Ethiopia's Tigray conflict explained: How a year of bloodshed has sparked fears of a wider civil war

The conflict in Ethiopia's Tigray region has spread through the north of the country at the cost of thousands of lives amid widespread reports of atrocities committed by all factions.

Observers say the fighting threatens to destabilize the Horn of Africa region and could worsen an ongoing famine in Tigray, while the United Nations warned that the risk of Ethiopia spiralling into a widening civil war is "only too real."

More than two million people in Tigray have fled their homes.

The fighting began in November 2020, when forces loyal to the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) seized military bases in Tigray. It came just three months after the central government postponed a scheduled general election, citing the COVID-19 pandemic.

When the Tigray region held its own regional elections in September 2020, the central government declared the vote unconstitutional.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed responded to the TPLF's attacks with a military counter-offensive that has spiralled beyond Tigray, as militias and separatist groups from other regions took up arms against the central government.

The Ethiopian government declared a unilateral ceasefire in June, and its forces retreated from the region, but the fighting has intensified in recent weeks, as Tigrayan forces retook key towns and advance closer to the capital, Addis Ababa.

The TPLF rules the mountainous Tigray region, which has a population of more than five million people, and was the dominant force in Ethiopian politics for decades. The dominance of the paramilitary group effectively ceased when Abiy was elected to office in 2018 in a popular uprising following his pledge to open up what has long been one of the most restrictive political systems in Africa.

Abiy, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for his efforts in securing peace between Ethiopia and neighbouring Eritrea, has accused the TPLF of treason and terrorism.

Since coming to office, Abiy has failed to tamp down ethnic violence within his own country, and any image of him as a peacemaker appears irrevocably stained by the atrocities committed by Ethiopian forces and their Eritrean allies in Tigray.

Last week, a joint investigation by the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission and the UN Human Rights Office concluded that there are "reasonable grounds to believe that all parties to the conflict in Tigray have, to varying degrees, committed violations of international human rights, humanitarian and refugee law, some of which may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity."

The acts the investigation uncovered included unlawful killings and extra-judicial executions, torture, sexual and gender-based violence, violations against refugees and forced displacement of civilians.

In June, the UN's top humanitarian official, Mark Lowcock, accused Eritrean forces of "trying to deal with the Tigrayan population by starving them."

The conflict is "defined overall by a legacy of sexual violation that has happened to many women and girls," Ethiopian-Canadian journalist Samuel Getachew told CBC News on Monday in an interview from Addis Ababa.