Tigray, Eritrea, the RSF, and the Sudan war

Old enemies, new friends

On 2 October 2025 the Ethiopian federal government formally writes to the UN Secretary-General accusing Eritrea of preparing for war against Ethiopia. By December, Sudan’s army-led government is accusing Ethiopia of directly supporting the Rapid Support Forces from Benishangul-Gumuz. The strategic alignments of the Tigray war of 2020–2022 have inverted: Ethiopia and the UAE against a coalition of Eritrea, Egypt, the Sudanese Armed Forces, Saudi Arabia, and the TPLF. The Pretoria Agreement’s regional-security architecture, in which Ethiopia and Eritrea were nominally aligned partners, has been substantively voided.

Filed late December 2025

The Horn of Africa’s regional security architecture in the fourth quarter of 2025 has been the outcome of a two-and-a-half-year sequence of strategic realignments that the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement had not been designed to accommodate. The Agreement had assumed the continuation of the Ethiopia-Eritrea partnership that had operated through the Tigray war of 2020–2022. The Agreement had not addressed the Eritrean role in the war (Eritrea was not a party to the Agreement and no accountability mechanism for Eritrean forces was established). The Agreement had also not anticipated the strategic consequences of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s October 2023 declaration that Ethiopian sea access was an “existential” question. The subsequent thirty months have progressively produced a regional configuration in which Ethiopia’s principal wartime ally, Eritrea, has become Ethiopia’s principal regional adversary, and in which the political-military coalitions across the Horn have realigned around the sea-access question and around the Sudanese civil war. [International Crisis Group, “Ethiopia and Eritrea Slide Closer to War amid Tigray Upheaval,” 17 June 2025, https://www.crisisgroup.org/anb/africa/horn-africa/ethiopiaeritrea/ethiopia-and-eritrea-slide-closer-war-amid-tigray-upheaval]

The realignment’s principal dimensions, as visible by October–December 2025, deserve identification.

The Ethiopia-Eritrea partnership had comprehensively broken down. The two states’ security cooperation during the Tigray war had been substantial: Eritrean Defence Force units had operated in Tigray from November 2020 through the Pretoria signing and beyond; Ethiopian federal forces had coordinated operationally with EDF units in multiple theatres; the two states’ intelligence services had operated in coordination against TPLF elements outside Ethiopia. By late 2023 the partnership had begun to erode; by 2024 the erosion had become substantive; by 2025 the two states were in an operational posture of mutual hostility. The proximate causes of the breakdown have been the subject of substantial subsequent analysis. President Isaias Afwerki reportedly viewed the November 2022 Pretoria signing — from which Eritrea was structurally excluded — as an Ethiopian betrayal of the wartime alliance, articulating publicly (as Ethiopia Insight and Africa Is a Country subsequently reported) that “our mission has been thwarted” by the Agreement’s terms. Isaias’s view had been that the war had been an opportunity to eliminate the TPLF as a political and military force; the Agreement had preserved the TPLF’s political existence and had, in Isaias’s analysis, left Eritrea’s strategic position substantially unimproved. Abiy’s subsequent October 2023 sea-access declaration was, on the Eritrean assessment, evidence that Ethiopia was preparing to turn on Eritrea to seize Eritrean coastal territory once the Tigray situation had been consolidated.

The Tigray-Eritrea rapprochement, unthinkable in 2020, has become substantively operational. The Debretsion-led TPLF’s progressive alignment with Eritrea through 2024 and 2025 has been the operational expression of the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic that the post-Pretoria strategic environment had produced. Africa Intelligence has reported multiple direct meetings between Debretsion and senior Eritrean officials through 2025, including a January 2025 Asmara summit that involved Isaias directly. The relationship’s operational content has included: Eritrean intelligence support for the March 2025 Debretsion faction’s takeover of the Interim Administration (Dispatch 23); Eritrean supply of military equipment to TDF formations under Debretsion’s command; coordinated political-diplomatic communications on regional questions; and, according to reports through late 2025, direct meetings involving TPLF, Amhara Fano, and OLA representatives on Sudanese-controlled territory that suggested an emerging opposition coalition against the federal Ethiopian government.

