Ethiopians said Friday they slept in their cars in hours-long queues
for petrol as shortages caused by the Middle East war began to take
their toll.
The effective blockade of the Strait of Hormuz by Iran, through which
a fifth of the world's oil and gas normally passes, has caused
shortages in many countries.
Ethiopia, a nation in the Horn of Africa with around 130 million
people, is particularly vulnerable as it imports all its petrol,
primarily from the Gulf.
Drivers waiting in an enormous queue at a petrol station in the
Summit 72 area of the capital Addis Ababa said the wait was "more
than a day".
"I've been in the queue since last night at around 7:00 pm. I
spent the night in my car without food," said taxi driver Awoke
Derese on Friday morning.
"I have already lost two days of business. I pay 2,000 birr
($13) per day in rental fees for the car. My family is at risk
because I can't support them," he told AFP.
Shortages started to be noticed earlier this week. At another petrol
station in the Summit 72 area, a worker said they had been closed for
four days and did not know when fresh deliveries would arrive.
Bakery worker Natenahel Gedamu said his business needed fuel for
generators and baking machines.
"We ran out yesterday and have not produced anything since,"
he said.
"I'm worried the station may run out of fuel before I reach it.
I've already tried several stations -- this feels like my last
chance," added Natenahel, who had been queueing since 4:00 pm
the previous day.
Land-locked Ethiopia relies on the port of Djibouti for its imports.
It has only 13 strategic reserve depots, according to the state-owned
Ethiopian Petroleum Supply Enterprise, which did not respond to
requests for comment from AFP.
More than 40 percent of Ethiopians live below the poverty line,
according to the World Bank, and fear the inflation -- already
running around 10 percent -- from rising fuel prices.
Addis Ababa has been undergoing a major reconstruction drive in
recent years, but some building projects were on hold this week, AFP
journalists saw.
This included the "corridor" project to widen and renovate
its streets and work in the Bole district near the airport.
⚡ Dramatic lightning
strikes illuminated Dubai's skyline on March 26, 2026, as severe
thunderstorms lashed the UAE. The BurjKhalifa was hit amid heavy rain
and thunder, part of a rare storm system forecast to deliver up to a
year's worth of precipitation, raising flood risks across the region.
Authorities urge caution.
❖[Psalms
18:7-19]❖
“Then the
earth reeled and rocked; the foundations also of the mountains
trembled and quaked, because he was angry. Smoke went up from his
nostrils, and devouring fire from his mouth; glowing coals flamed
forth from him. He bowed the heavens and came down; thick darkness
was under his feet. He rode on a cherub and flew; he came swiftly on
the wings of the wind. He made darkness his covering, his canopy
around him, thick clouds dark with water. Out of the brightness
before him hailstones and coals of fire broke through his clouds. The
LORD also thundered in the heavens, and the Most High uttered his
voice, hailstones and coals of fire. And he sent out his arrows and
scattered them; he flashed forth lightnings and routed them. Then the
channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were
laid bare at your rebuke, O LORD, at the blast of the breath of your
nostrils. He sent from on high, he took me; he drew me out of many
waters. He rescued me from my strong enemy and from those who hated
me, for they were too mighty for me. They confronted me in the day of
my calamity, but the LORD was my support. He brought me out into a
broad place; he rescued me, because he delighted in me.”
❖[Psalm
78:48 ]❖
“He gave over
their cattle to the hail and their flocks to thunderbolts.”
When 600,000
people die in a war, the question of who supplied the weapons is a
question of criminal responsibility. It does not disappear because no
tribunal has been convened to answer it. It does not disappear
because the supplier government has never been named in a UN Security
Council resolution, has never faced sanctions, and has in fact been
elevated to Major Defense Partner status by the same Washington that
commissioned a genocide report and then locked it in a drawer. The
question sits in the flight records, the cargo manifests, the
satellite imagery, and the procurement trails of every munition that
hit a Tigrayan town between November 2020 and November 2022. The
answer points to Abu Dhabi.
