Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Civil war resurges in Ethiopia’s Tigray region after four years, African countries seek greater sovereignty and representation at the United Nations, and Chad accepts a surge of Sudanese refugees fleeing war.

Civil War Returns

A long-predicted resurgence of Ethiopia’s civil war began last week when the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) seized three airports in the country’s northern Tigray region. The rebels also launched attacks in the neighboring Afar and Amhara regions days after forming an alliance with six other armed groups to oust Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s federal government.

“We are in the situation of full-blown war now,” TPLF Vice President Amanuel Assefa said shortly after fighting broke out.

On Monday, pro-government forces claimed to have captured Alamata, a strategic town about 75 miles south of Tigray’s capital of Mekelle. The conflict has escalated just as a powerful El Niño threatens crop production in Ethiopia, risking a broader humanitarian crisis.

There has been rising friction between the TPLF and the federal government since the end of the two-year Tigray war in 2022. That conflict, which killed an estimated 600,000 people, concluded with the Pretoria Agreement, whereby the TPLF agreed to disarmament and reintegration into Ethiopia’s political system.

Grievances over the treaty’s terms have since culminated in the collapse of the deal. Hard-line TPLF factions believed that it sidelined them, while TPLF officials who negotiated the deal secured roles in Tigray’s interim ruling administration appointed by Abiy. Tensions rose in May 2025, when Ethiopia’s electoral board banned the TPLF from the June 2026 national elections. This led the TPLF to reestablish its prewar legislative council this May, effectively ousting the interim government.

The latest wave of fighting initially began on Aug. 1, according to data from ACLED, when the two sides clashed in Shererina near Ethiopia’s border with Sudan following months of troop buildup. But it was not until last week that this turned into all-out warfare.

Security observers worry that the conflict could eventually draw in other actors in the Horn of Africa, especially Eritrea.

The TPLF and Isaias Afwerki, who has been Eritrea’s president since its independence from Ethiopia in 1993, were once allies while fighting against Ethiopia’s communist Derg government. But after Eritrea became independent and a TPLF-led government came to power in Ethiopia, the two countries fought a brutal border war followed by nearly 20 years of hostility.

In the last Tigray war, Eritrea fought alongside Ethiopian troops. Yet relations between Addis Ababa and Asmara have soured over the past four years, and the latter has now largely allied itself with the TPLF.

Although Eritrea supported Ethiopia’s government during the war, Asmara was dissatisfied after being excluded from talks on the Pretoria Agreement, which required Eritrean troops to withdraw from Tigray. (Eritrea has since failed to do so from contested border areas seized during the war.) Abiy’s pursuit of Red Sea access through Eritrea—which Addis Ababa lost when Asmara gained independence in 1993—has further compounded the rift between the two nations.

Analysts are particularly concerned about the regional consequences of the United States’ decision to lift sanctions on Eritrea’s ruling party and military earlier this month. (It also ended an arms embargo on Ethiopia at the same time.) Washington first imposed the sanctions in 2021 over Eritrea’s conduct in the Tigray war.

Eritrea’s port of Assab lies near the strategic Bab el-Mandeb Strait, and Washington’s sanctions decision comes as it hopes that Asmara can be part of an international alliance against Iranian-backed Houthi attacks on the Red Sea. However, it could also lead the TPLF, whose leaders are still under U.S. sanctions, to form ever-closer ties with Eritrea and open up a much larger proxy war.

“Far from closing a painful chapter, this decision [to lift sanctions] removes one of the few remaining checks on state-led violence, paving a direct path toward the next destructive war in the Horn of Africa,” a former member of the Commission of Inquiry on Tigray Genocide, Yemane Zeray Mesfin, wrote in the Addis Standard on Sept. 22.

Analysts also fear that Egypt and Sudan could be drawn into the conflict. Ethiopian military chief Birhanu Jula has already accused both countries of supporting the new alliance of armed groups, which includes the Oromo Liberation Army and Amhara Fano nationalists, saying that they could not launch successful offensives unless they were “pushed, supported, and supplied” from abroad.

However, there is currently no evidence for Birhanu’s claims, and Sudan and Egypt have denied supporting the rebel groups, with Sudan’s military calling the accusations “baseless.”

Egypt has its own dispute with Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which Cairo believes will reduce its water supply. It is also part of an alliance with Eritrea and Somalia that seeks to counter Ethiopia’s influence in the region.

Sudan’s armed forces, an ally of Egypt, have accused Ethiopia of supporting the United Arab Emirates in arming the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has been fighting for control of Sudan since civil war broke out in 2023.

Meanwhile, Ethiopia is planning to withdraw more than 3,000 troops from Somalia to bolster its domestic forces, Bloomberg reported. The withdrawal would create a security vacuum in areas where al-Shabab, an Islamist group increasingly working with Houthi rebels, is seeking to gain control.

