Abiy Ahmed came to power in 2018 promising to end wars, not manage them. Within four years he had presided over one of the deadliest conflicts in recent African history in Tigray, overseen a deterioration of security in Oromia that predated his government but has worsened under it, and triggered a new conflict in Amhara that transformed a region that had been a pillar of the federal government's support base into an active insurgency zone. At the same time, he has pursued a foreign policy agenda of striking boldness: a Nobel Peace Prize for the Eritrea peace deal, a confrontational push for Red Sea access that has reshaped Horn geopolitics, and an assertive regional positioning that has placed Ethiopia in direct tension with Somalia, Egypt, and Eritrea simultaneously.
The question that observers of Ethiopia have been asking since the Tigray war ended is whether these two tracks, internal fragmentation and external ambition, are sustainable together. The answer is becoming clearer in 2026, and it is not reassuring for either Ethiopian stability or regional cohesion.
The Amhara conflict: a new kind of threat
The emergence of the Fano as a serious insurgent force in Amhara region is the most significant internal security development in Ethiopia since the Tigray war. The Fano, loosely organised Amhara militia fighters who mobilised initially as auxiliary forces during the Tigray war, turned their weapons against the federal government after Abiy's administration began disarming regional special forces in 2023 in what was presented as a move toward a unified national military command.
The Amhara regional government and significant portions of the Amhara political establishment saw the disarmament as a threat to their security at a moment when the Tigray war had left unresolved questions about contested territories, particularly around western Tigray, where Amhara forces had occupied areas during the war that the Pretoria peace agreement did not clearly assign to either region. The Fano mobilisation that followed was not a simple response to disarmament. It drew on deep Amhara political grievances about the ethnic federalism framework that Abiy inherited, about the status of Amhara communities in regions claimed by other ethnic groups, and about a sense that the Abiy government, itself Oromo-led, was not reliably aligned with Amhara interests.
The conflict in Amhara has produced over a million displaced people, significant civilian casualties, and a pattern of fighting in towns and cities across the region that has not been resolved by either military operations or negotiation. The federal military has used air strikes and ground operations that human rights organisations have documented as causing civilian harm. The Fano have targeted government infrastructure and officials. Neither side has been willing to accept the terms the other has offered for de-escalation, and the conflict is entering its third year with no clear military resolution in prospect.
What makes the Amhara conflict particularly significant for Ethiopia's overall stability is that Amhara has historically been one of the regions most integrated into the Ethiopian federal state's political and military structures. The emergence of a serious insurgency in Amhara is not equivalent to peripheral conflicts in historically restive areas. It represents a fracture at the centre of the state's own coalition, one that has absorbed significant military resources, damaged the federal government's legitimacy in a core constituency, and created security conditions that are affecting economic activity across a region of some 25 million people.
Oromia: the long war that will not end
The conflict between the federal government and the Oromo Liberation Army, the armed wing associated with the Oromo Liberation Front, predates Abiy Ahmed's government and has continued despite the fact that Abiy himself is Oromo and came to power partly on the political momentum of Oromo protest movements. The expectation in 2018 was that an Oromo prime minister would be able to reach a political settlement with the OLA that had eluded his predecessors. That expectation has not been met.
Peace talks between the federal government and OLF leadership have started and stalled repeatedly. The OLA, sometimes called Shane, has continued military operations in Oromia's western and southern zones, targeting military posts, government officials, and in some documented cases, civilians from non-Oromo communities in contested areas. Federal military responses have included operations that human rights organisations have documented as resulting in civilian deaths and displacement.
The OLA conflict is structurally harder to resolve than the Amhara conflict in one important respect: it involves a genuine political dispute about the terms of Oromo inclusion in the Ethiopian federal system, one that Abiy's own political party, the Oromo Prosperity Party, represents one answer to but that the OLA represents a different answer to. The two answers are not compatible within a single political framework, which is why the conflict persists despite the ethnic identity of the government's leadership.
The practical consequence for Ethiopia's overall security situation is a second active conflict front that ties down federal military resources, creates displacement and economic disruption in Oromia's agricultural zones, and sustains an insurgency that has proven capable of continuing operations despite repeated military offensives. The OLA is not capable of overthrowing the federal government. The federal government has not been able to militarily defeat the OLA. The result is an ongoing, low-intensity conflict that is now in its fifth year under Abiy's leadership with no resolution in sight.
Tigray: fragile peace, unresolved grievances
The Pretoria Agreement signed in November 2022 ended the Tigray war's active phase. It did not resolve the underlying issues that made the war possible, and its implementation has been incomplete in ways that create genuine risk of renewed conflict.
The agreement required the disarmament of Tigrayan forces, the restoration of services to Tigray, the withdrawal of Eritrean forces from Ethiopian territory, and the resolution of contested border areas including western Tigray, which Amhara forces occupied during the war. Three years after the agreement, Eritrean forces have not fully withdrawn. The status of western Tigray remains unresolved. Services have been partially restored but not comprehensively. The humanitarian situation in Tigray, while improved from the war years, remains serious, with food insecurity affecting large portions of the population.
The Tigrayan political leadership, operating through the Tigray People's Liberation Front, which has been partially restored as a legal political entity, has publicly expressed frustration with the pace of Pretoria implementation. That frustration has not yet translated into a resumption of hostilities, partly because the TPLF's military capacity was significantly degraded by the war and partly because the international guarantors of the agreement, including the African Union, have maintained engagement. But the conditions for renewed conflict, unresolved territorial disputes, incomplete implementation, Eritrean forces still present in some areas, and deep grievances on all sides, remain in place.
The external agenda and what it costs internally
Against this backdrop of three active or fragile conflict situations, Abiy Ahmed has pursued an external agenda that would be ambitious for a government managing none of them. The Somaliland MOU, the sustained diplomatic push for Red Sea access, the assertive positioning within IGAD, the cultivation of relationships with Gulf states and with Turkey as counterweights to traditional Western partners: these are the moves of a government that sees itself as a rising regional power rather than one managing existential internal challenges.
The logic of this positioning is not irrational. Ethiopia's weight in the Horn, its population, its economy, its role in regional institutions, genuinely makes it the indispensable actor in many regional dynamics. A government that allows internal fragmentation to dominate its agenda risks ceding that regional role to other actors. Abiy has made a calculation that projecting regional strength is itself partly a domestic political tool, that Ethiopians of multiple ethnic backgrounds respond to a leader who asserts the country's place as a major power, and that the external assertiveness generates international relationships and resources that help manage internal challenges.
But the costs of the dual track are real and accumulating. Military resources committed to the Amhara and Oromia conflicts are resources not available for the kinds of security sector reform and reconstitution that would give Ethiopia a more capable and professional force. The diplomatic tensions with Somalia, Egypt, and Eritrea simultaneously create a regional environment in which Ethiopia faces coordinated pushback rather than isolated bilateral friction. The Somaliland MOU, which was the most aggressive of the external moves, produced a Somalia-Egypt alignment that has strategic implications well beyond the specific port question it was nominally about.
The coordination problem between internal and external
The deeper problem with the dual track is a coordination failure that is becoming more visible in 2026. Ethiopia's external assertiveness depends on projecting the image of a coherent, capable state. That image is undermined by the visible reality of multiple active internal conflicts that the state has not been able to resolve through either military operations or political negotiation. Foreign partners who might otherwise support Ethiopia's regional ambitions find it harder to do so when the government's domestic legitimacy is visibly contested in multiple major regions.
The Amhara conflict in particular has damaged Ethiopia's international standing in ways that compound the external pressures from the Somalia-Egypt alignment. Western governments that were broadly supportive of Abiy's early reform agenda have become more cautious as documentation of civilian harm in Amhara has accumulated. That caution limits the diplomatic support available to Ethiopia on issues where Western backing would be valuable, including on the GERD negotiations with Egypt and on the Somaliland recognition question.
Abiy's response to this coordination problem has been to double down on the external assertiveness while pursuing military rather than political solutions to the internal conflicts. The calculation seems to be that visible regional strength can substitute for domestic political settlements that have proven elusive. Whether that substitution is sustainable depends partly on military outcomes in Amhara and Oromia that are not currently trending in the government's favour, and partly on whether the external coalition that has formed around concern about Ethiopian assertiveness, with Egypt, Somalia, and Eritrea as its core, develops the coherence and resources to impose real costs.
What is clear in 2026 is that the dual gamble is generating real costs on both tracks simultaneously. The internal conflicts are not being resolved, and the external assertiveness is producing a regional alignment against Ethiopia that limits its room for manoeuvre precisely when it needs flexibility. That is not necessarily a terminal situation. Ethiopia has managed multiple internal conflicts while maintaining state coherence before, and regional alignments in the Horn are notoriously unstable. But the combination of pressures Abiy is managing in 2026 is more demanding than at any point since the Tigray war's active phase, and the tools available for managing them are more constrained.