The ghosts of the Badme War

Between 1998 and 2000, the Horn of Africa was the stage for the world’s largest interstate war, a conflict of staggering ferocity and scale that drew scant international attention as it raged and is today widely forgotten. What began as a localized skirmish at the obscure border village of Badme rapidly escalated into a full-scale conventional war between Ethiopia and newly independent Eritrea. The conflagration between these two heavily armed states was replete with pitched battles, as Eritrea’s defensive lines faced a series of Ethiopian offensives that alternated between careful planning and catastrophic ineptitude.

In a haunting reprise of the First World War, the fighting descended into bitter stalemates that scarred the borderlands with extensive trenches, where mass human wave assaults were cut down by concentrated machine gun and artillery fire in grinding battles of attrition. Over two years, more than half a million soldiers were fed into the inferno, and at times tens of thousands were killed and wounded in a matter of days.

What became known as the Badme War bled across the turn of the century, resulted in the deaths of around 100,000 people, and reshaped regional geopolitics, yet settled little. The cessation of armed hostilities in mid-2000 froze the conflict into a protracted cold war between Addis Ababa and Asmara, entrenched a heavily militarized frontier, and made the Red Sea corridor, above all the port city of Assab, a perennial flashpoint in what both states deemed salient national interests.

In the years that followed, as the two capitals engaged in brinkmanship via proxy conflict, Eritrea evolved into an autocratic and hypermilitarized state, while Ethiopia grew increasingly authoritarian and interventionist, a trajectory that fueled later regional wars, including the invasion of Somalia and the war in Tigray.

Today, amid accelerating militarization of the frontier and intensified saber-rattling from Addis Ababa over sea access, the ghosts of the Badme war warn that a renewed armed conflict will undoubtedly prove ruinous for both states all the while further destabilizing an already deeply unsettled Horn of Africa.

The prairie fire that burned Badme

When the war broke out in early 1998, it marked a stunning reversal, since the ruling elites in both Ethiopia and Eritrea had so recently been brothers in arms. For more than a decade, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) fought in concert to overthrow the Derg regime. Though fraternal, it was neither a partnership of equals nor free of serious contention. Eritrean resistance fighters were veteran revolutionaries whose struggle originated in the early 1960s, while the younger Tigrayan movement emulated their struggle.

Frictions never abated between the two fronts, yet they were contained long enough to culminate in victory in 1991 and in Ethiopia’s cordial recognition of Eritrean independence in 1993 within a TPLF dominated central government. Shared language and kinship linked Eritrea’s Tigrinya people and Ethiopia’s Tigrayans, a fraternity further forged through years of war against Addis Ababa and personified by the respective leaders of the new order, Isaias Afwerki and Meles Zenawi.

With Eritrea’s independence, Ethiopia found itself landlocked, epitomized by the loss of Assab, the strategic Red Sea port in Eritrea’s far east that once carried most of Addis Ababa’s international trade. This new reality fed into a deep resentment among opposition circles and much of the Ethiopian public. In the years that followed, a secret joint committee met to decide on the new frontier, but discussions over the border revealed more points of serious contention than areas of agreement.

Asmara grew increasingly convinced that the TPLF was engaged in deliberate territorial encroachment, fears that were hardly unfounded. The Ethiopian state was actively diverting resources to physically enlarge the Tigray region, encroaching on other provinces in the federation and, eventually, the Eritrean border.

The TPLF’s 1976 manifesto called for Tigray to secure access to the sea, a goal that in practice meant Eritrean soil

By the mid-1990s, simmering hostility fueled a growing paranoia, erupting in escalating bouts of border violence. After a brief meeting in Ethiopia in 1996, Meles Zenawi offered Isaias Afwerki a flight back to Asmara. En route, the aircraft caught fire and was forced to return to Addis Ababa. Enraged, Afwerki confronted Zenawi, accusing him of an assassination attempt. The fraternal bond between these two men and their respective people, already strained, began to seriously fray. The breach would soon escalate into a regional vortex that would engulf Amhara, Oromo, Saho, Somali, Afar and others, drawing them into a war many found incomprehensible.

The year 1997 drove tensions to a new crest. Early on, economic tensions sharpened as Assab, Eritrea’s strategic port and Ethiopia’s trade artery, became a flashpoint amid Ethiopian business complaints over rights of access. Beneath these emerging commercial quarrels lay a harder strategic aim within the Tigrayan elite that ruled in Addis Ababa. The TPLF’s 1976 manifesto called for Tigray to secure access to the sea, a goal that in practice meant Eritrean soil, though at the time of Eritrea’s independence Meles Zenawi argued a “military solution” to be impractical given Eritrea’s strength.

