War broke out in November 2020 between Ethiopia's federal government under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF), the regional ruling party, after months of rising tension; Eritrean forces and Amhara regional militia fought alongside the federal army. The conflict was marked by widespread reports of massacres, sexual violence used as a weapon of war, and a de facto blockade of Tigray that contributed to famine-like conditions; a UN-mandated International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia found reasonable grounds to believe multiple parties, including Eritrean forces, committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts amounting to ethnic cleansing. An estimated 2.5-2.7 million people were internally displaced within Tigray at the conflict's height. A November 2022 Pretoria peace agreement ended major hostilities, though Eritrean forces and disputed territorial control in western Tigray have complicated implementation, and death toll estimates remain unusually wide-ranging and contested.
The Ethiopian federal government, with allied Eritrean and Amhara regional forces, fought the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) for control of Ethiopia's Tigray region
The 2007 Ethiopian census counted 4,316,988 in Tigray and the Ethiopian Statistical Service's projection for 2022 is 5,738,996. Figures of 6-7 million are also cited, and no census has been held since 2007; the region's wartime population is further complicated by the expulsion of Tigrayans from Western Tigray.
There has been no census-based mortality study. Researchers at Ghent University, combining violence, famine and collapse of medical access, estimated 162,000-378,000 deaths; the African Union's chief mediator Olusegun Obasanjo publicly cited about 600,000, the figure most often quoted at the upper end. A peer-reviewed diaspora survey published in Population Health Metrics (2025) estimated more than 102,000 excess deaths among those aged 15 and over (95% CI 17,455-159,382), of which 72% were from intentional injury and 28% from starvation or disease, while cautioning that its urban, higher-wealth sample probably understates the toll; Uppsala's battle-related fatality series records over 100,000 for 2022 alone. The Ethiopian federal government disputes the higher figures and has published no count of its own, while Tigrayan authorities and diaspora organisations favour the 500,000-600,000 range.
The UN International Commission of Human Rights Experts on Ethiopia documented 'mass killings, rape, starvation, destruction of schools and medical facilities, forced displacement and arbitrary detention', singling out systematic rape and sexual violence by Eritrean troops and Amhara militia and recording the arrest, detention and torture of civilians.
Ethiopia, Sudan