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Ethiopia’s government has forged an alliance with Turkey amid reports that it wants to deploy armed Turkish drones in its bitter war against forces from the Tigray region.
Abiy Ahmed, Ethiopia’s prime minister, signed a military cooperation agreement on a visit to Ankara in August with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The details of the agreement have not been published, but officials told Reuters in October that Ethiopia had requested Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2 drones, considered to be the most effective munitions of their type in the world.
Abiy’s trip came two months after Ethiopian forces had been expelled from Tigray’s capital, Mekelle, and before an October air and ground counter-offensive, which appears to have been rapidly pushed back.
Alex de Waal, the director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, said: “The fighting is already at an intense scale and ferocity, with perhaps 100,000 soldiers already dead on the Ethiopian side. Five million civilians are in need of food aid as a result of the conflict, and yet [Ethiopia] is still shopping for drones and other arms.”
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