The Pretoria Leftover War: How the Unfinished Parts of Ethiopia’s 2022 Peace Deal Came Back as New Wars

Humera in Western Tigray, June 2022. The Pretoria agreement left the status of Western Tigray unsettled. File photo; the image does not show the renewed fighting of 2026. Photo: Henry Wilkins / Voice of America (public domain)

By Kaleb Yekuno Amlak

Amhara: the ally left outside the room

The war in the Amhara region is now in its fourth year, and it has not stopped while attention turned to Tigray. Fighting between federal forces and Fano, the armed Amhara movement, began in August 2023. Reuters reports that Fano has taken large parts of the Amhara countryside since 2023 and that the conflict has killed thousands (Reuters).

In late October and early November, Fano fighters were contesting the main road that federal forces use to move troops and supplies to Tigray. According to the Critical Threats Project, the Amhara Fano National Movement captured Wurgessa, between Dessie and Woldia, on October 3 and Girana, just off the highway about 30 miles south of Woldia, on October 24 (Critical Threats, October 27). The same group said Fano and the federal army clashed around Ambassel, Werebabo and Wuchale from October 30 to November 2, closing parts of the Dessie to Woldia highway, and that the army answered with drone strikes (Critical Threats, November 3).

Critical Threats also said Fano launched a new offensive on October 23 around the roads of the South Gondar zone, the east to west road that links Woldia with Bahir Dar and the north to south road that leads toward western Tigray. Accounts on X that support Fano said the movement captured Ibnat on November 2. Critical Threats said it could not confirm several of these claims (Critical Threats, October 27 and November 3).

Control of Wuchale has changed hands more than once in a few days. Fano media and two accounts on X said Fano entered the town on November 1 and 2. Government forces have since retaken the town, Wazema Radio reported on November 4, according to Anadolu Agency. Residents told The Abay Times that the army was back in the town on November 3, after a day of heavy fighting in which at least four civilians were killed, and that fighting continued outside the town. The federal and Amhara regional governments have not given a detailed public account of the fighting (The Abay Times; Anadolu Agency).

On September 20, 2026, it was a Fano leader, Zemene Kassie, who read the statement announcing a new alliance of seven armed movements, including the Amhara Fano National Movement and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), with the stated aim of removing Abiy Ahmed’s government (Reuters; Al Jazeera). Amhara forces fought on the federal side against the TPLF from 2020 to 2022. Their move to the same side as the TPLF goes back to a peace deal that was signed without them.

That deal was the Pretoria agreement. Amhara special forces and Fano, whose members describe themselves as local defense forces raised to protect their communities, fought beside the federal army in the 2020 to 2022 war. The BBC reported in August 2023 that Amharas were excluded from the Pretoria talks and that the deal "was met with deep suspicion among Amharas," with the Amhara Association of America, based in the United States, calling it a "war pact," a charge the government denied (BBC). Many Amharas feared that Welkait and Raya would be handed back without them having any say.

Five months after Pretoria, in April 2023, the Ethiopian Government announced that all regional special forces would be absorbed into the federal army and police (Reuters). Gunfire and protests followed in Amhara towns (Reuters). According to the BBC, many Amharas saw the plan as leaving them unprotected against Tigray, and many special forces members joined Fano. In August 2023 the federal parliament approved a six month state of emergency in Amhara (BBC). In Amhara, the peace deal signed without Amhara representatives was followed by the order to dissolve the regional special forces, then by a state of emergency, and then by three years of war.

The deal that left Amhara out

When the Ethiopian Government and the TPLF signed the Agreement for Lasting Peace through a Permanent Cessation of Hostilities in Pretoria on November 2, 2022, it ended a war that the African Union’s mediator later estimated killed some 600,000 people between 2020 and 2022, a figure the BBC and AFP still cite. Flights, banks and aid trucks came back to Mekelle.

In late September, the agreement collapsed. On September 23, 2026, Tigrayan forces seized the airports of Mekelle, Axum and Shire, and fighting spread into Afar and Amhara. By September 24, TPLF vice president Amanuel Assefa told AFP that Tigray was in a state of all out war with the federal government (AFP). The federal army said it killed 272 Tigrayan fighters that day and 436 more on September 25. These are figures the army announced and that no independent source has confirmed; the TPLF did not confirm them. A source close to the TPLF told Reuters that fighting had reached within a few kilometers of Lalibela airport (Reuters via The Canberra Times). The Associated Press wrote that the fighting had "effectively" shattered the peace deal (AP via iNFOnews). The African Union Commission chairperson called for "utmost restraint" and asked former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo to engage the parties again (AU statement via APO).