The latter half of 1997 slid toward war through a litany of misjudgments and provocations too numerous to recount with justice here. A major escalation came in July, when more than a thousand Ethiopian troops occupied the Eritrean border village of Bada and dismantled its administration. At Bure, on the frontier along the approaches to the port of Assab, Ethiopian units again expelled Eritrean administrators. In August, Tigrayan forces mounted a similar operation at Badme, a small, unassuming village in the scrub borderlands over which so much blood would soon be shed.

The Eritrean government suppressed public reporting on the crisis, but by then Asmara grasped the gravity of their security situation. In October 1997 the Ethiopian government published a new map of the Tigray Region that incorporated large swathes of Eritrean territory. For Asmara, this confirmed its fears of Tigrayan expansionism. After the border aggression at Bada, Bure and Badme, Asmara hardened in its refusal to contemplate any border concessions.

The following month Eritrea introduced its own currency, resulting in a trade war with Ethiopia and a steep decline in diplomatic relations. Ethiopia issued new birr notes bearing maps that depicted the disputed areas as Ethiopian and the national cartography authority released matching maps, underscoring the seriousness of Addis Ababa’s intent. Trade across the frontier, once busy, slowed to a trickle as restraint rapidly eroded.

No quiet on the Western front

On May 6, 1998, a bloody confrontation in the western border village of Badme ignited the tinderbox. Tigrayan militia shot dead several Eritrean officials, including senior veterans of the liberation war, during yet another local dispute. This time Asmara moved swiftly, dispatching a mechanized column that seized the town and its environs.

“Like Sarajevo, 1914,” Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi later mused. “An accident waiting to happen.” Eritrea insisted it had answered an unprovoked attack on its officials on Eritrean soil, while Addis Ababa countered that Eritrea had invaded Ethiopian territory. With no independent verification and both capitals claiming Badme as sovereign territory, the irreconcilable dispute yielded to armed confrontation.

Within a week, the Ethiopian parliament declared war. The conflict began to expand from skirmishes measured in dozens, and then hundreds of men to set piece offensives measured in the tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, as both states mobilized on a staggering scale.

This grisly calculus of manpower made Ethiopia’s massive demographic superiority the most decisive element of the war. As a result of the immense disparity, virtually the entire adult population of Eritrea was mobilized

The war unfolded in three major rounds, separated by months-long lulls as both armies regrouped, mobilized, and rearmed: May to June 1998, February to June 1999, and May to June 2000. What began at Badme soon burned across three main fronts: Western, Central, and Eastern. On each, well-armed and entrenched forces faced one another across fortified lines. Within weeks the conflict’s defining feature began to emerge: brutal battles of attrition fought through trench warfare and massed infantry assaults.

With a population of nearly 60 million, Addis Ababa could absorb staggering losses that would have been demographically fatal for Eritrea and its 3.5 million people, a key factor in the ensuing months and years of fighting. This grisly calculus of manpower made Ethiopia’s massive demographic superiority the most decisive element of the war. As a result of the immense disparity, virtually the entire adult population of Eritrea was mobilized. Eventually more than 300,000 men were deployed in the Ethiopian army. Over 250,000 men and women were mobilized for the Eritrean military.

Over the following months and years borderland locations such as Badme, Tsorona, Zalambessa and Bure would all become battlefields drenched with the blood of tens of thousands of lives. As military historian Jason Lyall notes, both sides dug “extensive trenches and defensive positions along all three fronts that recalled the First World War’s Western Front.” His observation captured a widespread refrain among the foreign observers of this tragedy, who commonly described “gruesome scenes reminiscent of World War I,” after touring the battlefields.

By late May and into June 1998, the opposing armies launched offensives against each other's frontier positions. The first of three major rounds was under way. Eritrean forces held the ground around Badme, repelling Ethiopian attempts to retake the town. On the central front, fighting around a key disputed border town known as Zalambessa seesawed across streets and surrounding heights before the lines stiffened. Eritrean troops were the victors of this contest and consolidated control of the town and its surroundings along the central front.

To the east, the approaches to Assab became a flashpoint, with fierce clashes as tens of thousands of Ethiopian troops massed along the border. Fighting on this front was ferocious yet often intermittent, checked by heat, exposure, and long supply lines. The open terrain seemed more conducive to large operations compared with the western and central highlands, but the withering sun and bare approaches punished both armies; the plastic sandals of Eritrean patrols melted in the scorching heat while Ethiopian logistics struggled to sustain massed formations.

In the first week of June, the war moved into the air with raids on Asmara and Mekelle. Ethiopian jets crossed the border to strike Asmara; cannon fire aimed at the international airport hit the civilian terminal and tore through a line of people waiting at a bus stop. Air defenses shot down one raiding aircraft and captured a well-known Derg era pilot who had been repatriated in good faith, only to return to bomb Eritrea, enraging many across the country. The Eritreans struck back, sending jets roaring across the border to bomb the Tigray region capital; only for errant bombs to hit an elementary school and kill scores of children. Addis then warned foreigners to leave before Asmara would be flattened, prompting a rush to embassies as a panicked exodus began.

