On November third, 2020, the AU was a diplomatic hub. By November fourth, the tension was visible. People stopped talking to each other in the hallways. Delegations suddenly vanished. There was no eye contact. Among youth representatives and diplomats there were rumors about every press release. What was the statement going to be? How would it affect the war that was about to happen? We were expecting a lot of disagreements. Were they even going to agree on all the specific details on the statement?
I had a lot of Tigrayan colleagues, and they were terrified. They did not know what was going to happen, or if they would be in the headquarters tomorrow. The Tigrayans there as AU staff members, the translators, and a lot of Tigray individuals were scared that they could be arrested or locked in undisclosed locations. I do not know anyone who was actually arrested. There were a lot of security crackdowns, and a lot of domestic security tensions in Addis Ababa. It was chaos.
The atmosphere lasted until I left in 2021. It was still intense. It was still quiet. It was full of uncertainty.
That was Addis Ababa in November 2020. From 2019 to 2021 I was Somalia’s Youth Representative to the African Union, and I worked from its headquarters.
Alamein, 4 October 2026
On Sunday 4 October, four men met in New Alamein, on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, and agreed a text. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi hosted. Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud of Somalia and Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who chairs Sudan’s Sovereignty Council, signed on. The declaration covers the Nile, the Red Sea, Sudan’s unity and Somalia’s sovereignty. It does not name Ethiopia once.
Ethiopia answered anyway. The next day its foreign ministry said geography and history cannot be changed by political rhetoric and that acts through proxies or aggression would not change the facts on the ground. It named none of the four countries.
On Tuesday 6 October, a commander of the Tigray Peace Force, a militia allied with Ethiopia’s government, said Eritrean personnel had entered Adigrat. On Wednesday, he said, they reached Idaga Hamus. The conflict monitor ACLED said Eritrean troops crossed at Zalambessa and came under drone attack. Residents of Adigrat told Reuters they saw military vehicles carrying dozens of Eritrean soldiers pass through town. The Associated Press, which carried the commander’s and ACLED’s accounts, said it could not verify them. Eritrea’s information minister accused Ethiopia of using a self-defence story to cover a war of aggression. Reports differ on whether he has confirmed or denied that troops are in Tigray.
I am not saying the declaration caused any of this. I found nothing that connects the summit to a troop movement, and the text creates no joint force. What I am saying is simpler. Four leaders wrote a principle down, and within three days one of them was reported to have sent soldiers into a neighbour’s war. A principle that is never tested is only a sentence, so I want to test it.
What the four signed
The declaration affirms respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, good-neighbourly relations and a rejection of interference in internal affairs. It backs political solutions to conflicts. On Sudan, it backs the country’s unity, rejects “parallel entities” and rejects support for mercenaries. On Somalia, it opposes recognition of Somaliland. It says Red Sea governance is the responsibility of the coastal states, and it rejects unilateral measures on the Nile that harm the two downstream countries. A follow-up mechanism will meet periodically. It has not met yet, as far as I can find.
Everyone reading it knows who the Nile and Red Sea lines are about. Al Jazeera says the text appears to push back against several recent Ethiopian policies. Ethiopia has said it supplies about 85 percent of the Nile’s flow and that its nearest border is about 30 miles from the sea. Its own case is not small.
Four countries, four different problems
It is easy to write about Alamein as one bloc. The record does not support that.
Egypt’s quarrel is the Nile. Ethiopia inaugurated its dam in September 2025, and Cairo wants the language on non-harm and consultation.
Eritrea’s quarrel is with Abiy Ahmed. The 2022 Pretoria peace agreement was signed by the federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front without Eritrea, and Crisis Group says Asmara felt it had not been properly consulted. Abiy has said since 2023 that Ethiopia needs a port, and Eritrea owns Assab. Eritrea says Ethiopia is building a pretext to attack it.
Sudan’s quarrel runs through its own war. Sudan and Ethiopia have accused each other of interfering in the fight between the army and the Rapid Support Forces.
Somalia is the odd one out. On 29 September Hassan Sheikh was in Addis Ababa with Abiy. Days later, he told Al Jazeera that Mogadishu does not object to Ethiopia getting commercial access through Somali ports, as long as it is agreed with Somalia. That fits the deal the two governments reached in Ankara in December 2024, which provided for commercial sea access arranged under Somalia’s sovereignty. Relations between the two had broken down after the Ethiopia-Somaliland memorandum of 1 January 2024, when Mogadishu recalled its ambassador, as this summary of both episodes records. The Alamein text opposes recognition of Somaliland, which is Somalia’s own position. After the summit, Ethiopia’s state news agency questioned Hassan Sheikh’s support for the declaration and reminded readers of Ethiopia’s role in Somali peace processes and African Union missions. I found no Somali reply.
So the shared concern is real in places and thin in others. A common worry about Ethiopia’s sea ambitions can be a position. It does not, by itself, give any of the four a reason to be in Ethiopia’s war.
The test the leaders set themselves
The declaration promises non-interference. So does the African Union’s founding treaty. Article 4(g) of the Constitutive Act lists non-interference by any member state in the internal affairs of another as a principle of the Union. Article 4(h) allows one exception. The Union itself, by a decision of its Assembly, may intervene in a member state in cases of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. The exception belongs to the Union. No single member state holds it.