The Assab
airbase sits on Eritrea’s southern Red Sea coast, roughly 900
kilometres from the Tigrayan capital of Mekelle. The UAE did not
build it for Ethiopia. Construction began in 2015, the year the
Saudi-Gulf coalition launched its campaign in Yemen, and Eritrea
leased it to Abu Dhabi as a forward operating position across the Bab
el-Mandeb, the strait through which approximately 10 percent of
global oil trade passes. By 2018, satellite imagery obtained by
Bellingcat and analysed by the Dutch disarmament organization PAX
showed three drone hangars on the northern tarmac,
Chinese-manufactured Wing Loong II unmanned combat aerial vehicles
parked in daylight, and the kind of infrastructure expansion covering
hardened shelters, extended logistics space, and naval berthing that
signals not a staging visit but a permanent operational commitment.
The United Nations Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea condemned
the arrangement as a violation of the arms embargo on both Horn
states. Abu Dhabi noted no objection, offered no explanation, and
expanded the base anyway.
The Wing Loong
II carries a 20-metre wingspan and is capable of dropping bombs or
shooting missiles. The UAE had used them in combat over Yemen. It had
already lost at least 12 to ground fire, Houthi surface-to-air
missiles, and Turkish air defence systems over Libya, where it had
deployed them in support of General Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan
National Army. When the Ethiopian government launched military
operations against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front on November
3, 2020, Assab had been operational for five years: a proven platform
for a war-tested drone fleet, positioned at the exact moment Addis
Ababa needed one.
The base at
Assab was the hardware of a relationship built in the two years
before the war began.
What The $3
Billion Purchased
Mohammed bin
Zayed Al Nahyan flew to Addis Ababa in June 2018. Abiy Ahmed had been
prime minister for two months. MBZ arrived at the National Palace,
signed seven memoranda of understanding covering economy, culture,
tourism, and consular affairs, and deposited one billion dollars
directly into the National Bank of Ethiopia the same week. The full
pledge was three billion, the largest single injection into
Ethiopia’s economy in its post-Cold War history. One billion went
to the central bank to address a foreign currency crisis so severe
the country held less than one month’s worth of import reserves.
The remaining two billion was structured as foreign direct investment
from Emirati private sector actors, directed toward tourism, real
estate, renewable energy, and agriculture, with UAE investors
receiving rights to large-scale construction and real estate
development in Addis Ababa.
Abiy had
travelled to both Abu Dhabi and Riyadh within weeks of taking office.
The sequence matters: a new prime minister, consolidating power
against internal opponents within a deeply fractured federal system,
sought external backing before the political architecture of his
government was fully assembled. The money arrived within two months
of him taking office.
What the $3
billion bought was not friendship. It bought structural alignment.
Emirati businesses moved into Ethiopia’s priority sectors. UAE
investors acquired land in Addis Ababa partly in exchange for the
liquidity injection, according to the Chatham House analysis of the
2023 conflict. UAE food security concerns, which drive much of Abu
Dhabi’s Africa strategy, were served by agricultural investment
rights across a country of 126 million people with some of Africa’s
most productive farmland. In 2023, the UAE became the fourth most
prominent destination for Ethiopian exports. In July 2024, both
countries signed a bilateral currency swap agreement worth up to $817
million. The financial architecture of the relationship deepened
every year between 2018 and the outbreak of war, then accelerated
after it.
The Peace
That Enabled The War
The same year
MBZ arrived in Addis Ababa with the $3 billion, the UAE brokered the
peace deal between Ethiopia and Eritrea, ending a 20-year military
standoff that had frozen Eritrea inside a permanent war economy and
left the Ethiopia-Eritrea border effectively sealed since the
1998-2000 war. The rapprochement was managed by Gulf intermediaries,
financed by Gulf capital, and announced to widespread international
acclaim. Abiy received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for signing it.
