Isaias Afwerki has run Eritrea since independence in 1993, and in all that time, he has never been on particularly comfortable terms with the outside world. But there was a brief window, roughly between 2018 and 2022, when it looked like something might change. Abiy Ahmed arrived in Addis Ababa, the two men made peace, and Isaias was photographed smiling at summits. The lifting of UN sanctions in 2018 felt, at least on the surface, like the beginning of a thaw. Eritrea, it seemed, might slowly re-enter the world.
Then came the Tigray war. Eritrea plunged back into a different kind of darkness, this time armed, actively fighting inside Ethiopian territory, and responsible for documented atrocities in the very region it had feared and resented for decades. The war is formally over now, sealed by the Pretoria Agreement of November 2022. The question worth sitting with in 2026 is what Eritrea actually got from it, and what it gave away in the process. Was intervening in Tigray a strategic masterstroke for Isaias, or a miscalculation that has left his country more cornered than before?
Why Isaias went to war in the first place
Isaias Afwerki's decision to commit Eritrean Defence Forces to the fight against the Tigray People's Liberation Front was not driven by affection for Abiy Ahmed. It was driven by something older and far more personal. The TPLF had dominated Ethiopian politics from 1991 to 2018, and during that period, the relationship between Asmara and Addis Ababa was defined by a war, an unimplemented peace deal, and decades of cold, grinding hostility. The 1998 to 2000 Eritrea-Ethiopia war killed an estimated 70,000 to 100,000 people. The border was never properly demarcated despite an international boundary commission ruling in 2002. The TPLF government in Addis Ababa simply refused to hand over the towns awarded to Eritrea.
For Isaias, the TPLF were not just political opponents. They were the people who had humiliated him, who had made Eritrea's internationally recognised border unenforceable, and who had kept his country in a costly state of no-war-no-peace for nearly two decades. When Abiy Ahmed removed them from power in 2018 and then, in late 2020, launched a military operation to finish them off, Isaias saw an opportunity he had been waiting for since at least 2002. He took it.
Eritrean forces crossed into Tigray from the north, engaged in some of the heaviest fighting of the entire conflict, and played a significant role in the initial capture of Mekelle in November 2020. Eritrea's military contribution was not peripheral. Without it, the early phase of the federal government's campaign would have looked very different.
What Eritrea found in Tigray
The military gains came with a cost that the Eritrean government has never acknowledged publicly. Eritrean soldiers died in Tigray in numbers that no official statement has confirmed, but which survivors, journalists, and satellite evidence have documented extensively. Eritrean conscripts, many of them serving under indefinite national service with no clear end date, fought and died in a war whose official rationale their government never explained to them directly.
More damaging to Eritrea's standing internationally was what Eritrean forces did in Tigray. Multiple United Nations reports, investigations by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and the findings of the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission documented mass killings of civilians, widespread sexual violence, and systematic looting. The Axum massacre, in which Eritrean soldiers killed hundreds of civilians in a UNESCO World Heritage city, was one of the most thoroughly documented atrocities of the entire conflict. These were not allegations Eritrea could easily deflect. The evidence was simply too abundant.
Isaias denied it all. Eritrean state media continued operating as if Eritrean forces were not even present in Tigray for the first months of the war, despite the evidence accumulating in real time. When denial became impossible, the line shifted to justification and then to silence. None of it repaired the damage.
The diplomacy that followed
The international response to Eritrea's role in Tigray has been significant, if not as sharp as many human rights organisations would have liked. The United States and the European Union both imposed targeted sanctions on Eritrean individuals and entities connected to the conflict. Washington suspended security cooperation. The European Parliament passed resolutions calling for accountability. The Biden administration removed Eritrea from certain trade preferences under the African Growth and Opportunity Act.
None of these measures came close to the kind of pressure that would force a change in Eritrean behaviour. Isaias has governed under sanctions before, and his government's model of near-total self-reliance, combined with revenue from diaspora taxation and mining, gives him some insulation. But the diplomatic damage is real in a subtler way. The countries and institutions that might otherwise have engaged with Eritrea on economic development, on healthcare infrastructure, on education, have pulled further back. The international goodwill that Eritrea briefly accumulated after the 2018 peace deal has been spent, and there is no obvious path to recovering it without accountability that Isaias will not provide.