The Ethiopia-Somalia-Egypt tensions of 2024 (Dispatch 18) had produced a durable Egypt-Eritrea-Somalia security axis. The Ankara Declaration of December 2024 had de-escalated the immediate Ethiopia-Somalia dispute but had not dissolved the underlying axis. Through 2025, Egypt-Eritrean naval cooperation continued; Egyptian military supplies to Somalia continued; Egyptian-Eritrean political coordination at the African Union and in multilateral fora against Ethiopian regional ambitions continued. The Egyptian foreign minister visited Asmara multiple times through 2025; Isaias visited Cairo in March 2025. The axis, while not a formal alliance, had substantively become the principal regional counterweight to the Ethiopia-UAE bilateral alignment.

The Saudi-UAE rift of late 2025 had introduced a new strategic dimension. The relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which had been substantially cooperative through the 2010s and into the early 2020s, had progressively deteriorated through 2024 and 2025 over multiple bilateral questions including the Sudan war (in which Saudi Arabia backed the SAF and the UAE backed the RSF), the Yemen post-war political arrangements, the Red Sea maritime architecture, and the broader competition for influence in the Horn of Africa. By late December 2025, the two Gulf states had publicly split on multiple regional questions and were operating on visibly divergent strategic trajectories. Ethiopia’s principal external strategic partner had been the UAE, which had provided drone capabilities to ENDF during the Tigray war, financing for post-war reconstruction (including reportedly the Chaka Palace construction), and diplomatic support for Ethiopia’s sea-access ambitions. Eritrea’s principal Gulf partners had been Saudi Arabia (with which the relationship had strengthened through 2024–2025) and Egypt (with which the alignment on Sudan questions had been substantial). The Gulf-state polarisation of late 2025 further hardened the regional alignment: Ethiopia-UAE on one axis, Eritrea-Egypt-Saudi Arabia on the other.

The Sudanese civil war had, through 2025, become the operational theatre in which the regional realignment expressed itself.

The Sudanese war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) had begun in April 2023. Through 2023 and into 2024, Ethiopia had maintained an official position of neutrality between the two Sudanese parties while cultivating what International Crisis Group analysts characterised as “friendly ties” with the RSF. The Ethiopian federal government’s tactical interest in RSF success derived from multiple factors: the SAF’s relationship with the Egyptian government (whose interests in the war were substantially aligned with SAF success) constituted a threat to Ethiopian strategic ambitions; the RSF’s control of Darfur and western Sudan created operational space along Ethiopia’s western Benishangul-Gumuz border that was strategically preferable to SAF control of the same area; and the UAE’s role as the RSF’s principal external backer aligned with Ethiopia’s UAE partnership.

Through 2024 and into 2025, the Ethiopian position on the Sudan war had shifted from de facto RSF-alignment to operational support. The exact scale of Ethiopian support for the RSF was subject to substantial subsequent investigation. In late 2025 the Sudanese Armed Forces publicly accused Ethiopia of providing “military and logistical support” to the RSF through Benishangul-Gumuz region and by air. The Ethiopian federal government denied the allegations; the denials were subsequently substantially undermined by investigative reporting. On 10 February 2026, Reuters published a comprehensive investigation, based on Sudanese military officers, diplomats, and analysts interviewed by the International Crisis Group across November 2025 to January 2026, documenting that “Ethiopia builds secret camp to train Sudan RSF fighters.” The report’s specific allegations: that Ethiopia had constructed an RSF training camp in Benishangul-Gumuz region, that the camp was intended to allow RSF forces to open a second front against SAF in Sudan’s Blue Nile state, and that the Ethiopian federal government’s official position of neutrality on the Sudan war had been operationally abandoned in the direction of substantive RSF alignment. [Reuters, “Ethiopia builds secret camp to train Sudan RSF fighters, sources say,” 10 February 2026; International Crisis Group, “Ethiopia, Eritrea and Tigray: A Powder Keg in the Horn of Africa,” 18 February 2026, https://www.crisisgroup.org/brf/africa/ethiopia-eritrea/b210-ethiopia-eritrea-and-tigray-powder-keg-horn-africa]

