NAIROBI, Kenya – As fighting erupted in northern Ethiopia last month, shattering a five-month truce and reigniting a destructive civil war, a small US military plane carrying senior US diplomats crossed the front line in part of a secret mission to stop the bloodshed.
Flying low and taking steps to avoid detection, the plane flew into Tigray, the beleaguered northern region which is at war with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopian government, before continuing on to Djibouti for a series tense peace talks, according to people familiar with the negotiations. In a measure of the mistrust between the two sides, Mike Hammer, the US envoy to the region, flew aboard the US Air Force plane to ensure it would not be shot down.
Tigray is the world’s invisible war, a sprawling conflict hidden behind a punitive government siege that has shut down communications in the region, locked out journalists and left 5.2 million people in dire need of food aid . United Nations investigators have labeled it a war crime.
But in recent weeks the fighting has reached its most intense yet – and covert peace efforts have given way to raging fighting that many fear is spreading rapidly across the Horn of Africa, destabilizing the region.
While the gaze of the world is largely fixed on the war in Ukraine, the conflict in Tigray is also enormous, with three major armed forces, including two of the largest armies in Africa, those of Ethiopia and Eritrea, fighting twice on several fronts in a rugged region. the size of Switzerland.
The latest fighting, with pitched battles, drone strikes and artillery barrages, has drawn in neighboring countries and involves hundreds of thousands of fighters, by most estimates. At least a hundred civilians have died and as many as 500,000 have fled their homes in recent weeks, a senior UN official said.
A diplomatic campaign to end the war was also concealed. A formal African Union-led peace process has been hampered by disputes over mediators and money for much of the past year, officials said, prompting Western officials to try to keep the ball rolling. Since March, the United States has held three secret meetings outside Ethiopia — in Djibouti and the Seychelles — bringing together warring leaders for the first time since war broke out in November 2020.
Details of the latest meeting on September 9, which was attended by Mr Abiy’s national security adviser, Redwan Hussien, and his justice minister, Gedion Timothewos, were provided by Western and Tigrayan officials who spoke to each other. spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the events which the Americans have insisted remain confidential.
A US official confirmed that a US Air Force Beechcraft aircraft made the flight through Tigray on behalf of the State Department.
Now hopes for peace rest on a surprise announcement this week from the African Union inviting the two sides to talks in South Africa.
But the prospects for this initiative are uncertain. Tigrayan leaders have accused the mediator, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, of siding with Mr Abiy. After initially scheduling talks for this weekend, the African Union said only on Thursday that they would take place “soon”.
Events on the battlefield could move faster than that.
It is difficult to obtain reliable information on the last six weeks of fighting. But interviews with Western and Tigrayan officials – along with video footage, satellite images and testimonies collected from the region’s few functioning phone lines – have offered a hollow view of a metastasized conflict that is costing civilians dearly.
Ethiopian drone strikes hit a kindergarten in August, killing several children, and a UN food truck in late September. An airstrike on Tuesday in Adi Da’ero, near the border with Eritrea, hit a refugee center, killing at least 50 people, said two aid officials in the region who spoke on condition of anonymity. their safety.
After an earlier strike in the same town, video footage showed the lifeless body of a woman being pulled from the smoking rubble.
“The fighting is intense and the losses are immense,” said General Tsadkan Gebretensae, former head of the Ethiopian army, now a strategist for the Tigrayans, in a telephone interview.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Abiy and spokespersons for the Ethiopian government and military did not respond to requests for comment. The government has denied hitting civilian targets.
What we consider before using anonymous sources. Do the sources know the information? What is their motivation for telling us? Have they proven themselves in the past? Can we corroborate the information? Even with those questions answered, the Times uses anonymous sources as a last resort. The journalist and at least one editor know the identity of the source.
The most striking change in recent weeks has been the return to war of Isaias Afwerki, the dictatorial leader of the northern nation of Eritrea, and his army, one of the largest in Africa, which has been accused of many atrocities in previous battles.