Each side blames the other for starting the fighting, Ethiopia Observer reported on September 23. TPLF authorities in Tigray described the fighting as a defensive response to what they called a federal invasion with drones and artillery. Getachew Reda, adviser to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, said TPLF leaders had launched an offensive against government positions in the Afar and Amhara regions (Ethiopia Observer).

The agreement was a deal between two armed parties, and it left several major questions for later: who owns Western Tigray and Raya, who holds the guns inside Tigray, how the displaced go home, what happens to the Amhara forces who fought beside the federal army, and what role Eritrea would have after its troops helped win the war. Each of these leftovers has grown into its own crisis, and in September 2026 they came together in one armed alliance.

The land question that Pretoria wrote in one sentence

The first leftover is land. Article 10(4) of the Pretoria text says only that "the Parties commit to resolving issues of contested areas in accordance with the Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia" (PA-X, full text). It does not name Western Tigray, which Amhara communities call Welkait Tegede Setit Humera, or Raya or Tselemt, and each side has read it in its own way ever since.

Many Amhara people believe that Welkait and Raya were taken from them and placed inside Tigray when regional borders were redrawn after 1991, as the BBC has explained. When the war began in November 2020, Amhara forces took control of Western Tigray. Human Rights Watch said in April 2026 that the zone has since been run by an administration that answers to the Amhara region (Human Rights Watch, April 22, 2026). Tigrayan leaders reject that arrangement and say the zone should return to Tigray’s administration. In October, after the federal government set up a caretaker administration in Tigray, its new Mekelle mayor, Shishay Amare, told AFP that "questions about territorial integrity will be resolved through constitutional processes." He gave no timetable (Kulu Media, citing AFP, October 19). It is unclear whether control of the zone changed in October.

In a joint report published on April 6, 2022, "We Will Erase You from This Land": Crimes Against Humanity and Ethnic Cleansing in Ethiopia’s Western Tigray Zone, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International said that the new authorities in Western Tigray and Amhara security forces, with the complicity of federal forces, carried out an ethnic cleansing campaign against Tigrayan civilians that amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Human Rights Watch repeated that finding in a report on April 22, 2026. The Amhara regional government rejected the 2022 report in a statement on April 10, 2022, calling it biased and lacking credibility (Addis Standard). The zone administration has rejected Human Rights Watch’s newer findings, as described below.

The federal position is that displaced people should first go back and then a referendum should decide which region the land belongs to. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed restated this in parliament on February 3, 2026, saying that "no one should be displaced while [the dispute] is in place; those who were displaced should return to their homes, administer themselves, and resolve their own questions" (Human Rights Watch; ENA). The TPLF wants the opposite order. According to ACLED, the TPLF wants to take control of the disputed areas, remove the local administration that was set up during the war, return the displaced, and only then talk about which region the land finally belongs to (ACLED). The Welkait zone’s own leaders have said displaced people are welcome back, but under a recognized Amhara administration and without people accused of crimes such as the 2020 Mai Kadra massacre (Human Rights Watch; ENA).

With three different orders of steps on the table, the referendum the federal government keeps promising has no date and no agreed body to run it.

The displaced people caught in the middle

Displaced people have been among the most affected by this long delay. Human Rights Watch said in April 2026 that more than 740,000 displaced people come from the Western Tigray area and that most of them live in camps in central Tigray (HRW; The Reporter). Al Jazeera, citing UN data, put the number still displaced inside Tigray at about 750,000, and AFP at around one million (Al Jazeera; Ahram Online/AFP). Reuters reported on October 16 that about 750,000 Tigrayans were still displaced as of February, citing the UN refugee agency, UNHCR (Reuters).

Some returns did happen. A 2024 Food Security Cluster assessment said about 38,000 people had gone back to Raya and Tselemti areas, out of a plan to return 689,000 (Food Security Cluster). Human Rights Watch said many of them later fled again because of insecurity and a lack of aid. One man told the group, "A mistake was done when they returned people to Tselemti and Raya. They fled again because of a lack of security. I don’t want to repeat this."