The escalating brutality of the war horrified communities on both sides of the frontier, and after calls from American President Bill Clinton to Meles Zenawi and Isaias Afwerki, Addis and Asmara announced a moratorium on air strikes. With Eritrean units dug in around Badme and holding fast along the frontier, Asmara emerged the clear winner of the opening round.

Addis Ababa expelled roughly 75,000 Ethiopians of Eritrean origin, their papers stamped “Expelled -- never to return,” a policy that split families, stripped people of property and wealth, and upended tens of thousands of lives

With the seasonal rains that began in June, operations tapered as supply lines became mired in mud on the western and central fronts. A larger war was widely expected, but few imagined it would be protracted. The old cliché “it will be over by Christmas” was heard uttered time and again.

Through the summer the three fronts ossified into belts of trenches, barbed wire, foxholes and mine seeded killing grounds. Across the no man's land between the lines, Ethiopian formations were later committed to repeated mass assaults against Eritrean positions on the heights, which Eritrean forces had seized or retained in the first round and subsequently developed into heavily fortified strongpoints.

In place of major offensives, a harsher civilian dimension emerged: mass expulsions of citizens disingenuously labeled security risks for their Eritrean background. Over the next two years Addis Ababa expelled roughly 75,000 Ethiopians of Eritrean origin, their papers stamped “Expelled -- never to return,” a policy that split families, stripped people of property and wealth, and upended tens of thousands of lives. Many had simply lost everything only to then be thrust into a country they had never really known. In some cases, children were separated from their parents and forced to fend for themselves, in other instances they were left behind as their parents were deported. This hideous element of the conflict further hardened bitter and venomous attitudes, poisoned cross border ties, and helped lay the ground for a far more vicious second round of the war.

The Eritrean government proposed a demilitarized zone and negotiations, but Addis Ababa refused, making an Eritrean withdrawal from Badme a precondition for any talks. For the rest of 1998 the war ebbed to low intensity, with occasional skirmishes and shelling – effectively an unspoken truce far below the convulsions of May and June.

Through the rest of summer and into fall the frontlines increasingly swelled with men and equipment. A dangerous hubris developed on both sides of the border as each party became entirely confident of victory. “Even if the sun did not rise again,” declared Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki on state television during July, “…we shall never withdraw from Badme,”

Somalia, quickly became the pivotal proxy theater. For Asmara, it offered a new axis of leverage and a release valve on the front, while for Addis Ababa, it posed a destabilizing threat along a vulnerable flank.

The chief impediment on the resumption of major combat operations was the seasonal rains that were making vital roads near impassable and had mired both sides during the first round of the war. As the rains receded in late October 1998, international mediators raced to broker peace before artillery guns roared to life again and advancing tank columns set the earth trembling. For the remainder of the year, artillery duels steadily intensified along the frontier, but the moratorium on air strikes held and major ground combat did not resume.

The conflict internationalized early through the infusion of foreign specialists and the emergence of systematic proxy competition. Shortfalls in trained aircrews pushed both Addis Ababa and Asmara to contract Russian, Ukrainian, and Latvian military pilots. Simultaneously, both capitals sought to open new proxy fronts on the ground. Ethiopia, for example, attempted to form an Afar proxy, the Red Sea Liberation Front, recruiting from Afar communities along the border and around Assab, where many Afar live. Somalia, however, quickly became the pivotal proxy theater. For Asmara, it offered a new axis of leverage and a release valve on the front, while for Addis Ababa, it posed a destabilizing threat along a vulnerable flank. Eritrea began to train and supply groups such as the Ogaden National Liberation Front, while Ethiopia backed other Somali factions as it began to carve out a buffer zone in parts of Somalia’s border regions.

By early 1999 the war entered a new stage. Ethiopia spent months acquiring armor, artillery, and aircraft, while Eritrea worked to keep pace in significant part by refurbishing equipment from the liberation war. Conscription widened on both sides: Ethiopia pressed teenagers into military service, and Eritrea extended national service to place large numbers of women in frontline roles. In parallel, both governments courted outside sponsors and waged an information war at home and online, where the still nascent medium of the internet quickly became the central arena for shaping international opinion.

Having mobilized the state, the TPLF reinstated many Amhara officers from the Derg era and expanded the army to roughly 250,000. Despite the military expansion, Tigrayan personnel held 80% of officer positions in the army. The leadership adopted a pan Ethiopian line to court Amhara constituencies still unreconciled to Eritrea’s independence. Tigrayan elites openly discussed removing Isaias Afwerki and installing a transitional client regime, a move that, as Guardian correspondent David Hirst noted, would advance TPLF ambitions for access to Assab while gratifying Amhara irredentists angered by the loss of the port.