The deal
created a specific strategic outcome that no commentary in the Nobel
committee’s citation examined. It positioned Eritrean President
Isaias Afwerki within an Emirati-managed relationship. It ended the
international isolation that had made Eritrea an unreliable partner
for any external actor. And it returned Eritrea to a posture in which
its Defence Forces could move southward into Tigray without
triggering the immediate international condemnation that would have
greeted a hostile Eritrean cross-border operation under the prior
state of affairs. Within two years, Eritrean forces were fighting
alongside Ethiopian federal troops and Amhara militias in one of the
deadliest conflicts of the 21st century. The peace brokered by Abu
Dhabi was the prerequisite for the coalition that waged the war.
When Abu Dhabi
says it promotes stability in the Horn of Africa, it means this: it
promotes the stability of governments it has invested in, through the
military suppression of political threats to those governments, using
the diplomatic architecture it has built to make the suppression
possible. The Nobel Prize speech in Oslo is part of this
architecture.
The
International Crisis Group, in Briefing 210 published in February
2026, assessed that the risk of a new war involving Ethiopia,
Eritrea, and Tigray remains high three years after the Pretoria
ceasefire. The brief documents how the wartime coalition between
Addis Ababa and Asmara has fully collapsed, with Eritrea now backing
TPLF factions and supporting proxy forces against the Ethiopian
federal government, while Abiy's publicly stated drive to seize
Eritrean coastal territory at Assab has brought the two countries to
what Crisis Group calls a state of open military preparation. The
same Sudan fault line runs through the analysis: Ethiopia is aligned
with the UAE-backed RSF, Eritrea with the Sudanese army and Egypt,
and the TPLF with the army's side as well, meaning every flashpoint
in the Horn now carries the risk of pulling in external powers
already at war with each other one country over. Crisis Group warns
that a slide toward hostilities "would be easy to start but much
more difficult to stop."
The Air
Bridge And What Flew Across It
On November 15,
2020, twelve days into the fighting, TPLF leader Getachew Reda posted
a direct accusation: UAE drones based at Assab were supporting
Ethiopian and Eritrean forces against Tigray. Tigrayan forces had
already fired rockets at Asmara airport, citing it as a base for
attacks on their territory. PAX researcher Wim Zwijnenburg confirmed
Wing Loong IIs at Assab but said he could find no direct evidence
those specific aircraft had flown combat missions over Tigray, a
distinction between the presence of the weapon and the documented use
of it in a specific theater, one that changed over the following
year.
What the
subsequent 12 months established was considerably less ambiguous. The
investigative site Oryx drew on an aircraft mechanic working at Harar
Meda air base near Addis Ababa to document in December 2021 that the
UAE had deployed at least six Wing Loong I UCAVs directly into
Ethiopia, not from Eritrea but inside the country. The delivery
arrived through a cargo aircraft from Chengdu, where Chengdu Aircraft
Industry manufactures the Wing Loong I, landing at Harar Meda in
September 2021. The drones were moved immediately into a hangar after
landing, in what Oryx described as a deliberate concealment effort.
An Il-76 freighter’s flight path from Chengdu, logged by
open-source tracking, had already made the delivery visible.
Between August
and September 2021 alone, tracking data showed more than 50 cargo
flights from the UAE to Ethiopia in 53 days. The aircraft were Il-76
freighters registered in Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan but operated by Fly
Sky Airlines, a UAE-based carrier. Forty-five of those flights
originated in the Emirates. The December 2021 bombing of Alamata, a
Tigrayan town, was traced by Omna Tigray researchers to Chinese-made
munitions sourced through UAE procurement. TPLF chairman Debretsion
Gebremichael wrote formally to UN Secretary-General António Guterres
that month, naming the UAE, Iran, and Turkey as weapons suppliers to
the Ethiopian government.
US Special
Envoy Jeffrey Feltman said in October 2021 that Ethiopia was running
a bombing campaign “using drones from questionable sources,
including reportedly from US adversaries.” He named no states
directly. The TPLF named them. Abu Dhabi named nothing.
