Allt fler flyr till Sudan: ”Måste agera snabbt”

The Tigray conflict is an ongoing armed conflict that began in November 2020 in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia, between the Tigray Region special forces (led by Tigray People's Liberation Front) and the Ethiopian National Defense Force, in alliance with the Amhara Region special forces. Rocket attacks have spilled over into the neighboring Amhara Region and the neighboring country of Eritrea. The conflict stemmed from the attempt of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to distance the country's politics from ethnic federalism, a power-sharing system based on ethnicity that gives regional control to individual ethnic groups that had been marginalized before, yet one that had been advantageous to the Tigray minority on the federal level. By merging the ethnic and region-based parties of the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, that had governed Ethiopia for 30 years, into a nationwide Prosperity Party, Abiy threatened the power of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), a military and politically powerful entity inside Ethiopia, representing, by ethnicity, about 6% of the population. The TPLF refused to join the new party, creating tensions between the two, that were escalated further when a disputed election in Tigray was held in September — in defiance of the federal government, which had postponed the national election due to COVID-19. The immediate cause of the conflict was an alleged attack on the fourth of the month by the organised Tigray forces on the headquarters of the Northern Command of the Ethiopian National Defense Force (ENDF), the defense wing of the Government of Ethiopia.