Around Badme, Eritrean engineers emplaced deep, echeloned defenses with interlocking arcs of fire meant to exact prohibitive losses. Ethiopian commanders had accepted the inevitability of heavy attrition and judged it a price worth paying for a decisive breach of an Eritrean line that had long eluded them. The new offensive, code named “Operation Sunset,” was a pointed dig to Isaias Afwerki’s televised vow the previous summer that Eritrea would never leave Badme.

In February, Addis Ababa alleged that Eritrean jets bombed the town of Adigrat in Tigray and declared the air strike moratorium void. Asmara called the charge fabricated, and when journalists and foreign diplomats sought verification Ethiopian authorities blocked access. The next day Ethiopia opened major assaults along the western front, using the unverified allegation as the pretext to unleash combat aircraft.

Operation Sunset and the Tsorona slaughterhouse

The second round opened in early February 1999, as Ethiopian forces launched major offensives on the western and central fronts, concentrating on Badme. For two weeks Eritrean troops held as the fighting pressed toward the town. Badme and its approaches shook under heavy artillery barrages while tanks, helicopter gunships, and jets struck Eritrean positions. The first assaults were thrown back by the men and women in the trenches, inflicting grievous losses on the attackers, and at one point the situation was so favorable that Eritrean counterattacks regained ground.

As relentless waves of airstrikes were carried out against the Eritrean units which they could not counter, Ethiopian commanders hurled division after division of infantry and armor against the Eritrean lines. In a few hours the situation was upended when a thinly held sector was hit and broken, opening a breach in the defensive line. Under mounting pressure and the threat of encirclement, Eritrean units withdrew from Badme to a new defensible line to avoid fighting on terms that would almost certainly have resulted in heavy losses. Eritrean commanders had not anticipated the scale of the forces that would be brought to bear against them.

The prospect of retaking Assab brought the Amhara opposition closer to the Tigrayan ruling class and, as a patriotic rallying cry, broadened popular support for the war.

During the bitter struggle for the town, casualties climbed into the tens of thousands, the majority Ethiopian, a toll the BBC described as extremely heavy. Contemporary military analysts noted that Ethiopian commanders had accepted casualty rates at levels normally deemed intolerable in modern war. Eritrean forces inflicted the greater losses in absolute terms yet suffered grievously themselves; estimates of about 3,000 Eritrean dead would translate, on a per capita basis, to roughly 270,000 battlefield deaths in the United States. Ethiopia’s success at Badme in the second round was indisputable, but it was purchased at such a prohibitive cost in human lives that it blunted the value of the gain. Incredibly, it was not to be the last mass bloodletting of this phase of the war

The fall of Badme jolted both countries. In Addis Ababa, the victory had made maximalist territorial aims politically marketable, and political elites moved to press them. State outlets aired debates over Eritrea’s right to possess Assab, and national radio played triumphant wartime songs from the 70s Ogaden War. From early 1999 onwards, restoring sea access became a centerpiece of pan-Ethiopian nationalist discourse. The prospect of retaking Assab brought the Amhara opposition closer to the Tigrayan ruling class and, as a patriotic rallying cry, broadened popular support for the war. Diplomats in Addis viewed the emerging aim of the war as consolidating regional hegemony by installing a subordinate Eritrean government; while others observed an internal contest between pragmatists and hawks over the war’s ultimate military and political objectives.

On the other side of the border, the loss of the town was devastating. In Asmara, students mounted strikes demanding deployment to the front. Both young and old who had not yet been conscripted soon began to seriously consider volunteering their service. For many Eritreans the struggle over Badme came to signify nothing short of national survival. The persistence of hostilities after the fall of Badme, ostensibly the war’s focus, confirmed what many in Asmara already understood. The bitter war was not merely a dispute over border villages, but a struggle for sea access and the imposition of a puppet regime in Asmara.

If Operation Sunset had been a bloodbath, the next offensive was to be a true slaughterhouse. At Tsorona, a strategic position on the central front that forms a natural gateway to the capital, Eritrean troops again held deep, prepared defenses. Emboldened by Sunset, Ethiopian commanders massed their divisions and prepared for an even larger concentrated push, marred by staggering ineptitude and callousness at both the tactical and operational levels. Tens of thousands of men were funneled into the killing ground to force a position that might threaten Asmara. It became the war’s bloodiest battle.

On the morning of 14 March 1999 Ethiopian units were hurled forward in futile assaults that collapsed into slaughter, masses of men cut down in shocking numbers. The opening wave consisted of raw recruits sent into a heavily mined approach to open lanes for the regular infantry and mechanized columns behind them. Those who faltered after watching the first wave obliterated by concentrated machine gun and artillery fire tried to turn back and were shot by their officers. The range fell to point blank. Hand to hand fighting erupted along the first Eritrean trench. Ethiopian tanks crowded by their own infantry tried to climb the parapet, only to be knocked out by volleys of RPGs. After three days of fighting had finally ended, Eritrean forces firmly held Tsorona. The Ethiopians had gained only a few hundred meters of ground at a nearly unfathomable human cost.