Inside Western Tigray itself, Human Rights Watch said in April 2026 that Tigrayans who stayed are denied ID cards, need permits to leave their towns, cannot farm their own land, and are held in local police stations and in a Humera prison. It said Col. Demeke Zewdu, the zone’s deputy administrator and security chief, should be suspended and investigated. The zone administration answered two days later, calling the report "false allegations" and a "predetermined narrative," and said thousands of Tigrayans live there peacefully (The Reporter).

Aid to the camps has shrunk. Al Jazeera reported in January 2026 that hunger in Tigray had worsened in the year after the United States cut the U.S. Agency for International Development, once Ethiopia’s largest source of humanitarian aid, and that the World Food Programme office in Shire had closed because of budget cuts linked to those cuts (Al Jazeera). OCHA officials have warned that a cash shortage in Tigray’s banks is making it harder to deliver help (Addis Standard). On September 21, 2026, a drone strike in northwestern Tigray hit a truck carrying food for displaced people, according to the UN spokesperson (UN News).

Guns that were counted and guns that were not

The second leftover is the question of weapons. Pretoria required Tigrayan forces to disarm, and the later declaration signed by military commanders in Nairobi on November 12, 2022 said heavy weapons would be handed over "concurrently with the withdrawal of foreign and non-ENDF forces from the region" (PA-X, Nairobi declaration). ENDF is the federal army, the Ethiopian National Defense Force. That wording was widely understood to mean Eritrean troops and Amhara forces. Neither the Eritrean army nor Amhara forces signed anything in Pretoria or Nairobi, so part of the deal depended on forces that had not signed it.

The program to disarm Tigrayan fighters and help them return to civilian life began only on November 21, 2024, two years after Pretoria, with a target of 75,000 former fighters in its first phase (Addis Standard). By April 2025 the National Rehabilitation Commission reported that only about 17,000 had gone through it, and by June 2025 it said more than 45,000 had left the armed forces through the program (Addis Standard). The federal government says, according to the BBC, that the TPLF handed only old weapons to the African Union and kept the rest hidden. The other half of the Nairobi bargain was never completed either. In February 2026, Foreign Minister Gedion Timothewos accused Eritrea of occupying Ethiopian land, a claim Eritrea rejected (The Africa Report). Human Rights Watch said in April 2026 that Western Tigray was still run from the Amhara region (Human Rights Watch, April 22, 2026).

In late January 2026 the Tigray Defense Forces crossed the Tekeze River into the disputed Tselemt area and clashed with the federal army, and on January 29 they took Alamata and Korem in southern Tigray after the federal command post there withdrew, according to ACLED, which called it the most serious fighting between the two forces since November 2022. The federal army answered with drone strikes. Even the man Addis Ababa had appointed to lead Tigray, Lt. Gen. Tadesse Werede, publicly justified the Tselemt crossing by pointing to the federal government’s failure to solve the land and displacement questions (ACLED).

How the TPLF split and who ended up running Tigray

Pretoria also left open who would govern Tigray. Its interim administration was led for two years by Getachew Reda, the TPLF negotiator who signed the deal. A faction led by TPLF chairman Debretsion Gebremichael announced the removal of Getachew Reda in October 2024, and in March 2025 forces loyal to that faction took over offices in Mekelle and other towns, pushing Getachew Reda to leave for Addis Ababa (Reuters; BBC). On April 8, 2025, Abiy Ahmed appointed Tadesse Werede in his place (Reuters), and a few days later named Getachew Reda his adviser on East African affairs with the rank of minister (ENA).

In May 2025 the National Election Board of Ethiopia revoked the TPLF’s legal registration, saying it had failed to meet the conditions for keeping it (Addis Standard). Getachew Reda and other former TPLF officials then formed a new party, Tigray Democratic Solidarity, known as Simret, which received full recognition in December 2025 (Borkena). The party that the electoral board no longer recognized still controlled the Tigrayan army.

The break came in the spring of 2026. On April 8, the Office of the Prime Minister extended the mandate of Tadesse Werede by one year, citing the constitution and federal law on interim regional administrations (ENA). The TPLF said it had not been consulted and called the move inconsistent with Pretoria, which says the interim administration should come out of political dialogue (Addis Standard). On May 5, the TPLF brought back the regional council that Pretoria had dissolved and elected Debretsion Gebremichael as regional president (Ethiopia Observer). The International Crisis Group said the TPLF had "elbowed out" Tadesse Werede (Crisis Group). In July, BBC Tigrinya reported, citing sources, that Tadesse Werede was under house arrest in Mekelle and was stopped from meeting U.S. Ambassador Ervin Massinga (Ethiopia Observer). The TPLF has not confirmed that account.