Eritrean troops pounded Tigray with artillery barrages across the border and captured the Tigrayan town of Shiraro, where recent satellite images showed hundreds of soldiers marching and lines of gunfire. field artillery. In an unusual move, several thousand Ethiopian troops were airlifted to Eritrea to help with the assault, officials said.
Inside Eritrea, the country has “fully mobilized its armed forces”, calling up all men under the age of 55 for military service, wrote Annette Weber, the European Union’s envoy to the Horn of Africa, to EU Member States last month in a confidential briefing. obtained by the New York Times.
“The war is raging with a heavy military buildup on all sides, increased intensity and Eritrean participation,” Ms. Weber wrote in the leaked briefing, which first appeared on the World Peace Foundation’s website, a program of Tufts University.
“Tens of thousands of people are injured or killed on the various battlefronts, many with the belief that surrender is not an option,” the briefing continued. “There’s a lot at stake.”
The stakes for civilians in northern Ethiopia were outlined in a September 22 report by UN investigators who accused both sides of war crimes, including massacres and sexual assaults. But he pointed the finger at Mr Abiy’s forces for “using starvation as a method of warfare” and for the “sex slavery” of Tigrayan women held in military camps.
At Tigray’s biggest hospital, doctors say patients are dying of cancer, kidney disease and other treatable conditions for lack of medicine. A recent study found that newborn babies in Tigray are dying at four times the pre-war rate.
“One day we will be free from the fear of being bombarded from the air,” said Dr Fasika Amdeslaise, a Tigray surgeon with rare internet access. wrote on Twitter. “One day, we will be able to treat our patients.
The fighting is the latest twist in a war in which the fortunes of both sides have swung wildly.
Just a year ago, Tigrayan fighters marched on the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, after driving government forces out of Tigray. But in November they were forced to retreat after Mr Abiy obtained armed drones from Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and China.
The United States changed tack in January when President Biden made his first phone call to Mr Abiy, allaying the Ethiopian leader’s fears that the United States was planning to try to oust him and opening the door to way to secret talks, two US officials said.
Two months later, on March 10, a US Army Beechcraft aircraft carried the Tigrayan General Tsadkan in the Seychelles, where he meets in a hotel Marshal Birhanu Jula, the head of the Ethiopian army.
The two men concluded a humanitarian truce which, weeks later, allowed aid convoys to return to Tigray. A second meeting under the aegis of the Americans took place in Djibouti in June.
But the truce was also an opportunity for both sides to rearm, and as the summer progressed Mr Abiy appeared to be dragging his feet, officials said. His delegates to the talks lacked the power to make decisions and he seemed reluctant to restore essential services like electricity and banking in Tigray.
The return to war on August 24 has drawn criticism from experts who say the Biden administration has not exerted enough pressure to force warring groups into substantive peace talks.
“Diplomacy clearly isn’t working,” said Cameron Hudson, a former State Department official at the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center. “There are a lot of efforts but they don’t get anywhere. So we have to ask ourselves if we are using the right tools.
The re-emergence of Mr. Isaias, the Eritrean leader, adds a new volatile element to the conflict. On September 20, Mr. Hammer, the US envoy, called on Eritreans to return home after the fighting in Tigray.
Other countries in the region are also being drawn in – along with a contingent of United Nations peacekeepers.
Sudan has been a “conduit” for flights carrying arms to Tigray, Ms Weber said in her confidential briefing. In May, about 650 ethnic Tigrayans, on a UN peacekeeping mission in Sudan, deserted the Ethiopian army and sought asylum, said two UN officials in Sudan who spoke from anonymously due to the sensitivity of the situation. By August, about 400 of those peacekeepers had disappeared, officials said, mostly in Tigray to fight alongside refugees who had been recruited from camps along the border.
Mr. Hudson, the analyst, said it appeared Washington was reluctant to take tougher action, such as rolling out sanctions that Mr. Biden authorized in November, in the hope that Ethiopia could once again become a strong American partner in the region.
But with Ethiopia reaching the breaking point of the Tigray war, as well as violent conflict in other regions like Oromia, such a notion is “delusional”, Hudson said.
“We are not going back to those old days, and certainly not under Abiy,” he said.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Simon Marks from Nairobi, Kenya.