The Sudanese Armed Forces’ response to the Ethiopian pivot toward RSF support was to expand its own operational engagement with the anti-Abiy Ethiopian opposition. Tigrayan forces — including elements of the pre-2020 Ethiopian federal army units that had fled to Sudan during the Tigray war and remained there through the subsequent period, operating as “Army 70” — were fighting alongside the SAF against the RSF, some reports suggested, and were being supplied by the SAF for the broader anti-federal-Ethiopian project. Amhara Fano formations had established coordination arrangements with the SAF that included, by late 2025 reports, the use of Sudanese territory as safe haven for Fano leadership and as supply-line origin for weapons flowing back into Amhara. OLA formations had reportedly used Sudanese territory in similar ways. The joint Tigrayan-Fano-OLA meeting in November 2025 on SAF-controlled Sudanese territory that Critical Threats Project analysts subsequently documented represented a formal beginning of coordinated operational planning across the three principal anti-federal-government Ethiopian armed formations.

The federal Ethiopian government’s formal diplomatic response to the accumulating strategic pressures came on 2 October 2025, when the Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a formal letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres accusing Eritrea of “actively preparing for war” against Ethiopia by financing and directing armed groups operating inside Ethiopia. The letter’s specific allegations: that Eritrea was arming and coordinating multiple rebel factions including Amhara Fano formations; that Eritrea was providing operational support to the Debretsion-led TPLF; that Eritrean military mobilisations along the Ethiopia-Eritrea border constituted preparations for direct attack against Ethiopia; and that the international community should recognise the Eritrean threat and impose corresponding diplomatic and economic pressure. [African Security Analysis, “Ethiopia Sounds the Alarm: Eritrea Mobilizing for War,” October 2025, https://www.africansecurityanalysis.org/updates/ethiopia-sounds-the-alarm-eritrea-mobilizing-for-war]

The Ethiopian letter was, in its diplomatic function, an operational admission that the post-Pretoria strategic environment had comprehensively broken down. The state that Ethiopia had been militarily allied with in 2020–2022 was, three years later, being formally accused of preparing to attack Ethiopia. The state whose leadership had shared the Pretoria signing with the federal government was, three years later, being formally aligned with the opposition to the federal government. The Horn of Africa security architecture that the Pretoria framework had assumed as its foundation had substantively voided.

The Ethiopian federal government’s operational response to the pressures, through October–December 2025, had multiple dimensions.

Militarily, ENDF units continued to be redeployed toward the northern border and toward Tigray Region. Convoys transporting heavy artillery, tanks, and troops toward the Tigray border became a regular feature of the ENDF’s operational activity through November and December 2025. Video documentation of these deployments, circulating on social media and captured by international analysts, demonstrated that the federal government was preparing for the operational possibility of renewed conflict in Tigray or against Eritrea. ENDF units were also being redeployed from Amhara and Oromia — theatres of the ongoing Fano and OLA insurgencies — to the northern deployments, producing operational tradeoffs in the federal government’s counter-insurgency capacities in the two regions from which forces were being withdrawn. [Critical Threats Project, “Ethiopia Prepares For War: Africa File Special Edition,” February 2026, https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/ethiopia-tigray-war-tplf-eritrea-sudan-red-sea-africa-file]

Diplomatically, the federal government pursued external partnerships to counter the emerging opposition coalition. The Ethiopia-UAE relationship was deepened through additional UAE investment commitments and arms deliveries. The Ethiopia-Israel relationship, which had been operationally active through the Tigray war period, was expanded. The Ethiopian federal government’s engagement with Western states — the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom — was oriented toward securing continued support against the “existential threat” the Ethiopian federal government characterised the Eritrean position as constituting. The Western states’ responses were, through late 2025, calibrated: expressions of concern about regional escalation, calls for de-escalation from all parties, continued reluctance to impose specific costs on either the Ethiopian or the Eritrean government for the conditions that were producing the escalation.

Domestically, the federal government’s political communications emphasised the external threat as the framing for the accumulating internal difficulties. The Amhara conflict was characterised as Eritrean-supported. The Debretsion-TPLF was characterised as Eritrean-aligned. The macroeconomic difficulties were characterised as consequences of external interference in Ethiopian sovereignty. The federal-government’s June 2026 electoral campaign, then in preparation, would substantially use these framings as the principal rhetorical instrument of the campaign.

