On: Eritrean troops reportedly enter Ethiopia’s Tigray region

8th October 2026

The Horn of Africa is rehearsing an old tragedy with the same cast and a fresh programme. Eritrean columns in Tigray - and we are asked to believe this is a neighbourly errand. I have seen this arrangement before: a “civil” war that acquires foreign legs, foreign arms, and foreign graves, until the map of the quarrel no longer resembles the map of the country.

The story here is not a border incident. It is the story of a federation held together by force discovering that force has many creditors. Asmara has debts to collect and ambitions to spend; Addis Ababa has a centre that cannot hold; and Tigray, which has been through the furnace once already, stands to be fed into it again. The 2020-2022 war taught everyone the price and taught no one the lesson. That is the melancholy arithmetic of mankind - the ledger is read aloud and then quietly shelved.

What is actually faced: two governments have severed ties, troops are moving, and every party believes a short sharp campaign will settle what politics could not. Short sharp campaigns have a record. They begin as police actions and end as famines with flags.

The region’s neighbours, and those beyond who still possess influence, must act now - not with communiqués, which are the wallpaper of diplomacy, but with pressure applied where it hurts: the arms, the money, the borders. We shall see whether the mediators move in the days ahead, whether the corridors hold, whether the grain routes stay open. If they do not, the fighting will spread as fire spreads in dry grass - quickly, and without asking permission.

History’s verdict on such wars is always written by the starving. It need not be written that way again. But it will be, unless someone decides that prevention is cheaper than regret - and someone, in my long experience, rarely does.