As reported by Al-Monitor on 5 November 2021, Prime Minister
Abiy Ahmed has declared a
state of emergency and called on citizens to arm themselves in the face of armed groups aligned with the Tigray People"s Liberation Front now closing in on the capital, Addis Ababa, just 300km away. According to the UN, there is now the very real risk of Ethiopia "descending into widening
civil war" (MSN News, 9 November 2021).
Yonas Dembele, World Watch Research analyst comments: "The situation in Ethiopia has deteriorated very fast. The conflict between government forces and the Tigray People"s Liberation Front (TPLF) began in 2020, but since August 2021 it has spread from Tigray to the neighboring regions of Afar and Amhara. The TPLF leadership has threatened to continue fighting until the Tigray blockade is lifted; country analysts, however, believe that the TPLF is attempting to regain power, which it lost in 2018 when Abiy won the election. If the fighting escalates, it could affect the whole of the Horn of Africa. For this reason, the African Union special envoy (former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo) met both the Ethiopian prime minister and the president of the Tigray regional state in an effort to
de-escalate tensions and broker peace (Republicworld, 9 November 2021)."
Yonas Dembele continues: "Any instability in Ethiopia, home for a population of over 115 million people, will have serious implications both for the region and the continent. Although the fighting is not rooted in a religious cause, the more the crisis in the country deepens, the more dangerous the situation for Christians could become. It has to be remembered that the Ethiopian government has been at the forefront of fighting jihadists in Somalia (and also in eastern Ethiopia in 1990s). A deepening crisis could lead to the conflict taking on a religious dimension."