The battlefield was strewn with the smoldering hulks of burnt-out tanks and the decomposing bodies of conscripts left in grotesque heaps, the resulting stench necessitating Eritrean soldiers' use of tissues to plug their noses. Correspondent Alexander Last, writing after seeing the central front’s devastation, put it bluntly: “The Ethiopian army was using First World War tactics, with First World War results, mass slaughter for no ground gained, where human losses did not seem to matter, under the terrible military rationale that since the population of Ethiopia is 60 million, 17 times larger than Eritrea’s population, therefore mass attacks must work.” As another observer hauntingly noted of Tsorona, “The dead far outnumbered the living.”

So catastrophic for Ethiopia was the result of the Tsorona battle, so severe the losses of both men and equipment, that it may have resulted in the effective destruction of several army divisions. German reporters described Ethiopian tactics as similar to Verdun in World War I, others likened the scene to the Somme of 1916. After visiting the battlefield, David Hirst aptly observed, “If the conduct of war is a measure of a government's fitness and ability to rule, then Tsorona is a terrible indictment of the TPLF. It was Oromo peasants it selected as human minesweepers, and Tigrayan officers who shot them from the rear.” With the offensive decimated, Tsorona thus became the graveyard of Ethiopia’s ongoing military operation and the second round of the war.

In trenches festering with hate, a thin thread of humanity sometimes carried across no man’s land, as soldiers on opposite lines hoisted stereos and played music for one another through the long nights

The TPLF-led Ethiopian army institutionalized a brutal ethnic hierarchy, employing non-Tigrayan conscripts as expendable assets usually insulating their co-ethnics from such risks. Historian Richard Reid, in his war memoir Shallow Graves, documents this policy, citing testimonies of Oromo and other non-Tigrayan soldiers ordered to "clear" minefields by simply walking across them. Compliance was enforced by Tigrayan officers who summarily executed those who hesitated. An Amhara commander recounted defecting to Eritrea after being sentenced to death for refusing a suicidal assault. This stratification exposed the ethnic underpinnings of the TPLF's state power and fed into a growing feeling of deep resentment among key national constituencies, primarily the Oromo and Amhara, which ultimately contributed to the TPLF regime's collapse two decades later.

There were no major offensives after the Tsorona debacle for the rest of 1999, yet the front never fell quiet. Ethiopian and Eritrean infantry traded fire from opposing trench lines in grinding engagements and artillery duels, which occasionally flared into intense bouts of fighting over the summer. After dark, small patrols crawled into no man’s land, a space sometimes no wider than fifty meters, to raid or to listen for the enemy. The slightest visible movement drew instant bursts from anti-aircraft guns pressed into a ground role, with grisly effect. The Agalay, dedicated Ethiopian army burial units, continued their grim work, dumping the dead into mass graves that roaming dogs routinely unearthed. Yet even here, in trenches festering with hate, a thin thread of humanity sometimes carried across no man’s land, as soldiers on opposite lines hoisted stereos and played music for one another through the long nights.

Abiy Ahmed, the future prime minister, and his experience in the killing grounds around Badme had radically reshaped how he saw the world, leading him to embrace Pentecostal Christianity, a conviction that would give his future political career a distinctly providential outlook.

Eritrean troops who had pulled back from Badme early in the year fought to regain the heights surrounding it, edging forward ridge by ridge in a grinding campaign of attrition. The limited gains of the summer of 1999 did not restore the commanding ground needed to retake the town or to anchor a stable defensive line on the western front. Meanwhile Addis Ababa, buoyed by foreign mercenary pilots and military advisers from Eastern Europe, planned a massive offensive designed to rupture Eritrea’s lines and force a decisive end to the war.

The invasion of Eritrea

In early 2000, the climactic final round opened on the western front. On May 12, the Ethiopian military struck an unexpected point in the lines, sending some 100,000 infantry across a dry riverbed and then up steep heights where Eritrean defenses were thinly held. The line was broken through, and in the chaos Ethiopian armor smashed through a different part of the western front and linked up with the advancing mass of infantry, causing the front’s entire defensive line to give way at multiple junctions. A vicious fight ensued over the next two weeks as the Ethiopian army pushed into western Eritrea. The ensuing deathmatch was reportedly so brutal that it shocked European military observers discreetly deployed to the area.

During the final days of fighting in the west, near Badme where all had begun, a young Oromo Ethiopian military radio operator climbed out of his foxhole to contact army command. Moments later Eritrean artillery shells pounded the position, killing nearly his entire contingent. The survivor was Abiy Ahmed, the future prime minister, and his experience in the killing grounds around Badme had radically reshaped how he saw the world. He later recounted that the artillery barrage had been the moment when “God’s purpose” was revealed to him, leading him to embrace Pentecostal Christianity, a conviction that would give his future political career a distinctly providential outlook.

