Ethiopia Has Entered Sudan’s War

All the ingredients are there for a much wider regional blowup.

Really, a regional mega war.

Those were the words of international crisis group expert Alan Boswell discussing the possibility that two of the worst wars seen this century might merge into a single conflict.

On the one side, you have the Tigray war in northern Ethiopia, which plausibly killed 600,000 people between 2020 and 2022 and now looks set to reignite.

On the other, you have the ongoing meltdown in Sudan, a meltdown characterized by mass killings, the destruction of entire cities, and what appears to be a genocide.

But while Boswell was speaking in the context of a resurgent Tigray war drawing in neighboring Sudan, there is another possibility, one we saw demonstrated just two weeks ago, that Ethiopia may willingly enter Sudan’s conflict of its own accord.

On March the 23rd, fighters from the Allied RSF in SPLMN routed the Sudin army at the strategic town of Kerak in the Blue Nar state.

But this wasn’t a regular victory.

The rebels had crossed over from Ethiopian territory where the government of Abi Ahmed had been sheltering them.

With Sudin military officers now briefing that they see Addis Ababar as an active participant in the war, the chances of these two conflicts merging has now gone from theoretical to a terrifying possibility.

The governor of Kermak province in Sudan’s blue Nile state is not a guy to mince words.

After a combined force of fighters from the paramilitary rapid support forces and the Sudan people’s liberation movement north overran the strategic town on March the 23rd told the media the forces that attacked Keruk set out from inside Ethiopian territory and are supported by Ethiopia.

We’re dealing with an invasion.

Privately, leading figures in Sudan’s military have been briefing journalists for months that Ethiopia is becoming actively involved in the nation civil war.

As Arab Weekly reported in January, quoting, “The current consensus within Sudan’s military-led government is that Ethiopia is now an official combatant.

Still, the magnitude of the joint attack seems to have caught the Sudin armed forces off guard.

The fighters cross over from Ethiopia’s Benes Shanguz region where a massive training and logistics camp was established late last year with financial support from the UAE.

In a recent in-depth investigative piece, Reuters uncovered diplomatic cables and internal security memos that suggested quote the United Arab Emirates financed the camp’s construction and provided military trainers and logistical support to the site.

We’ll circle back to the role of the UAE later in this video.

For now though, the key point is that neither the existence of this camp nor the sheer number of fighters training there was exactly a secret.

The Sudin military even moved additional troops to Blue Nile State to protect against any attacks.

Yet all was for Nort.

When the combined RSF and SPLMN force attacked, it humiliated the defenders.

According to the Sudan war monitor, equipment was seized and senior army officers taken prisoner amid a chaotic retreat.

By the time the dust settled, the strategic down of Kerberg was in rebel hands.

The opening of the Blue Nile front by the RSF and its allies comes at a time when the bulk of the fighting is taking place in Cordan in central Sudan.

A front where the paramilitaries seem to expect an easy victory, only to be surprised by a series of setbacks earlier this year.

Beginning a new campaign in the south is most likely an attempt to draw SAF troops away from the main fighting and make the army spread its forces thing.

It’s also a direct result of the RSF’s surprise alliance with SPLMn which has long had a presence in Sudan South including the Bunar state.

We call the alliance a surprise because from 2013 onwards the RSF was one of the main forces responsible for putting down the SPLM’s rebellion against Kartum, something they did with gleeful violence.

Here’s how Alazer described it.

Even after the RSF turned its guns on its former ally, the SAF, in 2023, its fighters massacred villages across the Nuba Mountains.

According to Human Rights Watch, RSF forces committed war crimes in the Nuba between December 2023 and March 2024, including murder, sexual violence, looting, slavery, gang, and the deliberate targeting of civilians.

So, the forging of this alliance in 2025 definitely raised few eyebrows.

As the Sudan war monitors explained, that includes within the two groups themselves.

Quote, “The two rebel groups still look upon each other wearily and their forces have not integrated.

” Whatever the motivations for the alliance, though, the latest combined RSF and SPLMN offensive appears to have been successful.

The SAF are now fighting on an additional front at a time when they need to concentrate their forces in Cordan.

And while it seems unlikely that the rebels will capture the blue state capital of Damazin, which the military is now rushing to reinforce, this is still a major blow to SAF leader General Alberan.