What the drones
did in the field was described with precision by Alex de Waal of the
World Peace Foundation. Writing in Responsible Statecraft in December
2021, he assessed that the Emirati Wing Loongs had “effectively
disarmed” Tigray, targeting artillery positions and weapons depots.
At the peak of the Tigrayan advance toward Addis Ababa in mid-2021,
when the federal government appeared genuinely at risk of collapse,
the cargo flights from the UAE were scaled up. The Chatham House
assessment published in 2023 confirmed what the timeline implies: UAE
material support was calibrated to the war’s turning points. When
the balance shifted decisively against Abiy, Abu Dhabi delivered.
Under
international humanitarian law, supplying weapons to a party engaged
in documented war crimes when the supplier knows or should know those
weapons will be used in such crimes constitutes complicity in those
crimes. The knowledge condition was met. The UN, the US Special
Envoy, Amnesty International, and the OHCHR-Ethiopia joint commission
had all documented the conduct of Ethiopian federal forces and their
Eritrean allies by the time the second air bridge opened in August
2021. The cargo flights kept coming.
The Body
That Abu Dhabi Built Inside The State
Before the
drones flew and before the air bridge opened, the UAE had already
embedded itself inside the Ethiopian state at the level that matters
most in any coup-era African political system: the force that guards
the leader.
The Republican
Guard was established in summer 2018, following a hand grenade
explosion at a rally in Addis Ababa on June 23 of that year that
killed two people and came within close range of Abiy. The unit was
stood up within months of the $3 billion pledge. According to Horn
Review’s 2025 analysis and the SWP Berlin policy brief of the same
year, the UAE trained the Republican Guard, the elite praetorian unit
reporting directly to the Office of the Prime Minister, structurally
insulated from the standard Ethiopian National Defense Force chain of
command. The Guard’s dual reporting line, formalised in Council of
Ministers Regulation No. 426/2018, made it operationally accountable
to Abiy personally. The UAE trained the unit that protects him.
In January
2025, UAE engagement went further: Dubai Police and UAE Ministry of
Interior experts trained the Ethiopian Federal Police in cybercrime
investigation, VIP security, and counterterrorism. What began as a
central bank deposit in 2018 had become a comprehensive security
partnership, with Abu Dhabi’s personnel embedded in the
institutions that would need to survive any political crisis facing
Abiy’s government: the elite personal guard, the police force, and
through arms supplies, the regular military.
This is not
unusual in the UAE’s Africa operations. It is the template. In
Libya, Abu Dhabi created partnerships with the local West Coast
Forces and the Giants Brigades before Haftar’s campaign. In Sudan,
it maintained financial and intelligence ties to RSF commanders years
before the 2023 war. The pattern is to build relationships inside
security structures before the crisis arrives, so that when force is
needed, the instruments are already in place.
Djibouti,
Berbera, and the port logic behind the patronage
The
relationship between the UAE and Ethiopia cannot be read as bilateral
without reading what happened in Djibouti first.
In 2006, DP
World, fully owned by the Dubai government, signed a 50-year
concession to operate the Doraleh Container Terminal, at the time the
most important container port in the Horn of Africa and the maritime
gateway through which approximately 90 percent of Ethiopia’s trade
passed. By 2015, Djibouti’s government had grown closer to China,
which was negotiating its own infrastructure stakes across the Belt
and Road corridor. The UAE attempted, in the same period, to use DP
World’s infrastructure at Doraleh as a military launchpad for Yemen
operations. Djibouti refused. Relations deteriorated. In February
2018, the same year MBZ flew to Addis Ababa, Djibouti’s President
Ismaïl Omar Guelleh terminated the DP World concession by
presidential decree and seized all assets at the terminal. China
Merchants Port Holdings took over. Abu Dhabi lost its primary
foothold at the mouth of the Red Sea. DP World’s chairman, Sultan
Ahmed bin Sulayem, reportedly said Abu Dhabi would “send Djibouti
back” to pre-investment conditions. Multiple arbitration rulings in
London and Hong Kong subsequently found Djibouti’s action unlawful,
ordering hundreds of millions in compensation. Djibouti ignored every
ruling.
