Airstrikes and artillery fire hit northern Tigray overnight into Monday, October 5, 2026, aid sources told Reuters — the first major reported violence since federal forces seized the regional capital Mekelle over the weekend. A bulletin circulated among humanitarian groups said air attacks killed at least 17 people northwest of the capital, and fighting flared again along the Tekeze River on Monday morning.
What happened overnight?
According to the humanitarian bulletin seen by Reuters, airstrikes killed at least nine people in Adwa, about 100 km (60 miles) northwest of Mekelle, and eight in Sheraro in northwestern Tigray. The bulletin did not say who launched the strikes. A second aid worker confirmed that strikes had hit Adwa but had no information about casualties. Spokespersons for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's office, the federal forces and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment, and Reuters said it could not confirm the reports independently — so the casualty figures should be treated as unverified aid-source claims, not established fact.
On Monday morning, the bulletin said Ethiopia's military and Tigrayan fighters exchanged heavy artillery fire close to the Tekeze River near the town of Mai Tsebri, in the northwest of the region.
Why is the front moving north?
The strikes came days after federal Ethiopian National Defence Force soldiers took Mekelle over the weekend, which Tigrayan forces left without a fight. In the capital, daily life was returning to normal on Monday, with shops reopening and phone and internet access restored after a week-long disruption, residents told Reuters.
But the war is not following Mekelle's script from the 2020–2022 conflict — when federal forces also captured the city within a month, only for the TPLF to retake it seven months later. Analysts are now watching the Ethiopian military's northward advance toward the Eritrean border, and a broader regional danger is building: Ethiopia has accused Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt of supporting the armed opposition, and all three deny it. Last week, Ethiopia and Eritrea — which fought a 1998–2000 border war, then normalized ties in a deal that won Abiy the Nobel Peace Prize — severed diplomatic ties over the allegations.
On Saturday, the US State Department urged both Asmara and Addis Ababa to exercise restraint, warning that a conflict would jeopardise US collaboration with both countries.
Why does it matter?
The fighting since September 23 is, per Reuters, the worst escalation of violence since the 2020–2022 Tigray civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. The overnight strikes signal that taking Mekelle has not ended the fighting — the battlefield is moving north and west while civilians absorb the cost. And the regional configuration is more volatile than 2020: Eritrean forces fought alongside Ethiopia's federal army in that war, but now the two countries' ties are broken, sea-access demands from Addis Ababa hang over the relationship, and analysts say the fighting could spill across borders.