These complicated geopolitical disputes with various overlapping alliances, coupled with fallout from the war in Iran that includes maritime instability in the Red Sea, make the escalation of war in Tigray a tinderbox for the entire Horn of Africa.

The Week Ahead

Wednesday, Sept. 30: Inflation data is released for Kenya and Uganda.

The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee holds a nomination hearing on William Flens as ambassador to Chad and Jessica Long as ambassador to Mauritania.

What We’re Watching

Africa at UNGA. At the recent U.N. General Assembly high-level debate, African countries used the opportunity to assert their sovereignty and push for greater representation.

Nigerien Prime Minister Ali Mahamane Lamine Zeine gave an address emphasizing his country’s control over its uranium stockpiles. “For more than half a century, Niger’s uranium has lit the cities of Europe, while our cities have remained in darkness. That injustice is now over,” he said, adding that its supplies would be sold on the international market on Niger’s own terms.

Meanwhile, Ghana and Nigeria used their speeches to reiterate Africa’s long-running push for permanent representation on the 15-member U.N. Security Council.

“The world of 2026 cannot remain captive to the distribution of power in 1945,” said Nigerian Vice President Kashim Shettima, who noted that Africa “cannot continue to fill the council’s agenda while remaining absent from its permanent membership.” Ghanaian President John Mahama echoed his sentiments, arguing that structural reform is “not a favor to Africa” but necessary for the “survival” of the U.N. itself.

Sudanese refugee surge. The number of Sudanese people fleeing to eastern Chad has “accelerated sharply,” according to the U.N. Refugee Agency. Around 400 people have been crossing into Chad per day, a twentyfold increase compared with previous months, driven by escalating drone attacks and drought.

More than 55,000 Sudanese refugees have fled to Chad this year alone. Meanwhile, Sudan’s military chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, has rejected U.S. pressure to accept a three-month cease-fire with the RSF proposed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s Africa advisor, Massad Boulos.

Morocco’s prime minister. As last week’s newsletter forecasted, Morocco’s Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM) has won the country’s parliamentary election, securing 97 of 395 seats in the House of Representatives, according to final results released on Thursday.

King Mohammed VI, who appoints a prime minister from the party that secures the most votes, chose Fatima Ezzahra El Mansouri, the housing minister and mayor of Marrakech, who has now become Morocco’s first female prime minister.

The National Rally of Independents, which won the 2021 elections, secured just 66 seats after being heavily impacted by last year’s deadly Generation Z-led protests against the country’s failing healthcare system and high unemployment. As usual in Moroccan elections, no party won the 198 seats needed for an outright majority; like its predecessor, PAM will form a coalition government.

Egyptian trial. An Egyptian court has upheld the sentencing of a young former doctor who alleged on Facebook in June that she witnessed systemic physical and sexual abuse of pregnant patients at a public hospital in Alexandria where she trained in 2020.

Omnia Sweidan was handed a six-month suspended prison sentence and a $400 fine in July for “spreading false news” in her social media post, where she also called for a review of safety protocols. Human Rights Watch has criticized her prosecution as an attempt by Egyptian authorities to silence whistleblowers.

This Week in Culture

Nearly 4 million records documenting the lives of enslaved African and Caribbean people across 20 former British colonies, including the United States, Mauritius, and South Africa, were made accessible for free last week by online genealogy platform Ancestry in partnership with researchers at University College London.

The new online collection follows the publication earlier this month of a Register of British Slave Traders. The free service lists about 13,000 individuals and associated companies who invested in the trafficking and enslavement of more than 3 million African men, women, and children. Investors came from all backgrounds, from plumbers to politicians, according to researchers at King’s College London.

FP’s Most Read This Week

• What Machiavelli Would Say About Trump by Stephen M. Walt
• Saudi Arabia Bribed the Wrong People by Nicholas Grossman
• The Twilight of the Francis Fukuyama Era by Jeremi Suri

What We’re Reading

False persecution. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced targeted visa restrictions against unspecified South African individuals who enact or enable discrimination against white Afrikaners.

In New Lines Magazine, Nick Alexandra explores how the Trump administration adopted unsubstantiated claims of a “white genocide” against Afrikaners, transforming bilateral relations.

Oil monopoly. The Dangote Refinery—owned by Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote—has ended Nigeria’s dependence on imported fuel but has also created a massive monopoly over Nigeria’s oil sector that effectively suppresses local wages and resists state oversight and regulatory control, Ayoola Babalola argues in Africa Is a Country.

“Nigeria’s development contradictions will not be resolved by one man’s industrial vision, however genuinely impressive,” Babalola writes.