Since the TPLF restored the administration it ran before the war, the BBC reported in late September, civil servants in Tigray have not been paid and services have been seizing up (BBC).

Both men’s positions changed again in October. Tadesse Werede and three other former officials escaped detention by TPLF security forces near Rama, on the Eritrean border, on October 12, according to Col. Tewelde Gebretinsae, who was held with him. The Abay Times reported that the men had been held since fighting resumed around September 23, and Col. Tewelde Gebretinsae said the group reached Mekelle separately on October 13 (The Abay Times). In an interview reported on October 20, Tadesse Werede said Rama district officials drove the group to federal troops; his claim that Eritrean personnel were waiting at the border to collect them rests on his account alone (The Abay Times). He is not among the five officials named to the federal caretaker administration on October 16 (ENA), and his current role is unclear. Getachew Reda was reappointed on October 10 as adviser to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed on East African affairs with the rank of minister (ENA). He returned to Mekelle on October 11 for the first time since March 2025 (UMD Media) and later called the rebel alliance "a baseless entity built on deception," according to state media (ENA, October 22).

Eritrea: the partner who was never part of the peace

The fourth leftover is Eritrea. Eritrean troops fought alongside the federal army, but Eritrea was not a party to Pretoria. Amnesty International reported in September 2023 that Eritrean soldiers in Kokob Tsibah, in eastern Tigray, raped and sexually enslaved women and executed 24 civilians between the signing of the agreement and January 19, 2023, when they withdrew from that area (Amnesty International).

Relations between Addis Ababa and Asmara later turned sour. In a speech in October 2023, Abiy Ahmed called access to the Red Sea an "existential" issue for Ethiopia and mentioned Assab by name (Addis Standard). In February 2026, Foreign Minister Gedion Timothewos accused Eritrea of "military aggression" and demanded that its forces leave Ethiopian land, and Eritrea’s information minister Yemane Gebremeskel rejected the accusations (The Africa Report). Later that month, a military parade displayed a banner saying Ethiopia would not remain landlocked whether "you like it or not," the Los Angeles Times reported (Los Angeles Times).

At the same time, the TPLF faction led by Debretsion Gebremichael moved closer to Asmara. ACLED said in February 2026 that some Fano groups and the Eritrean military had "aligned with the TPLF in the past year" (ACLED). Billene Seyoum, press secretary in the Office of the Prime Minister, told Reuters in September that the new alliance against the government had been working with money from Eritrea, and Asmara has repeatedly denied supporting armed groups in Ethiopia (Reuters).

The election that left out the north

On May 26, 2026, the National Election Board said voting would not take place in 46 constituencies: all 38 in Tigray and eight in Amhara, in parts of South and West Gondar, Ambassel and Dega Damot. It also said three Tigray parties, including the Simret party of Getachew Reda, would not be in the race (Ethiopia Observer). Voting went ahead on June 1. Results were released on June 21. Xinhua reported in October that Abiy Ahmed’s Prosperity Party won 438 of the 486 contested seats (Xinhua). Some earlier reports gave the total as 501 seats, and Ethiopian Review could not confirm which total is final. Opposition parties accused the government of arresting their leaders, which the government denies.

Abiy Ahmed was sworn in for a second five year term on October 5, 2026, according to the state Ethiopian News Agency and Xinhua (ENA; Xinhua). The new parliament has no one elected from Tigray, a region of about six million people according to the BBC, and the election board has given no date for voting there or in the affected parts of Amhara.

When the leftovers joined together

On September 20, 2026, seven armed movements announced the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, with the stated aim of removing Abiy Ahmed’s government. The statement was read by Fano leader Zemene Kassie and broadcast on Tigrai TV, which the TPLF controls. The members include the TPLF, the Amhara Fano National Movement, the Oromo Liberation Army, a faction of the Ogaden National Liberation Front, and groups from Afar and Benishangul Gumuz (Reuters; Al Jazeera).

