Fighting has erupted across northern Ethiopia after the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) launched a major offensive last week, shattering nearly four years of fragile calm since the 2022 Pretoria peace deal and raising fears that Africa’s second-most-populous nation could be sliding back into full-scale civil war.

The clashes, which began around September 23, have spread across the Tigray, Amhara and Afar regions. Ethiopian federal forces say they retook the strategic town of Alamata, roughly 120 kilometers south of the Tigrayan capital Mekelle, while Tigrayan fighters have seized airports and pushed into the Afar region toward supply routes leading to Djibouti. Ethiopia’s military says its forces killed around 270 Tigrayan fighters and wounded more than 200 in fighting around North Wollo, while hospitals in Korem and Alamata reported patient numbers surging from 180 to more than 420 within 48 hours.

Addisalem Balema, a member of the TPLF’s Central Committee, confirmed the offensive was underway. “They’ve begun an offensive around southern Tigray. They’re carrying out strikes in many places,” he said, describing a rapidly widening front. He said the group had joined forces with other factions facing threats from Addis Ababa: “We’ve been forced to ally with other movements who also face an existential threat from the government.” Balema added that the coalition has a clear political goal: “We have a political charter, and our aim is to remove the personalist regime of Abiy Ahmed, establish a transitional government.”

That coalition, calling itself the Ethiopian Peoples’ Forces Alliance for Survival, was formed just days before the fighting escalated and groups together seven armed factions, including the Oromo Liberation Army and the Amhara Fano movement alongside the TPLF. Ethiopia’s army chief, Field Marshal Birhanu Jula, accused Egypt and Sudan of backing the alliance in a bid to oust Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, saying the groups could not sustain their campaign unless they were “pushed, supported and supplied” from abroad. He also alleged Eritrea was acting as a conduit for foreign support, though he offered no evidence, and Cairo and Khartoum had not publicly responded as of Sunday.

Not everyone in Tigray’s political establishment is alarmed. Getachew Reda, a former senior TPLF figure who now advises Prime Minister Abiy, played down the offensive’s prospects, saying, “I don’t lose sleep over that. Now it goes back to the drawing board.” Government spokeswoman Billene Seyoum, cited by Reuters, said the alliance’s members had been coordinating with financial backing from Asmara, Eritrea’s capital.

The renewed violence comes on top of a war from 2020 to 2022 that killed an estimated 600,000 people and displaced roughly 750,000 within Tigray alone, a toll the United Nations has called one of the deadliest conflicts of the 21st century. UN human rights chief Volker Türk has urged an immediate ceasefire, warning that Ethiopia risks tipping back into full-scale war, while the regional bloc IGAD has also called for restraint from all sides.

For civilians across northern Ethiopia, the immediate concern is more basic than the political maneuvering in Addis Ababa or Mekelle: overwhelmed hospitals, disrupted phone and internet networks, and families once again forced to flee. Whether the Pretoria Agreement can be salvaged, or whether the country is headed toward a repeat of its bloodiest recent chapter, may become clearer in the coming days as both sides test how far the offensive will go.

Sources: Al Jazeera, Africanews, Euronews, CNN.