The Djibouti
loss accelerated the Berbera strategy that was already forming. In
2016, DP World had signed an agreement with Somaliland to develop and
operate the Port of Berbera in exchange for a 30-year concession,
financed by a $400 million Emirati investment. A tripartite deal
followed in March 2018, giving DP World 51 percent of the Berbera
Port project, Somaliland 30 percent, and Ethiopia 19 percent, in
exchange for Ethiopia’s commitment to invest $80 million in a
260-kilometre road connecting Berbera to the Ethiopian border and to
route 30 percent of its trade through the port. The Somali federal
government voted to nullify DP World’s Somaliland agreement.
Ethiopia never built the road. In June 2022, Somaliland declared
Ethiopia’s stake forfeited.
But the
strategic logic had been established. The UAE positioned itself as
the guarantor of Ethiopia’s alternative maritime access at the
exact moment it lost its primary Horn of Africa port foothold.
Berbera, managed by DP World, became Ethiopia’s only viable
alternative to Djibouti. That dependency is an instrument of
influence, not a development project. By August 2023, nine months
after the Tigray war ended, Ethiopia signed a bilateral maritime
agreement with Abu Dhabi. The arms that kept Abiy’s government
alive had been exchanged, in the medium term, for the diplomatic
ratification of an Emirati commercial position that Djibouti’s
assertion of sovereignty had nearly destroyed.
Abiy’s
January 2024 memorandum of understanding with Somaliland, offering
recognition of Somaliland’s independence in exchange for a 50-year
naval base lease at Berbera, was framed in international commentary
as an Ethiopian foreign policy gamble. It was also a confirmation of
the UAE’s strategic map. Several analysts assessed that Abu Dhabi
quietly supported the deal while publicly maintaining neutrality.
Ethiopia’s Red Sea access runs through a port that DP World
manages, and the MoU deepens that dependency at the same time it
creates a new flashpoint with Somalia, Egypt, and Eritrea, all of
which oppose it and all of which are aligned with UAE rivals in the
current regional configuration.
The Same
Aircraft, A Different War
The Fly Sky
Airlines Il-76 freighters that ran the arms bridge from the UAE to
Ethiopia in 2021 had a documented prior history: the same carrier had
previously been used to deliver equipment to Libya. This is not a
footnote. It is the operating model made visible.
Since
2014, the UAE had backed Haftar’s Libyan National Army with drones,weapons, special forces, funding,
and diplomatic cover through France’s Elysée. Wing Loong UCAVs
operated by the UAE struck targets in Libya for years. In January
2020, one killed 26 unarmed cadets at a military academy in Tripoli,
a strike Amnesty International cited when calling on the US to halt
drone sales to Abu Dhabi. The UAE did not acknowledge the strike. It
continued operations.
What connected
Libya to Ethiopia was not simply hardware. In November 2020, Foreign
Policy reported that the US Department of Defense had assessed that
the UAE was possibly funding Wagner Group mercenaries in Libya in
support of Haftar’s ground campaign. The Atlantic Council’s Libya
investigation described Abu Dhabi as “the conduit for Russian
paramilitary forces’ on-the-ground engagement” in Tripoli’s
suburbs. The model: UAE air cover, Wagner ground operations, local
strongman provides political legitimacy, Abu Dhabi denies everything.
The Emirati weapons that went to Haftar in eastern Libya were in some
cases later diverted via Wagner’s operational networks into Sudan’s
conflict, where they reached the Rapid Support Forces. The chain runs
from an Emirati cargo flight, through a Wagner-controlled Central
African Republic corridor, to Darfur.