Most of these forces were on opposite sides in 2020, and Al Jazeera wrote that the alliance "grew out of the political realignment that followed the Pretoria agreement." TPLF central committee member Abdisalam Balema told Al Jazeera, "We don’t want a repeat of 2020 when we were encircled and alone," and admitted that members still disagree over Western Tigray. Getachew Reda, speaking to state media, said the TPLF "declares Pretoria dead and starts an alliance with the very people who fell out with the federal government because Pretoria was signed" (Al Jazeera). Magnus Taylor of the International Crisis Group told Reuters that the alliance’s efforts "may be hamstrung by the weak nature of several of the groups, the geographical distances between them and political differences."

Within days the fighting widened. UN human rights chief Volker Türk said airstrikes hit five schools in Tigray on September 22 and that a mortar strike two days later killed civilians in Kobo in Amhara (UN News). Internet and phone services in Tigray were largely cut, and people there, who depend on mobile banking because ATMs stopped working months earlier, could not reach their money, the BBC reported.

October and November: the federal counteroffensive

In October the federal army and its allies pushed back. Many of the claims below come from the warring sides and could not be independently confirmed.

Federal forces took the Mekelle airport and other parts of the city on October 4, Bloomberg reported, according to Africa Risk Consulting. The army and the Tigray Peace Force, a Tigrayan armed group that backs the federal government, entered central Mekelle on October 3, and the TPLF withdrew and said it would operate from elsewhere for the time being (Africa Risk Consulting). Africanews reported that government troops captured Mekelle in early October (Africanews).

The army and its allies retook Shire on October 8 after Tigrayan forces withdrew, according to the Critical Threats Project, and entered Aksum in mid October after TPLF fighters pulled back into the mountains, according to the Belgian research group EEPA (Critical Threats, October 9; EEPA, October 19). Fighting continued. As of November 3, the army had entered Sheraro, near the Eritrean border, according to ACLED. ACLED also reported that Tigrayan forces had clashed with the army and the Tigray Peace Force in Bizet district and in Naeder Adet district near Aksum. Critical Threats said the army had been advancing toward Sheraro (ACLED; Critical Threats, November 3).

The TPLF claims that it killed 500 soldiers and wounded 800 in a counterattack near Aksum on October 31. The claim was made on Dimtsi Weyane, a TPLF television channel, and has not been verified. The federal government had not commented, Africanews reported on November 3 (Africanews).

The war also became a crisis between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Eritrea cut diplomatic ties with Ethiopia, accusing it of "deplorable acts of hostility," hours after Ethiopia closed its embassy in Asmara, the Kenyan newspaper Daily Nation reported on October 2, according to Africa Risk Consulting (Africa Risk Consulting). On October 9, Ethiopia told the United Nations in a letter that an all out invasion by Eritrean forces had left it no option but to defend itself, Reuters reported, according to Africa Risk Consulting (Africa Risk Consulting). Eritrea has denied supporting the rebel alliance. Parliament endorsed Gedion Timothewos as foreign minister in the new cabinet on October 8 (ENA).

On October 16, the federal government set up a caretaker administration to run Tigray for six months, according to the state Ethiopian News Agency and Reuters. The Office of the Prime Minister said the administration would restore services, help displaced people go home and prepare elections within six months, and it blamed the TPLF leadership for blocking peace under Pretoria (ENA; Reuters). The TPLF rejected the administration as an "illegitimate political structure" and warned local institutions not to work with it, according to EEPA (EEPA, October 19).

What the leftovers mean now

Each of the conflicts now joined in this alliance goes back to a question that Pretoria left for later or left to people who were not at the table. The land question was given to a constitutional process that never started, disarmament was tied to the exit of Eritrean and Amhara forces who signed nothing, and the interim administration depended on a TPLF that later split. The Amhara people, whose forces did much of the fighting, were not asked, and Eritrea, whose troops Amnesty International accused of killings after the deal was signed, was not a party to the agreement.

The African Union, the UN and IGAD have called for talks within the framework of the Pretoria Agreement. But Fano, the Welkait administration and Eritrea never signed it, and the TPLF leaders, who were forced out of Mekelle in October, say the federal government broke it first (Africa Risk Consulting; Africanews).

For displaced Tigrayans in camps, Tigrayans living under travel permits in Humera, families in Amhara after three years of war, people on the Dessie to Woldia road, and people in Afar towns such as Abala, these unsettled questions are part of daily life. Abiy Ahmed began his second term in October as fighting spread across the northern regions where many people could not vote.