Irish Examiner view: The unseen war in Ethiopia

Conflict in Tigray

People walk past destroyed heavy artillery equipment in Hayk, Ethiopia.

Sadly, war has become a global obsession in the past eight months, but there is a conflict in Africa right now that appears not only to have been forgotten by the rest of the world but to be one which could, without much prompting, become one of the greatest humanitarian disasters in living memory.

Fighting in the northern Ethiopian province of Tigray in a civil war has been ongoing since November 2020 between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and the government’s Ethiopian National Defence Forces and has now drawn in the army of neighbouring Eritrea, the EDF. A truce was brokered last March to stop the fighting, but it collapsed in August.