The African Union, headquartered in Addis Ababa and historically reluctant to publicly criticise member states on human rights grounds, largely stayed quiet. The Pretoria Agreement that ended the war made no mention of Eritrea and imposed no obligations on it, even though Eritrean forces were acknowledged to still be present in Tigray at the time of signing. That absence suited Asmara, but it also meant Eritrea had no formal role in whatever came next, no seat at the table, and no credit for any eventual stabilisation.
The Abiy-Isaias relationship in 2026
The partnership between Abiy Ahmed and Isaias Afwerki that made the Tigray war possible remains one of the more complicated bilateral relationships in the region. On paper, the two leaders maintain their 2018 peace agreement. The border crossings that reopened after decades of closure have stayed open, at least partially. There is trade, there is movement of people, and there are no active hostilities.
But the relationship has never had the warmth that the 2018 handshakes suggested. Isaias is not the kind of leader who forms warm alliances. He is transactional, suspicious, and has governed Eritrea on the premise that every neighbour and every external power is a potential threat. He aligned with Abiy because their interests converged on the TPLF question. Now that the TPLF has been militarily defeated and politically marginalised, the shared enemy that held the alliance together is weaker.
There are real tensions beneath the surface. The border demarcation that the 2018 peace deal was supposed to finally implement has still not been fully resolved on the ground. Ethiopia controls territory that the boundary commission awarded to Eritrea in 2002, and Abiy Ahmed has shown no urgency in handing it back. Isaias raised this point explicitly in a 2022 interview, in terms that were careful but pointed. The territorial question has not gone away. It has simply been set aside while other crises dominate.
Is Eritrea more secure now?
In the narrow military sense, the answer is probably yes, at least for now. The TPLF's military capacity has been shattered. The Tigray Defence Forces that had pushed Eritrean forces back across the border in mid-2021 and came within striking distance of Addis Ababa no longer exist as a coherent fighting force. The specific threat that obsessed Isaias for twenty years, a hostile, well-armed TPLF governing Tigray and using it as a base of pressure on Eritrea, has been removed.
That is not nothing. For a leader whose entire political philosophy is organised around the premise of a hostile external environment, the weakening of his most direct enemy matters. The northern border no longer looks like an imminent threat. Eritrea does not face the prospect of a TPLF return to federal power in Addis Ababa in any near-term scenario.
But security is not only military. The economic situation in Eritrea in 2026 remains extremely difficult by any measure. The country has one of the highest emigration rates per capita in the world. Tens of thousands of young Eritreans leave every year, many through the dangerous Sahara and Mediterranean routes, because the combination of indefinite military conscription, limited economic opportunity, and political repression leaves them with few alternatives. This is not a problem that the Tigray war resolved. If anything, the additional deaths and the prolonged deployment of conscripts into Tigray deepened the sense among many Eritreans that there was no future at home worth waiting for.
International isolation also has practical costs that compound over time. Foreign investment does not come. International financial institutions do not engage. The talent that leaves does not come back. Eritrea's economy has been described by some economists as running on remittances, minerals, and the coerced labour of conscripts. That model can sustain a government, but it cannot build a country.
The harder question about what actually changed
The honest answer to the question this piece set out to ask is that Eritrea is simultaneously in a stronger military position and a more deeply isolated political one than it was in 2020. Isaias got what he most wanted, a weakened TPLF, an open border with Ethiopia, and the satisfaction of having finally reversed what he considered a long injustice. He did not get accountability, international legitimacy, a functioning economy, or a country that young people want to stay in.
The deeper problem is structural. Eritrea's political system has no mechanism for the kind of course correction that might allow it to trade its international pariah status for something more constructive. Isaias does not hold elections. He has no obvious successor. The government has no opposition, no free press, no independent civil society. The institutions that might push back on a foreign policy that has cost the country so much simply do not exist. This means that whatever comes after the Tigray war is not the product of a national conversation about what Eritrea wants to be. It is, as it has always been, the product of what one man decides.
That is Eritrea's deepest isolation: not the diplomatic kind, which can shift with circumstances, but the internal kind, in which an entire country's direction is determined by a single ageing leader with no one willing or able to tell him when he has pushed too far. The Tigray war may have answered the TPLF question. But it has done nothing to answer the Eritrea question, which is what this country is for, and who it belongs to, beyond the man in the palace in Asmara.