By late December 2025, the operational assessment of the Horn of Africa security situation, articulated by International Crisis Group, Chatham House, the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, and other analytical bodies, was that the region was operating under conditions of substantial forward risk. The two states that had been military allies against Tigray in 2020–2022 were preparing for military conflict against one another. The armed opposition to the federal Ethiopian government had coordinated across Tigrayan, Amhara, and Oromo formations. The regional Gulf-state polarisation had produced material and diplomatic support flows that reinforced the polarisation of Horn of Africa positions. The Sudanese war had become the operational theatre in which the regional realignments expressed themselves. The specific timing of any renewed direct Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict was not predictable; the structural conditions for such conflict were, by late December 2025, comprehensively assembled.

The deeper analytical question that the late-2025 configuration raised was how the strategic environment had transformed so substantially from the November 2022 Pretoria signing point at which the federal Ethiopian government had appeared to be in a position of substantial regional strength.

The honest analytical answer, on the record of the intervening three years, was that the federal government’s post-Pretoria strategic choices had systematically alienated the constituencies and partners on which its subsequent regional position depended. The Amhara alienation of 2022–2023 (Dispatch 16) had opened the insurgency that consumed federal military bandwidth. The October 2023 sea-access declaration and the January 2024 Somaliland MoU (Dispatch 18) had produced the Egypt-Eritrea-Somalia axis. The federal government’s failure to implement the Pretoria terms regarding Eritrean withdrawal from Tigray, contested territories return, and transitional-justice accountability (Dispatch 14) had progressively alienated the Tigrayan political base and produced the Debretsion faction’s political ascendancy (Dispatch 23) with subsequent Tigray-Eritrea rapprochement. The May 2025 TPLF deregistration (Dispatch 24) had eliminated the political-institutional mechanism through which post-Pretoria Tigray politics could have been managed. The Amhara conflict’s continued escalation through 2024–2025 (Dispatch 21) had produced additional international-diplomatic pressures and had further constrained the federal government’s operational capacity.

Each of these developments had been, in isolation, a manageable strategic complication. The cumulative effect, by late 2025, was the comprehensive erosion of the strategic position that the federal government had held at the Pretoria signing. The federal government’s strategic response to each successive complication had been to double down on the choices that had produced the preceding complications: the OLA situation had been managed through fragmentation rather than settlement; the Amhara situation through military operations rather than political accommodation; the Tigray situation through administrative-legal instruments rather than substantive Pretoria implementation; the regional situation through unilateral positioning rather than diplomatic accommodation. The cumulative outcome, by late 2025, was that the federal government was operating from a position of substantially weaker regional strategic capacity than it had held at any point since 2018.

The realignment was, on this analytical view, substantially self-inflicted. The Eritrean pivot had been made in response to Ethiopian choices that Isaias had assessed as threatening to Eritrean interests. The Tigrayan pivot had been made in response to federal-government failures to implement the Pretoria terms that Tigrayan constituencies had assessed as substantive. The Sudanese SAF pivot had been made in response to Ethiopian tilt toward the RSF. The Egyptian-Somali-Saudi pivots had been made in response to Ethiopian regional posturing that these states had assessed as expansionist and threatening. Each of the pivots had specific proximate causes that the federal government could, with different strategic choices, have avoided producing. The federal government had, at multiple decision points across the 2023–2025 period, chosen the more confrontational or the more unilateral option rather than the more accommodating or the more consultative one. The cumulative choice-record had produced the late-2025 configuration.

The retrospective question — whether the federal government could still, at the end of 2025, have pursued strategic accommodations that would have averted the forward risk of full regional conflict — admits a complex answer. Some accommodations remained available: Ethiopian formal reaffirmation of Eritrean sovereignty over Assab; substantive Pretoria implementation regarding EDF withdrawal from Tigray and contested territories; renewed political negotiation with the Debretsion-led TPLF on its status as a political party; reciprocal de-escalation with Sudan through withdrawal of RSF support; broader diplomatic engagement with the Egypt-Eritrea axis on sea-access questions. The pursuit of these accommodations, if undertaken with sufficient commitment and if paired with reciprocal steps from the other side, could have averted the forward risk of full regional conflict. The federal government’s demonstrated pattern of doubling down rather than accommodating suggested, however, that such accommodations were not on the federal-government’s strategic agenda.