So far though, we’ve mostly been discussing events on the ground.

The sort of straightforward Sudan war updates that would slot in nicely with our briefing room format over on fronts.

co, which you can subscribe to if you want, but not the sort of thing that seems worth an entire video all of its own.

No.

What makes a video on this offensive so necessary isn’t the events in Lunar State, but what they may represent.

The regionalization of Sudan’s war as Ethiopia goes from being an observer to an active participant.

Now, before we do dive deep into the weeds on Ethiopia, let me talk about Front Stockco, which is our subscriberonly site.

Front Sto.

co is where we put out the extra detailed articles and videos that won’t fit here on the main channel, filling you in on the background of the biggest crisis gripping our world.

And yes, there is plenty of them to choose from right now.

For just $5 a month or $50 a year, you get two exclusive videos and two exclusive articles every week covering the wars in Iran, Sudan, Ethiopia, Ukraine, and more.

Basically, if you like what we do here on Warfronts, you’re probably going to like what we’ve got going on over at Front Sto.

Again, Front Stockhost, $5 a month, and it’ll keep you filled in on all the nerdy conflict and geopol details that we know you love.

I mean, you’re here deep into a warfront’s video.

And now let’s get back to the role of Ethiopia in Sudan’s devastating war.

Now the obvious question to ask at this stage is why? Why would Ethiopia itself a fragile state fighting multiple insurgencies be so keen to join what may be the world’s worst ongoing war? Certainly, Prime Minister Abi Ahmed spent the early years of the conflict trying to keep both sides guessing.

After provocatively receiving RSF chief Muhammad Dallo, a guy universally known as Amedi as a head of state in Addis Ababa, Abi later flew to the temporary military capital of Port Sudan, where he managed to arrange a direct call between General Alburn and the RSF’s chief backer, the leader of the UAE, Muhammad bin Zad.

So for Ethiopia to suddenly swing so decisively behind the RSF seems counterintuitive.

I mean, why bother trying so hard to keep up a veneer of neutrality if you’re suddenly going to go, “Nah, RSF for the win.

” The answer, as you probably guessed, is extremely complex and intimately tied into the shifting geopolitics, not just of Africa, but also of the wider Amina region.

For our purposes today, though, we can sketch out some basic drivers.

The most obvious of which is Ethiopia’s heavy reliance on the UAE.

Since Abby came to power in 2018, Abu Dhabi has bankrolled his regime, both helping the government carry out projects and sinking money into a gigantic palace the prime minister is building for himself.

More importantly, it was Emirati weapons shipments that allowed Addis Ababar to win the Tigray war, a war in which the Tigray People’s Liberation Front or TPLF came close to marching on the capital and overthrowing the government before being driven back by withering drone fire.

As such, Ali sees UAE backing as key to keeping his regime from toppling, especially as it fights an ongoing insurgency in Amhara region and gears up for another potential war in Tigray.

And since the UAE also backs the RSF in Sudan, perhaps it was only a matter of time before Abu Dhabi twisted Aby’s arm into overtly backing the paramilitaries.

As Africa expert Cameron Hubson has noted, quote, “Ethiopia is less motivated here by incentives, which seem absent, than by pressure from the UAE.

” Yet, there are reasons beyond merely keeping Abu Dhabi sweet, that Addis Ababar may have for getting involved in Sudan’s conflict.

And once again, they can be traced back to the Tigray war.

While most of the devastation was confined to Tigray region in northern Ethiopia or to the regions such as Amhara that the TPLF invaded in its counteroffensive, the war was also traumatic for the federal government in Addis Ababar.

As the crisis blew up, Sudan’s military took advantage of the distraction to move into the disputed Alpha Sharka borderlands, taking 90% of territory that Addis Ababar believes rightfully belongs to Ethiopia.

Nor did cartoons meddling stop there.

When the war ended, scores of TRAan fighters sought refuge in Sudan.

While the SAF has always denied harboring them, these protests fell apart in early 2025 when the TPLF’s Army 70 helped Sudan’s military liberate cartoon.

But the issue isn’t just bitterness at wartime interference.

Rather, Ethiopia fears that the Sudin army is now becoming more and more aligned with its mortal enemies.

