and the contemporaneous reporting of UN OCHA and the World Food Programme, contradicts the federal-government framing in every operational respect.

Telecommunications. Cellular phone service across Tigray had been shut down at the start of the war in November 2020. The shutdown was not lifted with the federal withdrawal; it continued through June 2021, through 2022, and was only partially restored after the Pretoria Agreement of November 2022. The shutdown’s operational character was complete: voice calls, SMS messages, mobile data, and internet access through cellular networks were not available to Tigrayan residents through the open-conflict phase of the war. The federal government’s communications infrastructure operator, Ethio Telecom, maintained that the shutdown was a function of damaged equipment; the documented reality was that Ethio Telecom had administrative control over the shutdown and could have restored service at any time it chose. The shutdown was not, in the meaningful sense, an incidental consequence of war damage; it was a federal-government policy.

Banking. The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia and other federal-supervised banks froze accounts of Tigray-based individuals and businesses within the first weeks of the war. The freeze continued through the federal withdrawal and beyond. Tigrayan individuals could not access their savings; Tigrayan businesses could not conduct commercial transactions; Tigrayan civil servants and pensioners could not receive federal payments. The freeze operated as an instrument of economic strangulation against a population that, in normal circumstances, depended on the federal banking system for daily commercial life.

Electricity. The federal electrical grid serving Tigray was disconnected during the November 2020 advance and was not reconnected after the federal withdrawal. Mekelle, Adwa, Axum, Adigrat, and the smaller towns of Tigray operated without grid electricity through the second half of 2021, through 2022, and substantially into 2023. The Tigrayan regional administration’s attempts to restore electricity through local generation were limited by the absence of fuel imports.

Fuel. Petroleum imports into Tigray, which had pre-war run through Djibouti and Amhara-region transit corridors, were blocked at federal and Amhara-controlled checkpoints. Tigrayan vehicles, hospitals, and infrastructure dependent on petroleum operated on rapidly diminishing pre-war stocks through the second half of 2021. Diesel generators that had powered hospitals’ operating rooms and intensive-care units shut down for lack of fuel. Cars and motorcycles stopped moving. Agricultural mechanisation collapsed.

Food and medicine. Commercial food imports into Tigray were blocked at federal and Amhara checkpoints. Humanitarian food imports — primarily from the World Food Programme and from USAID — were permitted to enter on a limited basis through specific Amhara-region corridors, but the volume permitted was, by OCHA documentation through 2021 and 2022, a fraction of the calculated need. Aid trucks were routinely turned back at checkpoints; convoys that did enter Tigray arrived with substantial portions of their cargo missing or damaged. Medicines, including antibiotics, insulin, antiretrovirals, and oxygen for respiratory patients, were restricted in similar terms. The federal government’s repeated public statements that “Tigray is not blockaded” were not, by the standards of any operational or humanitarian measurement, accurate.

Commercial transport. Ethiopian Airlines suspended commercial flights to Mekelle. Federal road transport into and out of Tigray was blocked at checkpoints. The Trans-African Highway corridor through Tigray was closed to commercial movement. The Tigrayan economy, dependent on commercial connection to the broader Ethiopian and East African economy, was operationally severed.

The cumulative effect of the siege architecture was the deliberate isolation of a population of approximately seven million from the basic infrastructural systems on which modern civilian life depends. The federal government’s framing of the siege as an incidental consequence of war disruption was, by the documentation that accumulated through 2021 and 2022, false. The ICHREE final report of October 2023 documented the federal blockade explicitly: “mass killings in Tigray occurred in the context of a siege, during which the ENDF and EDF deliberately interrupted food and medical supplies and cut off essential services, including banking, telecommunications, electricity, and trade.” The use of starvation as a tool of war is a war crime under both the Rome Statute and customary international humanitarian law. Ethiopia is not a party to the Rome Statute. There is, in 2026, no functional prosecution mechanism for the federal-government officials responsible for the siege architecture.

The mortality consequences of the siege are the central empirical question of the war’s casualty accounting.