By late December 2025, the operational assessment was that a Horn of Africa regional conflict — most probably between Ethiopia and Eritrea, with the TPLF, SAF, Egypt, and other actors participating in varying capacities — was substantially more probable than not over the medium term. The specific timing was uncertain; the structural conditions were comprehensively assembled; the federal-government’s continuing pattern of strategic choices was progressively contributing to the accumulation of forward risk rather than to its de-escalation. The old enemies of the 2020–2022 war had become new friends. The old friends of the Ethiopia-Eritrea partnership had become new enemies. The regional order that the Pretoria framework had assumed as its foundation had substantively voided. The next phase of the Horn of Africa’s political-military dynamic was, by the end of 2025, operationally opening.

The strategic clock, as International Crisis Group analysts articulated in the January–February 2026 briefings, was substantively running toward some form of regional-crisis expression. The specific character of that expression — whether direct Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict, whether renewed Tigray-federal conflict, whether escalation of the Amhara or OLA insurgencies, whether some combination of these — could not be reliably predicted. The structural condition of accumulated forward risk, produced by the choices documented above, could be reliably characterised. The Horn of Africa was, by late 2025, operating in a powder-keg configuration whose ignition was a matter of timing rather than of underlying probability.

The old enemies had become new friends. The new enemies were the old friends. The federal government’s strategic position had eroded across each of the dimensions that had, three years earlier, appeared substantial. The next phase of the crisis was, at year’s end 2025, no longer avoidable through the federal government’s continuing strategic pattern. Whether the pattern would be modified before the crisis expressed itself was, in mid-December 2025, the open political question of Ethiopia’s forward trajectory.

The pattern had not, by year’s end, been modified.

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Sources for Article 25

1. International Crisis Group, “Ethiopia, Eritrea and Tigray: A Powder Keg in the Horn of Africa,” 18 February 2026 — https://www.crisisgroup.org/brf/africa/ethiopia-eritrea/b210-ethiopia-eritrea-and-tigray-powder-keg-horn-africa
2. International Crisis Group, “Ethiopia and Eritrea Slide Closer to War amid Tigray Upheaval,” 17 June 2025 — https://www.crisisgroup.org/anb/africa/horn-africa/ethiopiaeritrea/ethiopia-and-eritrea-slide-closer-war-amid-tigray-upheaval
3. Critical Threats Project (AEI), “Ethiopia Prepares For War: Africa File Special Edition,” February 2026 — https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/ethiopia-tigray-war-tplf-eritrea-sudan-red-sea-africa-file
4. Critical Threats Project, “Tigray Tensions; Is Sahel Offensive: Africa File, June 26, 2025,” 26 June 2025 — https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/tigray-tensions-is-sahel-offensive-africa-file-june-26-2025
5. African Security Analysis, “Ethiopia Sounds the Alarm: Eritrea Mobilizing for War,” October 2025 — https://www.africansecurityanalysis.org/updates/ethiopia-sounds-the-alarm-eritrea-mobilizing-for-war
6. Reuters, “Ethiopia builds secret camp to train Sudan RSF fighters, sources say,” 10 February 2026
7. Chatham House, “Tensions in Tigray could spark war between Ethiopia and Eritrea,” March 2025 — https://www.chathamhouse.org/2025/03/tensions-tigray-could-spark-war-between-ethiopia-and-eritrea-disaster-must-be-avoided
8. The Soufan Center, “Renewed Tensions in Tigray Risk Escalating into a Broader Conflict,” 20 March 2025 — https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-2025-march-20/
9. Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs letter to UN Secretary-General, 2 October 2025 (reported by AFP)
10. Eritrean Ministry of Information, “Interview with President Isaias Afwerki: Part II – On Key Regional and Domestic Issues,” 30 July 2025
11. Atlas Institute for International Affairs, “Renewed Tension Between Ethiopian Regime and Tigray Forces,” July 2025 — https://atlasinstitute.org/renewed-tension-between-ethiopian-regime-and-tigray-forces/
12. Africa Is a Country / GPPi, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” 4 August 2025 — https://africasacountry.com/2025/08/the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend
13. The New Humanitarian, “Regional mega-war? How renewed conflict in Ethiopia could pull in Sudan,” 23 March 2026 — https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/2026/03/23/regional-mega-war-renewed-conflict-ethiopia-sudan
14. Africa Intelligence reporting on Eritrea-TPLF meetings, 2025

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End of expanded article for Dispatch 25. One article, approximately 3,200 words.