For extremely complicated reasons that we don’t have time to get into today, a large faction of the TPLF is now drawing closer to its old enemy, Eratraa.

Eratraa believes with some justification that Abby wants to annex parts of its territory to open access to the sea, something the prime minister has called an existential issue for landlocked Ethiopia.

So, Asara is now arming the same Tigran rebels that the Sudin army is deepening and formalizing its ties with in the hopes of creating a deterrence.

At the same time, the SAF is also being pulled into a direct alliance with Eratraa.

The reasons aren’t hard to find.

Sudan’s military believes the war would be over if not for the UAE keeping the RSF afloat.

Eratraa is part of a coalesing anti-MRC alliance due to its own fears of Ethiopia.

Therefore, the two feel like they have a common enemy.

This alliance is already more than theoretical.

Eratraan airfields shelter Sudin fighter jets to keep them safe from RSF drone strikes.

Asara trains and arms anti-RSF groups in Dar 4 that are aligned with the SAF.

Clearly, Eratra’s hope is that the threat of SAF and TPLF intervention is enough to deter Ethiopia from attacking.

Yet, there’s another equally important factor at play here.

One connected not to Eratraa, but another of Ethiopia’s longtime foes, Egypt.

Now, if you’re already feeling exhausted keeping up with all of these acronyms and alliances, well, I don’t blame you.

In a recent piece on Front Stockco, we described the web of alliances spreading across the Mina region like this.

Were you to try and plot this all on a corkboard, it would wind up looking like something designed by an obsessive detective tracking a serial killer.

Endless lines of string crossing maps like spiderw webs while printed bug shots of the main players staring passively out.

But to really understand what’s at stake here, we need to sketch out yet another major rivalry.

This time between Addis Ababa and Gairo.

Tensions have been rising between Egypt and Ethiopia ever since the latter announced its Grand Ethiopian Renaissance dam or gird for short.

Spanning the blue Nile, the gird is meant to transform the nation by generating enormous amounts of hydroelectric energy.

In Addis Ababar, it’s seen as a symbol of national pride.

In Cairo, by contrast, it is seen as an example of those thieving Ethiopians threatening Egypt’s water.

As a nation that is basically one big desert, nearly all life in Egypt clings to either the coasts or the Nile River.

Down the Blue Nile and you suddenly have the ability to control the state’s access to the one thing it needs to survive, water.

As such, Egypt regards the G as a potential threat.

The Lowi Institute claims that Egypt’s growing alliance with the SAF is entirely because it fears a Sudan controlled by the RSF would its attempts at null diplomacy.

That might be overstating the claim, but it’s certainly true that the GR is one of the major factors driving Egyptian decision-making.

Another is the fear that a wider collapse of Sudan would drive enormous flows of refugees across their border.

Regardless, Cairo is not shy about the fact that it wants the SAF to win.

Egypt recently reinterpreted a joint defense agreement signed with Sudan years before as a pact specifically with the SAF.

While the Egyptian Air Force has begun using Turkish supplied drones to bomb RSF supply convoys leaving from eastern Libya where the warlord General Haftar is in the UAE’s pocket.

As we’ve covered in other videos, the attacks on RSF supply routes from Libya are part of a broader pattern emerging in the region as an alliance headed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey attempts to hobble the ambitions of a rival block coalesing around UAE and Israel.

Right now, these two blocks remain somewhat informal and some of the alliances have been scrambled by the Iran war, but they still represent an under reportported driver of affairs in the African horn with Somalia, long a UAE client, recently cancelling Abu Dhabi’s access to its ports due to its fears surrounding Israel’s recognition of the breakaway state of Somaliand, not to mention Ethiopia’s offer roughly 2 years ago to do the same in return for access to one of Somaliand’s ports.

The result of all of this is that the UAE is now finding it harder than ever to get weapons to the RSF with multiple routes now closed.

This has left Ethiopia as one of the few friendly countries that Abu Dhabi can rely on to supply the paramilitaries.

As Cameron Hudson told the Africa Report, quote, “Ethiopia has become the last natural place to do that.

” In short, Adis Ababar is entering the Sudanese war both because of UAE pressure, but also because it perceives a growing regional alliance that aims to contain it.

one in which old foes like Eratraa are joining forces with Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, and Tigran rebels that pose an active threat to the gird and Ethiopia’s quest to access the sea.

