'We must have the sea': Abiy sworn in again as Red Sea demand pushes region toward war

ADDIS ABABA — Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was sworn in on Monday for another five-year term, and used the moment to press the demand now driving the Horn of Africa toward the brink: his landlocked country of more than 120 million people, he insisted, must have access to the Red Sea. The vow came as war intensifies in the north. Federal forces and allied militias are pushing back Tigrayan fighters and advancing on Mekelle, the Tigrayan capital — pro-government forces say they captured a town about 75 kilometres south of the city last week and are now within 30 kilometres of it. Tigray People's Liberation Front chairman Debretsion Gebremichael acknowledged losing ground but promised a counter-attack "in due course": "We should ensure that Tigray is their graveyard, not their playground." Ethiopia and Eritrea — which fought a border war from 1998 to 2000, restored ties in 2018 in a rapprochement that won Abiy the Nobel Peace Prize, then fell out again after Eritrea was frozen out of the 2022 Pretoria peace deal — have now severed diplomatic relations entirely. Asmara reads Abiy's sea-access campaign as an existential threat; it fears Ethiopia will seize its Assab port by force. Addis Ababa, in turn, accuses Eritrea of arming Tigrayan rebels and Egypt of joining in — reciprocal diplomatic expulsions with Cairo followed last week. Analysts warn the tangle could ignite a multi-nation war. Afar's governor told Al Jazeera that Eritrean forces are fighting inside Ethiopia and moving to cut the road to Djibouti — the corridor through which roughly 95 percent of Ethiopia's imports pass. At the strait's southern mouth, that would put a war within sight of the Bab el-Mandeb shipping lane. Late Wednesday, explosions were heard in Addis Ababa itself in what an opposition-linked source described as drone strikes on military headquarters — a claim that could not be independently verified, but which, if true, would mark the first rebel drone attack on the capital, hundreds of kilometres from the front. Abiy's office said on X that Ethiopia has "no intention" of war with Eritrea and wants the sea question settled through dialogue — a line few in Asmara or Cairo appear to believe after Eritrea's nationwide military mobilisation and Ethiopian troop movements toward the border. The African Union Commission has urged all three countries to exercise "maximum restraint." The human cost is already mounting. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the 2020–2022 Tigray war; hundreds of thousands of displaced people never returned home. With fighting now spreading across Tigray, Amhara and Afar — and Sudan's own civil war displacing some 14 million next door — the region faces what aid workers fear could be a second, wider catastrophe. A Nobel laureate's peace is unravelling into the very war his prize was meant to bury.