Ethiopian Civil Conflict: Timeline & Latest Developments

What gets called the “Ethiopian civil conflict” is not one war but three, fought on different fronts, on different timelines, by different armed groups, with only partial overlap in cause or command. The best-documented is the Tigray War, fought between the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front from November 2020 to the November 2022 Pretoria Agreement. Running alongside and after it are the Amhara region’s Fano insurgency, which turned into full-scale war against the Ethiopian National Defence Force in August 2023 and remains active today, and Oromia’s OLA insurgency, which has simmered since 2018 through repeated failed peace talks and one partial 2024 ceasefire. They are treated together here because none of the three fronts alone explains why Ethiopia’s combined death toll across the 2020s ranks among the highest of any conflict in the world this decade; it is the sum of three wars, not one, and conflating them risks understating how differently each has unfolded.

The Tigray War began on November 4, 2020, when TPLF forces attacked federal military bases in Tigray after months of dispute over a postponed national election. Federal forces, joined by Eritrean troops and Amhara regional forces, captured the regional capital Mekelle within weeks, but the TDF regrouped and retook most of Tigray by mid-2021, at one point pushing federal-aligned forces back toward Dessie and Kombolcha in neighboring Amhara. Eritrea’s involvement was denied by both Addis Ababa and Asmara for months until Eritrea itself acknowledged to the UN Security Council on April 16, 2021 that its forces were fighting in Tigray. The UN-mandated International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia later found Eritrean, Ethiopian federal, and allied regional forces collectively responsible for mass killings, systematic sexual violence, deliberate starvation and mass detention, and found that Tigrayan forces were also culpable for killings, rape and looting; the Axum massacre and the disputed Mai Kadra killings sit among the war’s most documented and most contested atrocities respectively. Death-toll estimates range enormously depending on methodology, from Uppsala’s UCDP battle-death count of over 100,000 in 2022 alone to broader excess-mortality studies putting total deaths, including famine and lost healthcare, at 162,000 to 600,000. The war ended with the Pretoria Agreement on November 2, 2022, though implementation has been uneven: a 2023 Mekelle protest still called for the return of displaced people and resumed aid, and the Commission investigating the war’s crimes had its mandate allowed to lapse weeks after its final report, leaving accountability efforts largely stalled.

The Amhara Fano insurgency has a distinct origin: an April 2023 federal plan to dissolve regional special forces and fold them into the ENDF, which set off protests that turned into full-scale war by August 1, 2023. Fano, a network of historically loosely organized militias, has since captured and lost towns including Lalibela, Metemma and parts of Gondar, while the ENDF has relied heavily on drone strikes, which rights groups say killed hundreds of civilians in 2024 alone, including more than 100 people in an April 2025 strike near an East Gojjam school. Government forces have also been linked to alleged reprisal killings, including the Merawi and Birakat incidents, allegations the government has not accepted responsibility for. Fano’s factions unified in stages, first into the Amhara Fano National Force in May 2025, then into the Amhara Fano National Movement in January 2026, and that unified movement sustained an offensive that disrupted Ethiopia’s June 1, 2026 general election, with voting unable to proceed in 30 Amhara constituencies even as the ruling Prosperity Party retained its national majority.

Oromia’s OLA insurgency is the oldest and least resolved of the three, tracing to the OLA’s 2018 split from the Oromo Liberation Front. Both government forces and OLA fighters have been linked to civilian atrocities, including a 2019 Amnesty-documented campaign of mass detentions by security forces and the 2022 Tole massacre, in which Amnesty attributed roughly 400 ethnic Amhara civilian deaths to OLA fighters, a finding the OLA disputes. Peace talks collapsed repeatedly until a major faction signed a deal in December 2024, after which ACLED recorded a 57 percent drop in political violence, though it also found Ethiopian federal forces still responsible for nearly half of remaining civilian-targeting incidents in early 2025, a reminder that responsibility for civilian harm in Oromia has not rested with OLA factions alone. As of mid-2026, tensions between the federal government, Tigray, and Eritrea have also flared again, with brief clashes in western Tigray in January and a documented military buildup along the Ethiopia-Eritrea border by February, underscoring that none of Ethiopia’s 2020s conflicts, Tigray included, can yet be called fully resolved.