Tigray’s pre-war agricultural production had been catastrophically degraded by the conditions of the first phase of the war. EDF and ENDF forces had, by Amnesty International and HRW documentation, systematically destroyed seed stocks, killed and looted oxen and pack animals, damaged irrigation infrastructure, and destroyed agricultural-processing facilities. The 2020 harvest had been severely disrupted; the 2021 planting season had been substantially missed; the 2021 harvest was a fraction of the pre-war norm; the 2022 planting season was further disrupted by the renewed fighting in the second half of 2022. The civilian population’s caloric base, in normal circumstances substantially imported and substantially produced locally, was therefore both internally collapsed and externally cut off through the period from June 2021 onwards.

The mortality consequences began to surface in late 2021. Hospital admissions in Mekelle, Adwa, and Adigrat for severe acute malnutrition rose sharply. Paediatric ward admissions for marasmus and kwashiorkor — clinical conditions that had not been present in Tigray’s hospitals in significant numbers for decades — climbed through autumn 2021 and winter 2022. Deaths from treatable conditions — diabetes (insulin restriction), respiratory illness (no oxygen), surgical infections (no antibiotics), childbirth complications (no medical equipment, no electricity) — accumulated through 2021 and 2022. The Tigrayan regional administration’s Interim Disaster Risk Management Commission, operating with limited resources, attempted to document the famine deaths; its reports through 2022 documented progressive increases in famine-related mortality but were limited in their capacity to capture deaths outside the major towns where its monitoring infrastructure was operational. [OHCHR / Human Rights Council A/HRC/54/55 (ICHREE final report), 14 September 2023, https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/chreetiopia/A_HRC_54_55_AUV.pdf]

The Ghent University post-war casualty analysis, conducted by Professor Jan Nyssen and his research team between 2022 and 2024, produced what has become the most cited estimate of total Tigray-war-related mortality. The Ghent analysis combined direct-combat casualty estimates, atrocity-attributable civilian casualty estimates, and famine-mortality estimates derived from pre-war population data and post-war demographic surveys. The Ghent estimate of total excess deaths in Tigray during the open-conflict phase of the war is between 162,000 and 600,000 — with the higher end of that range substantially driven by the famine-mortality component attributable to the federal blockade. The Tigray war’s casualty figure, in the Ghent reading, places it among the deadliest conflicts of the post-Cold War era globally; the famine-mortality component places the federal blockade’s death toll in the same category, by raw casualty count, as the largest documented civilian famines of the second half of the twentieth century.

The federal government’s response to the Ghent analysis and to related casualty estimates has been to dispute the methodology and to refuse to commit to an alternative figure. No federal-government casualty estimate has been publicly released. The Tigrayan regional administration’s casualty figures have been treated by the federal government as politically motivated and have been disputed in detail without being replaced by federal-government figures. The empirical question of how many Tigrayans died in the war and from the post-war siege remains, in 2026, formally unresolved. The Ghent estimate is, on the available evidence, the most rigorous; it remains the working figure for international human-rights documentation; it has not been contested in any peer-reviewed academic publication that has produced an alternative figure.

The strategic logic of the siege, from the federal government’s perspective, was the conversion of an operational defeat (the loss of Mekelle) into a slow-motion victory over the broader Tigrayan political project. The TDF had reconstituted itself; the TPLF political leadership had returned to Mekelle; the federal coalition could not retake the city without major military commitment and casualties. The siege offered an alternative path: rather than defeat the TDF on the battlefield, the federal government would degrade the population that sustained the TDF until the TDF’s political and material base collapsed. The siege would, in this reading, do the work that the federal military had been unable to do.

The strategic logic worked, in operational terms, only partially. The siege did, indeed, degrade the Tigrayan civilian population at a scale that meets the threshold for war-crime characterisation. It did not, however, produce the political collapse the federal government had hoped for. The TDF held through the siege. The TPLF political leadership held through the siege. The Tigrayan civilian population, despite enormous casualties, did not turn against its own political leadership in the way the federal-government strategic theory had assumed. By November 2021, the TDF would conduct its offensive south toward Addis — an offensive that became operationally possible only because the siege had not destroyed the Tigrayan capacity to sustain a major military operation. By November 2022, the federal government would be forced into the Pretoria Agreement — an outcome that became operationally necessary only because the siege had not delivered the political collapse the federal government had projected.

The siege’s failure to deliver its strategic objective did not mean its costs were not paid. The costs were paid by the Tigrayan civilian population. The mortality figures, the displacement figures, the destroyed agricultural capacity, the destroyed industrial capacity, the destroyed educational and medical infrastructure — these are the costs the siege actually purchased. The political objective was not achieved. The civilian damage was achieved. The federal government’s strategic calculation, by 2022, had failed in its forward terms and succeeded in its backward terms.