Covered by a blanket of fighter jets and helicopters that pounded Eritrean positions with near impunity, long columns of Ethiopian tanks and infantry pushed inland toward Barentu, regional capital of the western lowlands. Villages and towns along the advance were bombed, and hundreds of thousands of civilians fled in terror. The fight for Barentu was fierce and highly costly for the attackers, yet after days of relentless bombardment the city fell on May 18. Its loss ruptured the western front and exposed the road to Keren, the second largest city in Eritrea. To avoid being fixed and shattered in the open western plains by superior Ethiopian firepower and numbers, Eritrean commanders ordered a staged withdrawal.

The central front posed the gravest risk for Eritrea, since a breach there could open the road to Asmara. As the fighting in the west ground to a halt, mass assaults were launched on key positions in the central sector. Zalambessa was finally overrun, having held firm in the first two rounds of the war. Further thrusts toward the capital met sharp Eritrean counterattacks that drove them back. Eritrea then traded space for a shorter, stronger line along the escarpment guarding the central plateau and national heartland. Units withdrew to the rim of the highlands that shield Asmara and the major towns, where the front hardened once more into stalemate. The shock of the reversal across Eritrea was severe, but the withdrawal bought critical time to reorganize and fortify its highland defenses.

The crisis was most acute on the eastern front at Bure, guarding the approaches to Assab. As the invasion stalled on the western and central fronts after taking serious losses, Addis pivoted full force towards Assab. Asmara again weighed a broader withdrawal to a more defensible line, and officials began evacuating state assets out of the port in anticipation. In a pivotal act of defiance, senior field commanders defending the port city overruled orders to pull back. For two weeks the eastern front burned, much of it by night to escape the searing heat and the exposed fields of fire. On what many regarded as the war’s harshest front, Eritrean units met successive Ethiopian assaults and repelled them, keeping the approaches to Assab in Eritrean hands.

Meanwhile, Ethiopian occupation forces in western Eritrea carried out systematic looting that stripped towns bare. Foreign correspondents touring the region reported finding homes, clinics, schools, and churches ransacked, valuables hauled away, and whole districts set ablaze. Some troops went so far as to bulldoze the cemeteries of liberation martyrs, men who had once fought alongside their Tigrayan brothers in arms against Addis Ababa. Writing on the occupation’s conduct, Eritrean scholar Tekie Fessehatzion maintained that the TPLF, blinded by grudges and hatred, went on a rampage of destruction for no logical reason and “shattered the foundation of peaceful coexistence that has served Eritreans and Ethiopians well for many generations.” The memory of those depredations endured, and when Eritrean soldiers marched into Tigray twenty years later, the logic of reprisal was close at hand.

By June 2000 momentum shifted toward negotiation as international pressure mounted on Addis Ababa and Asmara to bring the war to a close. ''At the end of the day,'' an aide to Afwerki explained to the New York Times regarding the loss of territory to the Ethiopians, ''it's a mere issue of numbers.'' The offensive eventually displaced more than one million Eritreans, and the prospect of even fiercer fighting loomed. Yet even as Ethiopia held the initiative, both Addis and Asmara understood that escalating the war further would result in intolerable human, financial, and political costs, all while increasing the risk of the emergence of an intractable insurgency. The war had already driven both states to the edge of insolvency.

As ceasefire talks gathered pace while occupied districts were still being looted, the last battles raged around Assab in the dying light of the Badme War. In the final push for the port, heavily armed Ethiopian divisions drove at Eritrean lines in a bid to seize the city. But the offensive ran out of steam and suffered defeat after defeat over a week of fighting. As Fessehatzion wrote of the war's final days, “...the invasion failed in the red hot oven of the Bure line in the second week of June, the TPLF’s dream of hegemony over Eritrea crumbled.” With all three fronts now hardened into a stalemate and both warring parties driven to exhaustion, the time had at last come to end the war.

No War, No Peace

On June 18, 2000, both sides signed a ceasefire that ended two years of fighting, with both publicly claiming victory. In Addis Ababa's ledger, the war closed with strategic success in the west, above all the occupation of large stretches of the western lowlands, and Ethiopian officials portrayed Eritrean forces as nearing total collapse. In Eritrean eyes, however, the invasion's core aim: to extinguish its sovereignty, break its military, overthrow the government, and install a compliant regime that would not contest Assab, had failed. By that measure, Eritrea had preserved its state and army, denied Ethiopia’s irredentist coastal aims, and pointed to the severe losses its forces had inflicted on Ethiopian troops.