SourceMaterial’s
October 2024 investigation documented this route in detail: UAE
weapons routed via Africa Corps, Wagner’s renamed successor,
through Bangui, to Birao near the Sudanese border, and into RSF
hands. Local CAR militia spokesman Abdu Buda of the Coalition of
Patriots for Change stated they had intercepted shipments “coming
from the UAE through CAR since the start of the war in Sudan,”
transported by Wagner mercenaries. In Sudan, Dubai was already the
primary destination for RSF gold smuggling before the 2023 war began.
A UN panel found credible evidence of UAE weapons deliveries to the
RSF, including multiple shipments per week through a UAE-funded field
hospital in Amdjarass, Chad. Gold from Darfur’s mines, controlled
by RSF fighters, flowed into UAE markets, and RSF commander Hemedti’s
gold networks, built with Wagner’s protection from 2017 onward,
made Dubai the clearinghouse for a war economy funding genocide in
Sudan.
What The
Abraham Accords Ratified
The Abraham
Accords were signed on September 15, 2020. The Tigray war began on
November 3, 2020. The proximity does not mean MBZ ordered the drones
deployed because the Accords had been signed six weeks earlier. It
means something more structural: the Accords, and the decade of
foreign policy construction that produced them, established the
political environment in which everything that followed was possible
without serious consequence.
The Accords
formalized the UAE’s position as Washington’s most valued Arab
partner: willing to normalize with Israel, aligned against Iran and
the Muslim Brotherhood, capable of managing Gulf-adjacent conflicts,
and able to extend US strategic reach without requiring American
soldiers. The Congressional Research Service, in its 2025 review of
US-UAE policy, described Abu Dhabi’s regional posture since 2014 as
organized around keeping secular authoritarian Arab leaders in power,
suppressing Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations, countering Iran,
and projecting force in ways that complement US objectives. The same
document noted that UAE interventions in Sudan, Yemen, Libya,
Ethiopia, and Somalia have attracted criticism from some
international observers, while the bilateral relationship has
continued to deepen.
The first Trump
administration sealed the Accords and produced large Gulf arms deals.
The Biden administration expressed concern about UAE activities in
Ethiopia’s Tigray conflict, and under Biden pressure the UAE
reportedly pulled back from Assab in early 2021. Emirati drones
“disappeared from Tigrayan skies” at that moment, Responsible
Statecraft reported. They reappeared when the TDF threatened Addis
Ababa. The State Department commissioned a genocide assessment of the
Tigray war, found sufficient grounds to prepare one, then declined to
publish it on the grounds that publication would “complicate the
search for a negotiated solution.” The report was suppressed. The
drones flew. The Biden administration, which had spent months calling
for accountability, granted the UAE its Major Defense Partner
designation in September 2024, a status previously held only by
India, now extended to a state whose weapons had been documented on
cargo flights into an active genocide.
Chatham House’s
2023 analysis of the Abraham Accords made the logic explicit: MBZ had
concluded that US security guarantees were more conditional than
before the Arab Spring, and that this demanded UAE action in regional
theaters without waiting for Washington’s consent. “States
realize they cannot wait for the US to decide everything, and they
have to be more assertive themselves,” one interlocutor told
Chatham House researchers. The Accords purchased, through
normalization with Israel, a degree of operating latitude for actions
that a decade earlier would have attracted serious Western pressure.
Abu Dhabi deployed force in Ethiopia precisely as it had deployed
force in Libya and Yemen: with the knowledge that Washington would
complain and then ratify.
The Doctrine
Across Yemen,
Libya, Sudan, and Ethiopia, the operational method is consistent
enough to constitute a doctrine. Identify a government or faction
that serves UAE strategic interests: anti-Iran, anti-Muslim
Brotherhood, willing to accept Emirati financial penetration and port
access. Deliver liquidity first, to establish dependency. Broker a
diplomatic arrangement that positions Emirati-allied actors as the
dominant local force. Train the security units closest to the leader.
When a military crisis threatens the government, deliver weapons
through deniable cargo carriers. Where possible, use Wagner or Africa
Corps as a ground layer to avoid direct Emirati operational exposure.
Secure commercial concessions before the fighting ends, so that the
government’s survival is a financial interest rather than a
political choice.
