Tigray's Warring Sides Are Shelling Displaced Families and Forcing Recruits

Ask a child in Abi Adi what a classroom is for. She will tell you it is where you learn to read and dream about the future. Today, in a former high school in Ethiopia's Tigray region, classrooms are where families sleep on mattresses, cook on borrowed stoves, and wait. They have been waiting for years. Some have children who were born there and have never seen their home village.

We are told the war in northern Ethiopia ended in November 2022. The families in those classrooms know better. Fighting has returned, and the people who pay for it are the same people who always do: the mothers, the children, the old, and the sick.

This is not a story about faraway strangers. This is about Africans, our own people, living in the shadow of a peace deal that everyone signed and no one has honored.

Begin with the Pretoria agreement, signed in November 2022 after two years of war that the African Union estimated had killed around 500,000 people through violence, famine, and the collapse of healthcare. Millions were displaced. The deal was supposed to stop the killing. Instead, it left the hardest questions unanswered. The most important of them was Western Tigray, where Amhara forces took control during the war and where displaced Tigrayans like Tewolde, who fled Setit Humera, still cannot go home.

Those unanswered questions did not stay quiet. Disputes over the withdrawal of non-federal forces, over disarmament, and over who governs Tigray poisoned relations between the federal government and the regional authorities. Divisions within Tigray deepened. By September 2026, the region was at war with itself again.

On September 22, fighting escalated to its most serious level since the 2020 to 2022 war. The Tigray People's Liberation Front launched an offensive the following day and seized Mekelle's airport. Both sides blame each other for starting it. Federal forces and allied fighters counterattacked and retook Mekelle on October 4, but the fighting did not stop. It spread across the region, and the civilians were the ones who could not escape it.

Human Rights Watch and other organizations wrote to the UN Human Rights Council on October 8 with a warning that should keep every African leader awake. They documented drone strikes, mortar fire, and artillery attacks in populated areas, and near camps for internally displaced people. Think about what that means. The shells are not landing on abstract military targets. They are landing near the classrooms, the water points, and the clinics where families are already running out of everything.

On September 25, UN human rights chief Volker Türk condemned forced recruitment by the TPLF, including of children and of previously demobilized fighters. He also raised concerns about arbitrary conscription by government forces. Read that again. Children are being taken to fight. Men who had already laid down their weapons are being pulled back in. Whoever holds the gun in this conflict is treating young Tigrayans as ammunition.

Now look at what this does to the families in Abi Adi. Selass is a mother of two from Humera. She told reporters that when she takes her children to the clinic, the medicines they need are not there. She is told to buy them from private pharmacies. She has no money. Doctors at Ayder Referral Hospital in Mekelle, speaking anonymously because they are not authorized to talk to the press, say patients are being sent out to buy their own prescriptions. Many cannot afford them. A treatable illness becomes a funeral because a pharmacy costs too much.

Here is the hard truth we must say out loud. A war does not end when the guns go quiet on paper. It ends when the people can eat, heal, school their children, and go home. None of those things are happening in Tigray right now.

We have seen this pattern across our continent before. A peace agreement is signed in a hotel and celebrated in the capital. Then the disputes it ignored come back, and the civilians are left to pay the debt. Western Tigray is the test. If an agreement cannot return displaced families to their own homes, it is not a peace agreement. It is a ceasefire waiting to break.

Yet there is a glimmer, and it comes from the former fighters themselves. On November 5, Ethiopia's National Rehabilitation Commission reported that about 5,500 former Tigrayan fighters were in a rehabilitation program in Mekelle, learning vocational skills and preparing for civilian work. Alem, 28, wants to get married and have children, like any other woman. Atsbeha gave up his university studies in 2020 to fight, and now he wants to finish the life he paused. These are not monsters. They are young Africans who want the same ordinary future you want.

That future is possible, but only if the security exists to protect it. Disarmament cannot succeed when recruiters still roam the streets. Rehabilitation cannot succeed when shells fall on the training grounds and the families of the trainees. The program is a promise, and promises need protection.

Africa has shown what a better path looks like. Botswana built decades of stability on accountable institutions, a predictable rule of law, and a commitment to transparent public finance. Mauritius turned itself into a functioning, prosperous democracy through open markets and strong courts. Senegal, in 2024, proved that an incumbent can lose an election and hand power over peacefully, because its institutions were stronger than any individual's ambition. None of these countries are perfect. All of them understood that a state earns the loyalty of its people by protecting their lives and their property.

So here is what must happen, and it must happen now.

The African Union, which brokered the Pretoria agreement, must convene its Peace and Security Council on Tigray and put the agreement's unresolved territorial and disarmament questions back on the table with a timetable and enforcement mechanisms. Monitors must be deployed with real access to camps, hospitals, and frontlines. The UN Human Rights Council should launch an independent investigation into drone strikes, artillery attacks near displacement sites, and forced recruitment, and it should name every party responsible. Impunity is the oxygen of this war. Starve it.

The federal government and the Tigrayan authorities must immediately stop any use of force against civilians, open humanitarian corridors, and guarantee the safe and voluntary return of displaced families, including to Western Tigray. Essential medicines must reach public hospitals without being rationed through private pharmacies that families cannot afford. The six-month caretaker administration must produce credible, transparent preparations for elections, not another round of appointments made in backrooms.

And we, the citizens, must demand more than silence. Ethiopian civil society, journalists, lawyers, and religious leaders must keep documenting every atrocity and refuse to let any faction hide behind the other. The diaspora must pressure its own governments and donors to tie aid and diplomatic support to measurable steps toward civilian protection. Regional business leaders should understand that no investment survives a war zone, and they should push for an end to the fighting as fiercely as they would push for a new port or a new road.

Go back to that classroom in Abi Adi. A child is sleeping where she should be learning. Her mother is counting the coins she does not have for medicine. Her father is waiting for a call to go home that may never come. Selass said it better than any policy paper ever could: "We survived one war and lost almost everything. We don't want our children to experience another one. All we want is to return home and live normally."

That is not a radical demand. It is the most basic promise a government can make to its people. Every Ethiopian leader, every faction commander, and every African institution that claims to care about this continent should be asked a simple question: when will the children of Tigray be allowed to go home?

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA