Why the World Ignored the 21st Century's Deadliest War

Of all the conflicts to take place entirely in this blood-soaked century, which has been the deadliest? With so many to choose from, it is difficult to say. Perhaps Ukraine, where vicious fighting continues to rage. Perhaps Syria, with its bitter civil war that lasted a decade.

Or it could be Yemen, or Afghanistan, or perhaps even Mexico’s drug war. Few would guess the actual answer: Ethiopia’s Tigray War. Taking place between November 2020 and November 2022, the Tigray War was one of the bloodiest civil conflicts this generation has seen. At its height, as many as one million soldiers were fighting, with a thousand people dying every day.

Overall, it is thought 600,000 lost their lives. Yet, somehow, the world seemed to miss this conflagration. While fighting in Ukraine and Syria dominated headlines, the Tigray War passed silently by, like a ship in the night.

A Scale of Destruction Not Seen for Decades

When the Tigray War officially ended in November of 2022, it left behind a shattered land over which unbelievable volumes of blood had been spilled. Taking place mostly within the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, it had seen local armed forces clash with the central government, in a catastrophe that dragged in not just other states’ militia, but also the military of neighboring Eritrea. With battles on a jaw-dropping scale and atrocities against civilians, it was simply one of the biggest conflicts of our time—as shocking and intense as anything happening elsewhere.

Yet it is only when looking at the estimated death tolls that the true scope of the Tigray War becomes clear. Since exact casualty figures are unknown, there are a range of estimates, some lower, some higher. But they all tell a similar story of large-scale suffering.

The African Union’s lead negotiator in peace talks, Olusegun Obasanjo, put the number of deaths at 600,000. Shortly after the conflict ended, the USA’s ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, gave her government’s estimate of over half a million dead. The EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, meanwhile, has claimed anywhere between 600,000 and 800,000 were killed in the conflict.

The higher number, if proved, would place the Tigray War on the same level as the Rwanda Genocide. These distressing figures were backed up by researchers at the University of Ghent in Belgium, who tried to track deaths as the conflict was unfolding. By analyzing field reports and using models to extrapolate civilian suffering, the team estimated a range of between 200,000 and 300,000 battlefield deaths, and between 300,000 and 400,000 civilians killed.

Speaking to El Pais, researcher Jan Nyssen estimated that 10 percent had died due to direct actions like bombings and atrocities, 30 percent had died due to lack of access to healthcare in the conflict zone, while a staggering 60 percent had starved to death. To appreciate just how shocking these figures really are, perhaps the best comparison is to other 21st-century conflicts. The Syrian Civil War, taking place mostly between 2011 and 2021, was defined by chaos and atrocity, with different factions fighting bitterly in the shadow of civilian mass murders.

But even this nightmare, which included the conflict against ISIS, is thought to have killed fewer. The UN, in 2022, estimated around 350,000 casualties. The Ukraine War has not killed so many either.

Western powers estimate tens of thousands of dead soldiers on both sides, with perhaps another 100,000 civilians killed. Yemen, Darfur, Myanmar, Mexico’s drug war—as awful as they all are, none resulted in so many bodies. In fact, the Tigray War’s only contender is the Second Congo War, which led to maybe 3 million fatalities.

Yet this was a 20th-century war, born of the aftermath of the Rwanda Genocide, that spilled over into the new millennium. For a purely 21st-century war, Tigray is untouched. The Ethiopian government maintains that overall fatalities were closer to 80,000, but there are good reasons to suspect the Ethiopian government is not a reliable source—not least because of their central role in this east African apocalypse.

Decades of Bad Blood: The TPLF and Ethiopia’s Ethnic Fault Lines

While the main focus is the conflict’s death toll and how it came to be widely ignored, this cannot be discussed without first explaining what happened. The Tigray War was extremely complex, and what follows is a basic account of its major points. One of the most critical factors was the history of bad blood between the Tigrayans and some of Ethiopia’s other ethnic groups.

Prior to the war breaking out, Tigrayans had held a stranglehold on national politics for 27 years in the form of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or TPLF. Coming to power in 1991, the TPLF were part of the alliance that overthrew the Derg—the Marxist military junta that had ruled Ethiopia with an iron fist since the 1970s. The Derg had been responsible for awful atrocities against Tigrayans.

The Ethiopian Famine of the mid-1980s was at least in part so deadly because the Derg used it as cover to starve thousands of their enemies. So when the TPLF gained power in the form of President-turned-Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, it seemed only fair that Tigrayans should get a shot at the top job. But TPLF rule would not be without controversy.

While Zenawi’s autocracy turbocharged Ethiopia’s development, his government also marginalized other minorities: such as the Amhara, Somali, and Oromo. In Tigray itself, local forces committed abuse against the Walqaytes. Each of these groups is actually bigger than the Tigrayans, yet careful political maneuvering meant the TPLF were always near the pinnacle of power.

That continued even after Zenawi’s 2012 death. Right up till 2018, the TPLF kept running things as they always had—as part of a coalition of four ethnic parties that they always managed to dominate. Then came the mother of all political earthquakes.

In 2018, the four-party coalition made Abiy Ahmed its leader. An Oromo, Abiy broke the Tigrayan stranglehold on Ethiopia for the first time in decades. By 2019, he had dissolved the four-party coalition, creating the new Prosperity Party—the same coalition as before, only now minus the TPLF.

For their part, the TPLF retreated to their base in northern Tigray to lick their wounds and wait for the next general election, scheduled for 2020. But the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world, and Abiy took it as the perfect excuse to delay the elections. In Tigray, the TPLF reacted with nuclear outrage.

Rather than follow orders, they held scheduled regional elections in defiance of the government, warning that any attempts to stop the vote in Tigray would be considered an act of war. When the regional ballots were counted that September, the TPLF had won a resounding victory.

From Limited Incursion to Total War: November 2020 to November 2022

Celebrations would be short-lived. No sooner had the TPLF declared victory than Abiy began publicly accusing them of attacking government bases to loot weapons. To this day, it is uncertain how true these accusations were.

What is true, though, is that on November 4, 2020, Abiy ordered National Defense Forces into Tigray on a military operation designed to bring the region to heel. Instead, he would wind up almost drowning Ethiopia in a sea of blood. What began as small-scale clashes quickly grew in intensity as militias from the neighboring Amhara region and Eritrea joined on the Ethiopian government’s side.

At first, it looked like the TPLF had been crushed, that the war would end with an easy victory for Abiy. But then came the 2021 summer counteroffensive that shook the nation. Sweeping out of their bases in the mountains, the TPLF rolled over Ethiopia like a tsunami.

By fall, they had retaken Tigray. By the end of the year, they had expelled Eritrea’s troops across the border. Come 2022, and the rebels were marching toward the capital of Addis Ababa, far south of Tigray.

A shock TPLF victory looked like it was just around the corner. But the rebels were pushed back to their powerbase, as Ethiopia deployed powerful Turkish and UAE drones to regain the advantage. After a short ceasefire, the conflict then re-erupted in the fall of 2022.

This time, it was worse than ever. With Eritrea conscripting all men between 18 and 50 to fight, Amhara regional forces running wild, and Ethiopia’s federal forces using human wave tactics, Tigray became one giant kill zone. This is the era when a thousand were dying every day, when the clashing of up to one million men made it likely the biggest war being fought anywhere in the world.

Finally, in early November 2022, the Tigray conflict reached its bitter end. At a peace conference in Pretoria, South Africa, the TPLF agreed to permanently disarm and demobilize, and hand control of Tigray to the federal authorities. In return, the Ethiopian government agreed to restore and rebuild the ruined region, and take part in a transitional justice program.

Just like that, this century’s deadliest war was over—except, it wasn’t. Not really. Although the fighting had stopped, there was still the sheer number of fatalities to contend with.

To figure out how a region of 6 million could have witnessed 600,000 deaths in just two years.

Massacres, Ethnic Cleansing, and Human Wave Attacks

No civil conflict is ever orderly. Occasionally, though, one goes from peace to widespread atrocity in the blink of an eye. Usually, this is due to grievances that have been simmering under the surface for decades—religious animosity, as in Syria, or ethnic rivalry, as in the collapse of Yugoslavia.

In the case of the Tigray War, old tensions between Tigrayans and the Amhara and Walqayte turned what was sold as a limited military incursion into a disaster zone in mere days. The atrocities started within hours of Abiy ordering the assault on Tigray. Government forces announced their arrival by shelling villages, killing scores of civilians.

The first known massacre occurred on November 9, five days into the conflict. In the small town of Mai Kadra, near the border with Sudan, Tigrayans attacked Amhara civilians, using machetes and axes to hack them to death. Hours later, an Amhara militia rode into town and returned the favor, slaughtering Tigrayan civilians.

Overall, 229 people were killed. The massacre set the tone for the rest of the war—a war in which Tigrayans made up the majority of casualties, but in which all sides committed terrible crimes. By November 19, 2020, credible reports were filtering out of federal troops burning villages, destroying livestock, and summarily executing civilians suspected of supporting the TPLF.

In 2022, Human Rights Watch released a long report on the conflict titled “We Will Erase You From this Land,” after a particularly chilling quote by an Amhara Special Forces officer. The organization described a whirlwind of death sweeping through Tigray, placing heavy blame on Amhara militia for the atrocities. They detailed how Amhara security forces acting under newly appointed Amhara and Walqayte officials had been responsible for extrajudicial executions, rape, and other acts of sexual violence.

Tigrayan civilians had been funneled into makeshift camps, where they were beaten, tortured, and murdered. Fano militia entered towns the government had subdued and walked down the street shooting anyone they saw, until the bodies piled so high that a tractor was needed to remove them all. At its height, Human Rights Watch reported gross violations of human rights including rapes, the mutilation of women and girls to ensure infertility, mass killings, and torture.

No side was completely innocent. After Eritrean forces started committing war crimes against Tigrayans, Tigrayans located refugees from Eritrea and murdered them in bloody revenge killings. When the TPLF’s counteroffensive saw it seize control of swathes of Amhara and Afar states, more blood was shed.

In the final weeks, human wave attacks saw hundreds upon hundreds cut down on killing fields worse than even those around Bakhmut in Ukraine.

The Blockade: Starvation and Medical Collapse as Weapons of War

While civilian casualties outstripped battlefield deaths, violent deaths are estimated to have made up less than half of all those killed in the Tigray War. To really understand what made this conflict so deadly requires looking at the most controversial action of all: the decision Abiy took at the beginning of the war to blockade Tigray. From the moment federal forces reached the border on November 4, 2020, the Tigray region was sealed off from the outside world.

Cell phone service and internet were cut. Roads were blockaded. Routes out were patrolled by armed men.

The goal was to create an impassable barrier, a way to ensure nothing could get in or out of Ethiopia’s restive region. And that “nothing” included two extremely vital things: food and medicines. The impact the blockade had on healthcare is thought to be responsible for 30 percent of all civilian casualties.

With no regular supplies or humanitarian aid allowed in, Tigray ran out of medical necessities—things like gauze and antiseptics essential for treating war wounds. Reports from the time talk of nurses reduced to trying to clean wounds with warm salt water. It also included civilian medicines, like antibiotics, insulin, and even vaccines.

No one in Tigray received a Covid-19 shot until the ceasefire in the summer of 2022. In the city of Mekele, Tigray’s last working maternity hospital during the conflict reported a fivefold increase in women dying during childbirth. At the University of Ghent, researchers tracking the conflict found that Ethiopia’s overall mortality rate jumped in those two years from 6 per 1,000 to 18 per 1,000—as bad as it was back in 1990, just as the nation was emerging from famine and civil war.

Grim as the lack of medicines was, it was the blockade on food supplies that was the real killer. Prior to the war, Tigray was a region that was mostly self-sufficient. People grew nearly enough to sustain themselves, and imported the small bit extra that they needed.

Once conflict broke out, that self-sufficiency vanished. Government-aligned forces torched crops and killed livestock. Militia confiscated harvests.

Fertilizers were redirected to other parts of the country. Then, once agriculture had been decimated, the government refused to allow any food shipments or humanitarian aid in. What followed was a famine not seen in Ethiopia since the 1980s.

By spring of 2021, the international Integrated Food Security Phase Classification placed 5.5 million people at emergency levels of hunger, with another 350,000 at catastrophe levels. Tigray’s pre-war population was around 6 million. The blockade was starving nearly the entire region.

When hunger really took hold, the University of Ghent research project estimates between 437 and 914 people were starving to death every single day. It was a deliberate policy of using hunger to wage war—to break the will of the population, to drive them into camps and bleed local support for the TPLF dry.

The Information Blackout: How a Government Hid a War from the World

While all this explains how the war came to be so deadly, it does not explain the other great mystery: how the world broadly came to ignore it. Not in the sense that no one was writing about it—contemporary articles on the crisis can be easily found—but in the sense that it seemed to drive no global conversation, make few headlines, and spark no concerted worldwide effort to stop the killing. Tigray became the 21st century’s invisible war.

In August 2022, the head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, made an explosive claim about the global response to Tigray. The WHO chief explicitly linked the silence to racism, saying: “I haven’t heard in the last few months any head of state talking about the Tigray situation anywhere in the developed world.

Anywhere. Why? Maybe the reason is the color of the skin of the people in Tigray.”

In April of 2022, he had claimed that the greater attention shown to the Ukraine War was the result of racial bias, declaring: “I don’t know if the world really gives equal attention to black and white lives.” There are often racial dynamics at work in crisis reporting, and it is something that people need to take seriously. However, it is not at all clear that this was the sole factor with the Tigray War.

While it is true Ukraine received far more coverage in 2022, the conflict in Tigray had already been running for well over a year by that point. One could plausibly construct a theory that bad timing kept it off the front pages—it broke out at the height of the pandemic and a divisive US presidential election—but there is likely a much simpler reason: the blockade. When Abiy’s forces sealed off Tigray, they did not just stop people from escaping and aid from getting in.

They also created an information blackout. One that saw almost no journalists able to access the affected regions, while a lack of electricity and service meant no one inside could broadcast the atrocities they were witnessing. There is no doubt that this was intentional.

As well as destroying the TPLF, the government wanted to make sure no outside actor would step in to stop the war. In our hyper-visual culture, that lack of images had exactly the effect Abiy wanted. Unable to see for themselves what was going on, the global public simply let the war pass them by.

Slate published a piece on the effects of the blackout and how it helped shape public opinion, looking at other crises that governments are hiding from journalists and social media—such as China’s persecution of the Uyghurs, or Uganda’s post-election unrest—and concluded that “an information blackout keeps the news, and with it the global sense of crisis, remote.” A flood of images, videos, and content relating to a modern war—such as in Ukraine, Iraq, or Syria—ensures that it is always at the forefront of global opinion. But find a way to turn off that tap, and watch it disappear from the headlines.

The Death of Radical Openness: Lessons from Tigray’s Silenced War

Abiy’s government did not just cut off all communications in Tigray and block international journalists from entering. They expelled UN officials and foreign observers. They used anti-fake news legislation to jail and silence local reporters.

Aid workers who did manage to enter Tigray were barred from taking anything that could carry images, like hard drives or USBs. Cell phones were searched by government forces to make sure they contained no pictures or recordings. The siege of Tigray did not just succeed in sealing the region off.

It also succeeded in making sure the world did not care—in creating a global blind spot in our vision, where people knew bad things were happening, but lacked the tools to see and understand what those bad things might be. It is a terrifying lesson. A determined government can, in the most connected era in history, still censor a massive war taking place, effectively erasing its atrocities from human consciousness.

Worse, it is a lesson other governments seem eager to follow. Back in the 1990s, the internet promised a future of radical openness, when those in power would be incapable of hiding anything they did. The Tigray War represents the death of that dream.

If Ethiopia’s government can effectively hush up the deadliest war of the century, the question becomes what bigger, better-funded nations might be capable of concealing. The Tigray War blackout shows why the world still desperately needs journalists and freedom of the press, and why there should be deep wariness of governments who try to limit those things. Because the victims of the Tigray conflict deserved more than to die in secrecy.

After so much suffering, the least they deserve is for their stories—for their people’s tragedy—to be better known.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the Tigray War considered the deadliest conflict of the 21st century?

Estimates from the African Union’s lead negotiator, the US ambassador to the UN, and EU officials converge on approximately 600,000 deaths between November 2020 and November 2022—more than the Syrian Civil War’s estimated 350,000 casualties or combined Ukraine War military and civilian deaths. Researchers at the University of Ghent estimated that 60 percent of those deaths were caused by starvation, 30 percent by lack of healthcare due to the blockade, and only 10 percent by direct violence. No other purely 21st-century conflict has produced comparable death tolls.

What triggered the Tigray War and why did it escalate so rapidly?

The immediate trigger was Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed ordering federal forces into Tigray on November 4, 2020, after the TPLF defied his authority by holding regional elections he had postponed due to Covid-19. Escalation was rapid because Eritrea and Amhara regional militias joined the Ethiopian government’s side, and decades of ethnic grievances between Tigrayans and the Amhara turned what was presented as a limited security operation into a multi-party war featuring mass atrocities within days of the first shots.

How did the Ethiopian government’s blockade of Tigray drive the death toll so high?

From November 4, 2020, onward, Abiy’s forces sealed Tigray from the outside world—cutting cell service and internet, blockading roads, and preventing food and medicine from entering. The blockade collapsed the region’s healthcare system, with one Mekele maternity hospital reporting a fivefold rise in women dying in childbirth. It also destroyed food security: government-aligned forces torched crops and confiscated harvests, while aid was blocked, pushing 5.5 million people to emergency hunger levels and 350,000 to catastrophe levels by spring 2021.

Why did the world largely ignore the Tigray War as it unfolded?

The WHO chief attributed global indifference partly to racial bias. But the primary mechanism was the information blackout the blockade created: journalists could not access the region, electricity and communications were cut so no one inside could broadcast what was happening, and aid workers who reached Tigray were banned from carrying hard drives, USBs, or phones with images. Ethiopia also expelled UN officials and jailed local reporters under anti-fake-news laws. Without visual evidence, the global public largely did not engage with the crisis.

How and when did the Tigray War end?

The war ended at a peace conference in Pretoria, South Africa, in early November 2022, where the TPLF agreed to permanently disarm and demobilize and hand control of Tigray back to federal authorities. In return, the Ethiopian government agreed to rebuild the ruined region and participate in a transitional justice program. The fighting had reached its most intense phase just weeks before the peace deal, with Eritrea conscripting all men aged 18 to 50 and human wave attacks producing a death rate estimated at around a thousand per day.

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