Originally published 2022-03-23.
In March 2022, researchers at Ghent University in Belgium, led by geographer Jan Nyssen, estimated that as many as half a million people may have died in Ethiopia's Tigray war in its first 16 months. Their rough breakdown was 50,000 to 100,000 people killed in fighting, 150,000 to 200,000 deaths from starvation, and more than 100,000 deaths from lack of health care.
The figure was an estimate, not a count, but it pointed to one of the deadliest conflicts of the 21st century, unfolding largely out of view. It arrived just as the world's attention turned to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and aid groups warned that crises in Africa and elsewhere were being pushed aside.
How the Tigray war began
Tigray is Ethiopia's northernmost region, bordering Eritrea. For almost three decades the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) dominated Ethiopia's national government. After Abiy Ahmed became prime minister in 2018, the TPLF lost its central role, and tensions grew over power, the federal system and postponed national elections, which Tigray held on its own in 2020.
Fighting broke out on 3–4 November 2020, after Tigrayan forces attacked federal army bases in the region. Ethiopia's army, joined by troops from neighbouring Eritrea and by forces and militias from the Amhara region, launched a major offensive. The Tigrayan side, later known as the Tigray Defense Forces, was often described in early reports as "pro-independence", but that is not accurate: the TPLF's stated aims centred on Tigray's rights within Ethiopia's federation, although support for secession did grow among Tigrayans as the war went on.
What the Ghent estimate counted
Deaths in a war are not only those caused by bullets and bombs. The Ghent team counted three groups: people killed in combat or massacres, people who died from hunger, and people who died because clinics, medicines and transport were cut off.
The team had documented hundreds of individual incidents with up to about 12,500 confirmed civilian victims, but believed the true number killed by violence was far higher. The starvation and health-care figures were modelled from reports of food shortages, displacement and the collapse of health services. Ethiopia had restricted aid, communications, flights and journalists' access to Tigray. "The Ethiopian government has been very efficient in shielding Tigray from outside eyes," Nyssen told The Globe and Mail.
Because of those restrictions, such numbers come with wide uncertainty. They should be read as a careful attempt to show the scale of loss, not a list of individually verified deaths. Later estimates from the same Ghent team, published in 2023, put the toll at roughly 162,000 to 378,000 deaths, while the African Union mediator, former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, publicly spoke of around 600,000. All of these figures point to a catastrophe of enormous scale.
Siege, hunger and a humanitarian emergency
For much of the war, Tigray was effectively cut off. Banking, telecommunications, electricity and fuel supplies were suspended, and aid convoys were blocked or delayed for months. United Nations reports described most of the region as hard to reach or highly restricted. Families sold harvests, skipped meals and begged to survive.
By mid-2022, an estimated 13 million people across northern Ethiopia needed food aid. Human rights groups also documented mass killings, sexual violence and forced expulsions by several parties to the conflict, especially in western Tigray.
Why the world looked away in 2022
Unlike Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, Ethiopia faced no broad international sanctions and no UN General Assembly vote condemning its conduct in Tigray. Aid agencies warned that donor money and media attention were shifting to Europe.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres told journalists: "We are seeing clear evidence of this war draining resources and attention from other trouble spots in desperate need." He was speaking of the war in Ukraine and its effect on crises such as Tigray, Yemen and the Sahel.
In Burkina Faso, where more than 1.7 million people had been displaced by violence and hunger, the humanitarian group Médecins du Monde warned that some donors planned to cut funding by up to 70 percent and move money to Ukraine. Earlier reports sometimes said the charity itself was cutting its aid; in fact the warning was about donors.
The wheat shock from Ukraine
The war in Ukraine also threatened food supplies far beyond Europe. Russia and Ukraine were among the world's biggest exporters of wheat, barley and maize, and many countries in North Africa and the Middle East relied heavily on their grain.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization warned that the conflict could raise international food and feed prices by 8 to 22 percent and push up to 13 million more people into hunger over the following year. Its director-general, Qu Dongyu, noted: "Wheat is a staple food for over 35 per cent of the world's population."
Some researchers have linked the steep rise in bread prices around 2010 and 2011 to the unrest that preceded the Arab Spring. Most agree that food prices were one factor among many, alongside unemployment, corruption and political repression, but the comparison explained why governments feared a new grain shock.
The Pretoria agreement and what followed
On 2 November 2022, the Ethiopian government and Tigrayan forces signed a permanent cessation of hostilities in Pretoria, South Africa, after talks led by the African Union. The guns largely fell silent, the siege was lifted, and a follow-up deal on humanitarian access was signed later that month. In March 2023 an interim regional administration took office, led by former TPLF spokesperson Getachew Reda.
Banking, communications, electricity and transport gradually returned, though war damage limited them. Food aid resumed, but deliveries were later suspended for a period after reports of large-scale theft and other irregularities. Eritrean troops, which were not party to the agreement, stayed in some border areas, and western Tigray remained disputed with the Amhara region, leaving many displaced people unable to return home.
Why the numbers still matter
Estimates like Ghent's matter because a war fought behind closed borders can otherwise disappear from memory. They help aid agencies plan, support efforts to hold perpetrators accountable, and remind the world that deaths from hunger and denied medical care are as much a cost of war as deaths in battle.
For readers, the lesson is to look at what a death toll includes, who produced it and under what limits. In Tigray, every credible estimate points the same way: a vast human loss that deserves far more attention than it received at the time.
Sources: The Globe and Mail (March 2022); Wikipedia: Tigray war; Heinrich Böll Stiftung: The Pretoria Agreement one year after (1 November 2023).
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