By that standard, an Eritrean column in Tigray would be a problem whoever it was shooting at. So would a Somali one, an Egyptian one or a Sudanese one. And the test cuts the other way too. Ethiopia accuses Egypt, Eritrea and Sudan of backing the armed alliance it is fighting, and all three deny it. Its army chief, Field Marshal Birhanu Jula, accused Eritrea of raising money for the TPLF and implied that Sudan and Egypt were involved, without explaining or offering evidence, according to the Associated Press. Sudan’s army rejected it. I found no document, image or captured weapon that shows outside supply. If Ethiopia wants to hold the four to the rule, it has to show its evidence. Ethiopia has troops in Somalia too. The African Union and Somalia approved 2,500 Ethiopian troops for the current mission in April 2025, and I could not confirm how many are there now.
We have seen this before
This is not the first time Eritrean soldiers have crossed into Tigray. Abiy told parliament on 23 March 2021 that Eritrean troops had entered Tigray and called harm to civilians unacceptable, after months of Ethiopian and Eritrean denials. The Ethiopian Human Rights Commission put the Axum killings on 28 and 29 November 2020. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch reported hundreds killed and blamed Eritrean soldiers.
Somalia has its own part of that history, and it is the part I think the Alamein signatories should be asked about first.
In 2021, Somali families said their sons, recruited for security work, had been sent to Eritrea for training and then to Tigray. A UN Special Rapporteur’s report that June said Somali soldiers had been moved from camps in Eritrea to the front line and accompanied Eritrean troops across the border. The report said it was working from “information and reports,” and an Atlantic Council analyst quoted by The National noted that the UN lacked full access to the region. Somalia and Eritrea denied it. So did Ethiopia.
One of the people who spoke up that month was Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, then out of office. On 9 June 2021 he said the recruits had been “sold”, that they were lured with promises of jobs in Qatar’s army, and that officials should disclose what happened to them. In July 2022, as president, he went to Asmara and verified their status, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. The first batch of trained recruits came home that December.
The more serious allegations come from Tigray. The Globe and Mail spoke to survivors in six villages who said Somali troops in Eritrean uniforms were stationed there from December 2020 to February 2021 and killed civilians. Anonymous Ethiopian officials told the paper that up to 10,000 Somali troops were deployed. Those are allegations. No court or commission has tested them, and the Somali government has denied that its troops fought in Tigray. I found no official Somali account of what happened to the recruits since the first batch returned. That is the question I would put to Villa Somalia, and I have set out the request below.
What about the 10,000 Egyptian troops?
The figure circulates widely, and it needs care. In August 2024, the Somali Guardian reported, citing unnamed sources, that Egypt would send 5,000 troops under a bilateral defence pact and 5,000 more under the African Union mission, 10,000 in all. A February 2026 Horn Review analysis describes an initial contingent of “over a thousand” that could grow to 10,000, and names no official source. Sisi said in February that the deployment is proceeding. Egypt has publicly committed troops to the mission. The total is not confirmed.
Those troops are in Somalia. I would not tie them to the war in Tigray without evidence that they are connected. They matter for a different reason. They are one more fact Ethiopia has to weigh when it reads the Alamein text, and its state news agency presented Hassan Sheikh’s signature as a shift in Somalia’s relationship with Ethiopia.
What I am arguing
Egypt can argue for its Nile position at the African Union, in a negotiation or in a court. Eritrea can say that Pretoria left it out and that Assab is not for sale. Somalia can insist that sea access for Ethiopia is a matter for a deal between two governments. Sudan can say Ethiopia is meddling in its war, if it can show it. Ethiopia can say that a country of more than 120 million people with no coast has a case to be heard. All of those are arguments, and arguments can be answered.
Sending soldiers into a neighbour’s war is not an argument. The cost of the last war in Tigray is documented in the numbers above and in the Somali families who, the Council on Foreign Relations says, were kept out of contact with their sons for years. Of the four signatories, Eritrea has a record in that war that Abiy himself acknowledged. Somalia has an allegation it denied and a president who once demanded answers. If the signatures at Alamein mean what the text says, then the follow-up mechanism’s first job is to say plainly that none of the four will take a side with soldiers. And if it will not say so, the text is a press statement.
What I do not know
- Whether Eritrean forces are inside Tigray. It is reported by a militia commander, a monitor and residents, and it is unverified.
- Whether Eritrea has confirmed or denied it. The reports differ.
- Whether the follow-up mechanism has met or has a date.
- The number of Egyptian troops now in Somalia, and the number of Ethiopian troops.
- What the Somali government has told the families of the Eritrea-trained recruits since 2022.
- Whether any of the four has given military support to either side in Ethiopia’s war. I found no evidence of it. Sudan and Eritrea deny it, and Al Jazeera reports that Egypt does too.
The requests for comment
On 9 October I sent questions to four governments. I asked Somalia’s presidency and foreign ministry what became of the Eritrea-trained recruits and whether Somalia reads the declaration as barring any military role in Ethiopia’s war. I asked Eritrea’s information ministry whether Eritrean forces are in Tigray and whether the declaration binds Eritrea. I asked Egypt’s State Information Service about the size and purpose of its deployment in Somalia, and Ethiopia’s foreign ministry for the evidence behind its accusation and the status of its troops in Somalia. Each has until 15:00 East Africa Time (12:00 GMT) on Sunday 11 October to answer.
Eritrea, Egypt and Ethiopia have no press address I could reach directly, so those three requests went to their embassies in Washington, with a request to forward them. Egypt’s published embassy press address rejected my first message, so that request went to the embassy’s general address. I will add each reply to this piece, in the sender’s words, when it arrives, and I will say so here if a government does not answer.