The reality, however, was more ambiguous. The capture of Badme did not constitute a decisive victory, as Addis Ababa's true military ambitions, which fueled another bloody year of war and far eclipsed the small border village itself, were largely thwarted. Ethiopia's central gains were indeed blunted as Eritrean units counterattacked to halt the offensive and turned back thrusts toward Assab, freezing the front in stalemate. And while the Eritrean army maintained cohesion under immense pressure, it was unable to consistently sustain a prolonged conventional fight against a far larger state on terms of its choosing. Conversely, while Ethiopia's troop losses were grievous, in a struggle defined by a massive manpower disparity, casualties alone could not decide the result. As analyst Miguel Miranda notes, “…it was difficult to ascertain the war’s definitive outcome beyond the hysterical propaganda spread by the belligerents”.

Over two years the war had killed more than 100,000 people and imposed serious economic damage. The death toll will never be fully known. Losses were grievous on both sides, far heavier for Ethiopia in absolute numbers yet proportionately significantly harsher for Eritrea given its much smaller population. In December 2000 Ethiopia and Eritrea concluded the Algiers Agreement, which solidified the truce and created a boundary commission.

With the ceasefire, the conflict froze into a tense standoff “No War, No Peace.” Addis leveraged UN and OAU procedures to stall demarcation and keep troops on Eritrean soil, forcing Asmara to maintain costly mobilization. The result was a managed stalemate denied closure to either society. During early 2001 thousands of UN peacekeepers deployed to the border while both armies dug in around Assab less than fifty miles from the sea. The question of the port city spilled into the streets as thousands marched in Addis, accusing the government of wavering on coastal access.

Asmara reeled in the war’s wake. For the first time, Isaias Afwerki faced a serious internal challenge born of its toll. By mid-2001, the ruling party had split and senior figures publicly denounced his rule. In September that year he moved to consolidate power through a sweeping crackdown that secured his grip on the state. Many observers mark this as the moment Eritrea settled into personalist autocracy and closed the remaining space for dissent, a turn that saw critics label the country “Africa’s North Korea.”

Driven by profound strategic anxieties over the massive demographic disparity Ethiopia exploited during the war, the increasingly autocratic Afwerki regime introduced mandatory and indefinite military service in the early 2000s. Designed to maintain a disproportionately large standing army, the system extended to all teenagers about to complete high school, who were required to report to the now infamous Sawa military camp for basic training. This policy has had a corrosive impact on Eritrean society and spurred a sustained exodus of its youth, many seeking a better life beyond the constraints of a highly militarized state.

In 2002 the boundary commission established by the peace accord awarded Badme to Eritrea. Ethiopia refused to implement the ruling and locked the northern frontier into an armed standoff that lasted nearly twenty years, unwilling to yield a town for which tens of thousands of its soldiers had died. Meanwhile Assab remained a political time bomb, its loss stoking persistent nationalist demands in Addis and across broad segments of the public for sea access. By 2003, Zenawi had branded the boundary ruling as “null and void” while openly warning of renewed conflict.

By the mid-2000s, tensions edged back toward open war. In 2004 Ethiopia began preparing its forces for another major conflict, and in 2005 it illegally deployed troops into the UN demilitarized zone inside Eritrea. Confronted by Ethiopia’s demographic and military edge, Eritrea sought leverage by supporting rebels such as the Oromo Liberation Front and by supplying material and intelligence to the emerging Islamic Courts in Somalia. In 2006 Ethiopia invaded and occupied much of Somalia, which Asmara cast as an effort to block a unified Somali state. When Ethiopian forces withdrew from Mogadishu two years later, Meles Zenawi went on state television to declare success, framing the invasion as an effort to defeat an Eritrean conspiracy and insisting that Asmara’s Somali allies had been decisively broken.

After nearly three decades of Tigrayan political hegemony defined by protracted proxy conflict with Asmara and recurrent border war scares during the late 2000s, the TPLF-led order in Addis Ababa collapsed in 2018, bringing Abiy Ahmed, an Oromo, to the national leadership. “I have seen brothers slaughtering brothers on the battlefield. I have seen older men, women, and children trembling in terror under the deadly shower of bullets and artillery shells,” he reflected in his Nobel peace prize acceptance speech, recalling his service as a radio operator in the Badme sector, an experience that changed the trajectory of his life.

The transition in Addis opened a path to détente with Asmara for the first time. At Bure, long a battleground on the approach to Assab, Isaias Afwerki and Abiy presided over the reopening of the border. Abiy pledged to implement the 2002 boundary ruling, including the handover of Badme, and the two capitals formally ended the long running cold war.

However, this momentous thaw in relations proved brief. It was largely founded on a shared strategic animosity toward the TPLF, the very party that had previously ruled Ethiopia and prosecuted the Badme War against Eritrea. After being removed from federal power by Abiy, the TPLF retreated to its regional stronghold in Tigray. Asmara also began to bristle when Abiy soon began to speak of the effort to recreate an Ethiopian navy, despite the country’s landlocked status.