The 28 June 2021 federal withdrawal from Mekelle was, in retrospect, the moment at which the federal-government strategy in the war shifted from direct military operation to indirect civilian degradation. The shift was not, in the federal-government public framing, acknowledged; the federal-government public position was that the withdrawal was a humanitarian gesture and that the subsequent restrictions were operational necessities. The factual record, established by ICHREE and the supporting human-rights documentation, identifies the shift as a deliberate strategic choice. The choice produced a famine. The famine is, in 2026, the largest single component of the Tigray war’s casualty accounting.

The TDF that marched back into Mekelle on 28 June 2021 marched into a city that the federal government was, in operational terms, beginning to destroy by other means than direct military occupation. The celebration that day in Mekelle was real. The cost of the strategy that the federal government had chosen in response was, by November 2022, also real. The TPLF political leadership’s calculation, when it eventually signed the Pretoria Agreement, was a calculation made under the operational pressure of a starving population. The federal-government’s calculation, in the same agreement, was a calculation made on the basis that the siege had achieved its civilian-degradation objectives and that further military operations were no longer necessary.

The siege, in this final reading, was the federal government’s strategic instrument of choice for sixteen of the war’s twenty-four months. It was not a failed alternative to direct military operation; it was the operational form the federal-government strategy took when direct military operation became too costly. The Tigrayan civilians who died from it — between roughly 80,000 (the conservative famine-mortality estimate) and roughly 400,000 (the high-end Ghent estimate) — were not, in the federal-government strategic logic, incidental costs. They were the operational mechanism by which the federal government produced the political outcome it required.

The fact has not, by mid-2026, been adequately addressed by the Ethiopian post-war political process. The transitional-justice framework contemplated by the Pretoria Agreement has not produced any prosecution of any federal official for the siege. The international community’s accountability mechanisms, with ICHREE’s mandate not renewed after October 2023, are not operative. The question of who is responsible for the famine deaths in Tigray between June 2021 and November 2022 is, in 2026, unanswered.

It is among the largest unanswered questions in modern Ethiopian political history.

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Sources for Article 11

1. Wikipedia, “Tigray war,” accessed June 2026 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigray_war
2. OHCHR / Human Rights Council A/HRC/54/55 (ICHREE final report), 14 September 2023 — https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/chreetiopia/A_HRC_54_55_AUV.pdf
3. OHCHR, “International community must ensure accountability and protection for civilians caught in Ethiopia conflict, UN commission says in final report,” 13 October 2023 — https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/10/international-community-must-ensure-accountability-and-protection-civilians
4. Joint EHRC-OHCHR investigation report on alleged violations by all parties to the conflict in the Tigray Region, 3 November 2021 — https://www.ohchr.org/en/news/2021/11/ethiopia-eritrean-troops-extreme-brutal-violence-against-women-and-girls-tigray-must
5. Lawfare, “Ethiopia’s Tigray Conflict: Alleged Atrocities, Law of War Violations and Regional Implications,” 18 January 2023 — https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/ethiopias-tigray-conflict-alleged-atrocities-law-war-violations-and-regional-implications
6. Ghent University Tigray War mortality research (Jan Nyssen et al.), 2022–2024
7. UN OCHA Ethiopia Humanitarian Updates, 2021–2022
8. Human Rights Watch, “We Will Erase You From This Land,” 6 April 2022 — https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/04/06/we-will-erase-you-land/crimes-against-humanity-and-ethnic-cleansing-ethiopias
9. World Food Programme Ethiopia situation reports, 2021–2022
10. Reuters and Financial Times coverage of federal withdrawal from Mekelle, June 2021
11. ISS Africa, “The Eritrea-Ethiopia peace deal is yet to show dividends,” 11 September 2020 — https://issafrica.org/iss-today/the-eritrea-ethiopia-peace-deal-is-yet-to-show-dividends
12. The Tigray Interim Disaster Risk Management Commission reports, 2021–2022
13. London Review of Books, Tom Stevenson, “Incapable of Sustaining Weeds,” February 2024 — https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n02/tom-stevenson/incapable-of-sustaining-weeds

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End of expanded article for Dispatch 11. One article, approximately 2,800 words.