Meanwhile, Ethiopia’s neighbors are increasingly alarmed by what they see as an expansionist power that’s aligning itself with genocidal paramilitaries in Sudan, all while gearing up to attack Eratraa.

Unbelievably, we haven’t even touched on some of the wider implications of these hardening alliances like how South Sudan is currently descending into civil war with the SAF backing one faction while the government under Salvakia increasingly supports the RSF or how the involvement of South Sudan in Sudan civil war risks dragging in Uganda which has already deployed troops to keep KI in power in Juba.

Were a wider conflict to also pull in South Sudan, it would risk merging the Sudan war in Tigray war with yet another bloodbath.

After all, it’s believed that South Sudan’s own civil war, which ran along the fault lines seen in the country’s fighting today, was one of the deadliest in recent years, killing an estimated 400,000 people.

But time is short, so we won’t dig into that right now.

If you really want to know more, we covered South Sudan in a separate video earlier this year.

For now, we want to end this video by asking what may be the most important question of all.

What happens next? Given that 2026’s current ambition is apparently to be the new 1939, we’d love to end this video with a ray of hope.

the suggestion that actually all that’s needed is Abby Ahmed, General Alberani and Egypt’s President Cece to all go bowling together, crack open some Bud Lights, and realize that deep down the real friends were the ones they made along the way.

But given that this is Warfronts and not everybody lived happily ever after fronts, you could probably guess where this is going.

While there’s no guarantee that Sudan’s war is about to explode across its borders, the pieces are all in place for a once- ina generation catastrophe.

The potential flash points are as follows.

Even indirect Ethiopian involvement in Sudan risks a reaction from Eratraa, which could try to destabilize its southern neighbor by throwing its weight behind rebels in Amhara or Tigra.

At the same time, Adis Ababar seems intent on finishing Tigra’s rebels once and for all.

The end of February saw the Ethiopian military move heavy armor to the region’s borders.

And while widespread fighting never broke out, it’s been theorized that this is solely down to the Iran war causing a fuel crisis in Ethiopia, which would have hindered the army’s mobility.

Should Adis Ababa ultimately decide to attack Digra, it seems likely that the SAF might enter the war on the TPLF side.

And then there’s the alliance between the SAF and Egypt.

Should the SAF retaliate to the attacks in Blue Nile State with direct strikes in Ethiopia, perhaps to destroy the RSF training camp, it’s not inconceivable that a conflict between the two could lead to Egypt joining the fry.

Or hey, perhaps even Abby will make good on his threat to annex part of Eratraa to gain sea access and spark a regional confilration.

Of course, the reality is that none of these flash points exist in isolation, and that’s what makes this moment so dangerous.

Right now, there are thousands of potential triggers all over the region.

All it takes is one wrong move and suddenly everyone is fighting.

We may have jokingly compared 2026 to 1939 just a moment ago, but in the wider Mina region, it’s more like 1914, the year in which a complex web of alliances managed to pull an entire continent into war.

Yet, even if the much feared mega war never ignites, the recent news out of Sudan is still a grim reminder that the world’s worst war continues unabated.

This month, April, the Sudin war will mark its third anniversary.

Three years since a standoff between the SAF and the RSF turned cartoon into a war zone with fighting that quickly spread across the entire country.

Well, fast forward to 2026, and that fighting is still ongoing.

Together, the RSF and SPLMN are thought to still have maybe half a million men under arms, while the SAF is thought to have slightly more.

And while both have scored victories in recent months, neither side seems capable of delivering a knockout blow.

And as the war drags on, the atrocities mount.

It was only in October that the RSF overran the Darur city of Alfascia, unleashing a wave of mass killings that may rank among the worst atrocities seen this century.

While death tolls vary widely, a commonly accepted middle- range figure is 60,000 dead in slightly over a week.

By way of comparison, it took 21 months for the Hamas run health ministry to announce a similar body count in Gaza.

In short, whatever happens, Sudan’s tragedy seems set to continue.

A tragedy fueled by outside actors and ignored by the wider world, even as it risks plunging the Horn of Africa into a crisis that would make the Iran War look like child’s play.

Thank you for watching.