When war erupted in Tigray during 2020, Addis Ababa and Asmara waged war in concert against the TPLF, united to neutralize their old foe in a conflict that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. However, the 2022 peace settlement (Pretoria agreement) was negotiated directly between Abiy's government and the Tigrayan leadership, conspicuously sidelining Eritrean input. Crucially, the deal enabled the organization to endure as an entity rather than be fully dismantled. This outcome sparked bitter acrimony in Asmara, which felt its primary security objective of eliminating the TPLF as a politico-military force had been fundamentally undermined.

War clouds over the Horn of Africa

In the aftermath of the Tigray War, relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea sharply deteriorated. This rift was initially driven by the peace agreement that had left the TPLF intact, and it greatly widened as maritime access re-emerged as a central preoccupation of Addis Ababa. Assab has been repeatedly presented as the most practicable outlet. In 2022, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed publicly entertained taking Eritrean ports by force, and state media amplified talk of “reclaiming Assab”. By late 2023, warnings mounted that Addis Ababa and Asmara were again on a road to war. When negotiations for a Somali corridor to the sea stalled in 2024, Addis’s rhetoric grew markedly more bellicose and pivoted to Eritrea with full force.

Though the Ethiopian political elite shifted from Tigrayan-based to Oromo-based leadership, the irredentist ambition for sea access has remained a central and escalating foreign policy objective. Abiy has advanced an imperial vision rooted in a radical Pentecostal Christian worldview, casting the return of sea access to Ethiopia as providential rectification. This belief draws power from two sources: his Badme War-era conversion under the rain of Eritrean artillery shells, and his mother’s prophecy (cited in his inaugural address) that he would be Ethiopia’s seventh king. Together, they impart a messianic outlook that has driven the region to the brink.

This escalatory posture belies Ethiopia’s domestic security crisis. The military is stretched thin, contending with multiple insurgencies, and the army is diminished after heavy wartime losses and a purge of experienced Tigrayan officers. In Amhara region, Fano insurgents with links to Eritrean security services since 2020 have fought the federal government, while Tigrayan elites fragment into pro-Addis Ababa and pro-Asmara camps, raising the risk that Tigray itself, not just the borderlands, becomes a principal theater. Though Ethiopia and Eritrea fought the TPLF together, that common foe never posed an interstate conventional threat comparable to a direct confrontation between Addis Ababa and Asmara.

Early in 2025, Tsadkan Gebretensae, the former Ethiopian army chief during the Badme War, warned that a new conflict appeared inevitable and stated preparations were in their final stages. That summer, as members of Abiy’s inner circle called for an ominous merger of Eritrea and Ethiopia, the TPLF also began readying itself for war, quietly establishing a wartime command to coordinate Tigrayan political and military leadership. During a televised interview at the start of September, Abiy declared he would correct what referred to as the “mistake” made decades earlier when Addis had relinquished Assab. Reflecting this, he formed a new military command structure aimed at Eritrea. Only weeks later the Ethiopian army issued a statement declaring it would “pay any sacrifice” to regain the port city. The same month, the president of Tigray publicly warned of the “visible cloud of war” extending its shadow over the region.

For now, mutual uncertainty in Addis and Asmara over the unpredictable course and outcome of a possible conflict has kept open war at bay. Yet in October 2025, after a year of escalatory rhetoric from its own leadership that included public threats to annex territory and declarations of its irredentist ambition to "reclaim Assab", the Ethiopian government accused Eritrea of preparing for war and ominously warned the United Nations it would not pursue what it called “indefinite restraint”.

The legacies of the Badme War are not confined to history; they are acutely evident in the present, having metastasized into a protracted cold war of deep suspicion and proxy conflicts that profoundly reshaped the geopolitics and daily lives of millions across the Horn of Africa. For Ethiopia, the conflict fueled an authoritarian trajectory, entrenched a foreign policy fixated on countering Eritrean-backed proxies and, crucially, a persistent nationalist ambition to regain Assab. Meanwhile, Eritrea’s experience in the war solidified its trajectory into a highly militarized, autocratic state and amplified its deep-seated fears of Ethiopian irredentist ambitions for its coastline.

A renewed interstate war would be far more destabilizing and ruinous than the last, animated by a grimly familiar calculus of strategic anxiety, brinkmanship, and militant hubris. As in the Badme War, many in Asmara and beyond read the real objective of Addis as the toppling of the Isaias regime, potentially extending to the annexation of Eritrea itself. The eruption of war would imperil the very survival of both the Ethiopian and Eritrean states in their present forms; shatter the brittle regional political and security order of the Horn of Africa; and possibly convulse an unsettled Red Sea region. The ghosts of Badme, therefore, serve as an urgent warning that to forget their memory is to invite a human tragedy of apocalyptic scale.