Ethiopian war and terrorism, two nightmares that rob Africa of sleep

The civil war in Ethiopia, which has been raging for more than a year and threatens the security of the Horn of Africa, and jihadist terrorism, which continued to plague several African countries, were two nightmares that kept the continent awake at night in 2021.

The Ethiopian conflict erupted on 4 November 2020, when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched a military offensive against the ruling Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in the northern region bordering Sudan and Eritrea.

The leader ordered the onslaught after accusing the LPTF of attacking an army base and withstanding the challenge to his authority by that formation, hegemonic in the ethnic coalition that led the country with an iron fist from 1991 until the president came to power in 2018, whose reforms met with Tigrian rejection.

Abiy, winner of the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for the historic peace agreement with the former enemy Eritrea, wanted a blitzkrieg that would spare the country a long and devastating agony.

Nothing could be further from the truth: the rebels escaped the Ethiopian army's initial harassment, regained control of Tigray this year and invaded the neighbouring regions of Amhara and Afar, loyal to the Ethiopian government.

The toll is grim for Africa's second most populous country (more than 110 million people): thousands dead, more than two million internally displaced in Tigray alone, some 9.4 million people in need of humanitarian assistance in northern Ethiopia, and a booming economy choked by conflict.

The pendulum of contention appeared to swing in favour of the TPLF in late October when the rebels captured towns within 400 kilometres of Addis Ababa, the seat of the African Union.

The threat of an insurgent takeover of the capital sparked international panic and countries such as the US, the UK and France urged their nationals to leave Ethiopia, while diplomatic efforts to force a cessation of hostilities and a negotiated solution intensified, without success.

The fall of Addis Ababa would have had "a negative effect on the security strategies for the Horn of Africa" of international powers, Saruni Lemargeroi, a political analyst from neighbouring Kenya, warned Efe.

The rebel advance prompted Abiy himself to put on his uniform last November and march to the front to lead the Ethiopian army, which has since won important victories by recapturing strategic towns in Amhara and Afar, apparently with the help of drones supplied by China, Iran and Turkey.

"There seemed to be a possibility that the federal government would make some concessions because of the threat of war coming to Addis Ababa, but now there seems to have been a change of momentum in the conflict," William Davison, an analyst with the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank for Ethiopia, told Efe.

This turn of events precedes the PLAF's announcement on 20 December of the withdrawal of its forces in Amhara and Afar to Tigray, one of the central government's conditions for initiating a dialogue.

"While there are many obstacles, this withdrawal to Tigray, after the setbacks on the battlefield, is an opportunity to stop the fighting, so everyone must seize it," Davison concluded on his Twitter account.

Beyond Ethiopia's entrenched war, the clatter of guns also reverberated in 2021 in other African countries due to the scourge of jihadist terrorism.

As Kenyan security expert Kiyo Nganga tells EFE, one of the most notable events was "the rise and metamorphosis" of the Al-Shabab group - unrelated to its Somali counterpart - in the province of Cabo Delgado, in northern Mozambique.

Al-Shabab, active since 2017 and linked to Islamic State (IS), attacked in March and seized for two weeks the coastal city of Palma, which hosts million-dollar gas projects, in an attack that left dozens dead and thousands displaced and prompted the dispatch of a Southern African Development Community (SADC) military mission to combat the fundamentalists.

The jihadists - who have caused more than 3,500 deaths (including more than 1,500 civilians) and nearly 800,000 displaced since 2017 - struck as a "well-organised terrorist group (...) which, if left unchecked, could spread chaos with a domino effect as far as South Africa and the Horn of Africa", according to Nganga.

Another hotspot was the Sahel region, where groups linked to IS and the Al-Qaeda network continued their bloody campaign in countries such as Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, which in June suffered the worst massacre in its recent history in the northern town of Solham, where at least 160 people were killed.

Terror also struck Nigeria once again this year, where the Boko Haram group, which since 2009 has sought to impose an Islamic-style state on the country by force, not only attacked targets on Nigerian soil, but also carried out attacks in neighbouring Cameroon, Chad and Niger. More than 35,000 people have been killed and around two million displaced by the violence of Boko Haram, which has been competing for years with its dissident faction, the Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP).

Somalia also did not escape in 2021 the atrocities of Al-Shabab, an organisation affiliated with Al-Qaeda since 2012 and dominating rural areas in central and southern Somalia, where it seeks to establish a Wahhabi (ultra-conservative) Islamic state.

Al-Shabab killed hundreds of people in attacks in Somalia, especially in Mogadishu, in a year in which political disagreements prevented the holding of presidential elections rejected by the jihadists. 

Finally, it is worth mentioning the numerous attacks on civilians attributed to the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a group of Ugandan origin with loose links to IS, in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where it has its base of operations.

On 30 November, the armies of the DRC and Uganda began a joint operation on Congolese soil to defeat the ADF, which the Ugandan authorities accuse of organising three suicide attacks on their territory that month.

There is no sign of a decline in jihadist violence in 2022, according to Nganga, who predicts more "attacks by these Daesh affiliates in East African countries to try to attract media attention as they try to proclaim their expansion".