The
Transnational Institute frames this pattern through the concept of
sub-imperialism: a state that is itself dependent on a dominant
global power, in the UAE’s case the United States, while acting as
an imperialist force within its own region. The UAE fits the model
precisely. It leverages oil wealth and a US security umbrella to
exert economic, military, and political control over weaker states
across Africa and the Middle East, backing militias, financing coups,
and securing resource and logistics concessions in ways that serve
both its own interests and Washington’s broader strategic
objectives. What looks from the outside like Gulf generosity,
investment, and mediation is, on this reading, the operating method
of a sub-imperial power: extending dominance through financial
capture, security dependency, and the deliberate installation of
governments that cannot survive without Abu Dhabi’s support.
The resulting
structure is not a military alliance. It is not foreign aid. It is
structured dependency: a political economy in which the government’s
security and financial survival both run through Abu Dhabi, and in
which Abu Dhabi extracts positions, port concessions, agricultural
land, and supply corridors that would be unavailable in any open
competitive market. Djibouti chose China. Djibouti lost its DP World
concession and was sued in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously.
Ethiopia chose Abu Dhabi. Ethiopia received central bank liquidity,
Republican Guard training, a maritime strategy, and an arms bridge
when its government was nearly overrun.
The 600,000
And The Accounting That Hasn’t Happened
The Tigray war
killed an estimated 600,000 people over two years, according to
assessments published by Refugees International, the Justice and
Security Research Programme, and multiple humanitarian organizations.
The figure exceeds the death toll in the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine
that defined the country for a generation in Western media. More than
20 million people required humanitarian assistance by the end of
2022. The UN-OHCHR joint investigation documented unlawful killings,
torture, sexual violence, and deliberate restriction of humanitarian
access by multiple parties, including Ethiopian federal forces,
Eritrean Defence Forces, and TPLF fighters. The Amnesty International
assessment of the Axum massacre, in which Eritrean forces killed more
than 100 civilians in December 2020, was one of dozens of documented
atrocity incidents from the war’s first year.
The Council
on Foreign Relations' conflict tracker, updated February 2026,
documents how Ethiopia has moved from post-war fragility to the edge
of a new interstate conflict in the space of three years. The
Pretoria Agreement's core provisions, including TDF disarmament and
Eritrean withdrawal, were never enforced. The TPLF has since split,
with the old guard seizing control of Tigray's regional
administration and forging ties with Asmara. Ethiopian Airlines
suspended flights to Tigray in January 2026 after federal and
Tigrayan forces clashed in the north, and by early March analysts
cited by CFR were describing war between Ethiopia and Eritrea as
imminent. Abiy's Red Sea ambitions, including his parliament
statement that Ethiopia's exclusion from the coast "will be
corrected," sit at the centre of the escalation. Meanwhile three
other insurgencies, in Amhara, Oromia, and along the Sudan border,
continue to stretch Ethiopian federal forces simultaneously.
No
accountability process has targeted the external weapons suppliers.
The Pretoria Agreement, brokered by the African Union in November
2022, imposed terms on the losing party and left every external actor
outside the frame. The ceasefire that ended the killing preserved the
impunity that enabled it. The UAE has not been sanctioned for its
role in Ethiopia. It has not been sanctioned for its documented
support to the RSF in Sudan, despite Sudan filing a formal case at
the International Court of Justice against Abu Dhabi in March 2025,
and despite a US determination that RSF atrocities constituted
genocide.
The
architecture holds because the architecture serves too many interests
for any one institution to dismantle it. Washington uses the UAE as a
regional intermediary for objectives it cannot pursue directly. The
Abraham Accords’ symbolic value to multiple US administrations has
exceeded the political cost of what happens in the theaters where Abu
Dhabi operates. European arms sales to the UAE continue. The same
Wing Loong platforms circulate between Yemen, Libya, Sudan, and
Ethiopia without triggering the arms re-export restrictions that
nominally govern US-origin technology.
What
Djibouti Shows
There is a
country in this story that did not submit to the architecture. It is
worth naming what happened to it.
Djibouti
ejected DP World from the Doraleh Container Terminal in February
2018, the same month MBZ flew to Addis Ababa with $3 billion for
Abiy. The sequence was not coincidental. Djibouti had refused the
UAE’s request to use Doraleh as a military launchpad for Yemen
operations. It had then refused to host an Emirati military base on
its territory. China Merchants Port Holdings took over Doraleh. Abu
Dhabi pursued litigation across multiple jurisdictions for years,
winning every arbitration ruling and collecting none of the
judgments. The legal victories were real and unenforceable. Djibouti
kept the port.
What followed
was not a diplomatic rupture. It was something more consequential:
Abu Dhabi began building a parallel architecture that would make
Djibouti irrelevant. The Berbera concession with Somaliland was
accelerated. The tripartite deal with Ethiopia in March 2018 was
designed to route Ethiopian trade, currently 90 percent dependent on
Djibouti, through a DP World-managed alternative. The UAE also
constructed a military base in Somaliland from 2017, training
Somaliland’s security forces and establishing a physical presence
along the Gulf of Aden coast, directly across from Yemen and directly
adjacent to the Bab el-Mandeb. What the UAE lost at Doraleh it was
rebuilding in Berbera, and what it lost in Djibouti’s refusal to
host a military base it was rebuilding 300 kilometers away.
The next move
was diplomatic. In December 2025, Israel recognized Somaliland as an
independent state, the first UN member to do so. Netanyahu explicitly
framed the move within the Abraham Accords. According to diplomatic
sources cited by Middle East Monitor, the UAE had mediated the
arrangement: Abu Dhabi had convinced Somaliland’s government to
accept an Israeli military base on its Gulf of Aden coast and had
agreed to finance it. Assurances were given that Israeli recognition,
and investment, would follow. Academic analysis published in January
2026 stated the logic plainly: Israel’s recognition of Somaliland
“is a strategic move that aligns it with the UAE’s economic and
security architecture in the Red Sea.”
The emerging
alignment in the Horn is now visible in full. On one side: Egypt, the
Sudanese Armed Forces, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Eritrea,
Djibouti, and Somalia. On the other: the UAE, Israel, the RSF in
Sudan, Libya’s Haftar militia, Somaliland, and Ethiopia, even as
Addis Ababa has tried to conceal the depth of its alignment. The US,
which maintains its only permanent African base at Camp Lemonnier in
Djibouti, is being pulled toward Somaliland by a combination of
Israeli lobbying, Emirati pressure, and frustration that Djibouti
refused to allow attacks on the Houthis from its territory. Project
2025 flagged “the US’s deteriorating position in Djibouti” as a
primary concern. Some US lawmakers and analysts have explicitly
proposed Somaliland as the replacement for Camp Lemonnier.
Djibouti said
no to the UAE. It now sits between a US base it cannot fully control,
a Chinese base it partially regrets, a neighbour to the south whose
port is being absorbed into an Emirati logistics network, and a
government in Addis Ababa that owes its survival to Abu Dhabi.
Eritrea, which leased the UAE its Assab airbase for years, is now on
the Egypt-Saudi side of the fault line. The entire eastern shore of
the Red Sea, from Assab to Berbera, is being stitched into an
Emirati-Israeli strategic corridor, and the Tigray war was the
operation that secured its landlocked hinterland.
The crimes
committed in Tigray between 2020 and 2022 were the pivot of this
architecture. Without UAE drones, without the arms bridge, without
the Republican Guard training, the government in Addis Ababa would
likely have fallen. The war would have ended differently. The port
strategy would have lost its Ethiopian partner. The Berbera corridor
would have lost its landlocked hinterland. The entire arc from Assab
to Somaliland depends on Abiy Ahmed remaining in power, and Abiy
Ahmed remaining in power depended on what Abu Dhabi shipped across
the Red Sea in those 53 days.
