Eritrea severs diplomatic ties after Ethiopia closes the Asmara embassy

Eritrea cut diplomatic relations with Ethiopia on 1 October, hours after Addis Ababa ordered its embassy in Asmara closed and declared 10 Eritrean diplomats persona non grata. The 10 were told to leave within 48 hours. Eritrea's information minister, Yemane Gebremeskel, said the expulsions amounted to a closure of Eritrea's embassy in Addis Ababa. The foreign ministry in Asmara then said it had no option but to reciprocate and sever all ties, with what it called the negative corollaries that step entails.

The embassies had reopened in 2018, part of the rapprochement that won Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. That opening is now shut again. The two states fought a border war from 1998 to 2000, then spent nearly two decades without formal relations, then fought on the same side in the Tigray war of 2020 to 2022. The 2022 Pretoria agreement ended the main phase of that war without Eritrea as a signatory. Since then the argument has moved to the Red Sea. Ethiopia, landlocked since Eritrean independence in 1993, has pressed for access. Asmara has treated talk of the port of Assab as a threat to its coast.

The blasts in the capital

The diplomatic break came hours after explosions were heard overnight in Addis Ababa. Three diplomatic sources, speaking without names because of the sensitivity of the reporting, confirmed the blasts to Reuters. Witnesses near a military base reported no visible damage. A source linked to the opposition alliance told Reuters the alliance had carried out several drone strikes in the capital, including strikes aimed at the military headquarters. If that claim holds, it would be the first known drone attack by anti-government forces on Addis Ababa, hundreds of kilometres from the fighting in Tigray, Amhara and Afar.

Ethiopia's national intelligence service banned drone flights over the capital after the blasts. Opposition forces were not previously known to field armed drones. On 29 September the pro-government Tigray Peace Forces militia said it had captured drone frames and batteries from forces linked to the Tigray People's Liberation Front. That claim is the public evidence Addis Ababa has for an opposition drone capability. It is not the same thing as confirmation that a drone hit the capital.

Who Addis Ababa is accusing

Ethiopia's foreign ministry said it was closing the Asmara embassy in response to what it called Eritrea's direct and indirect acts of hostility and belligerence. Addis Ababa accuses Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt of supporting an opposition alliance led by the TPLF that has been fighting federal troops since last week. All three deny it. The clashes are the largest escalation since the 2020-2022 war, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed and Eritrean troops fought alongside the Ethiopian federal army.

Federal troops and allied militiamen have made gains in Tigray and Afar, according to Reuters' account of the week's fighting. The Tigray Peace Forces said they had retaken Erbeti in Afar with air support from the Ethiopian National Defence Force. Earlier in the same burst of fighting the opposition alliance had taken towns in Afar. Valerie Browning, founder of the Afar Pastoralist Development Association, said the fighting had forced tens of thousands of people from their homes. Haji Awol Arba, chief administrator of the northern Afar region, told Al Jazeera that Eritrean soldiers had crossed into Afar to join the offensive. Eritrea's information minister did not comment on that claim. It remains an allegation from one regional official.

Ethiopia also declared an Egyptian diplomat persona non grata and ordered him out within 48 hours, the state-run Ethiopian Broadcasting Corporation reported, with two sources confirming the order to Reuters. Egypt's foreign ministry had not responded at the time of that report.

What the closure actually does

Closing an embassy does not stop a war. It removes the channel that would normally carry a protest, a prisoner query or a ceasefire feeler. The 2018 reopening was the institutional face of the peace prize. Its closure puts the relationship back where it sat for most of the years after 2000: no ambassadors, a contested border, and a port argument that Asmara reads as existential.

The new element is the drone claim. In the 2020-2022 war the long-range strikes on Tigray were flown by the federal side and, at points, by outside partners. An opposition strike on Addis Ababa, if confirmed, would invert that pattern and put the capital inside the target set. The intelligence service's flight ban is a defensive step that also grounds civilian drone use over the city. It does not identify who flew the overnight blasts.

The 48-hour clock on the 10 Eritrean diplomats is the nearest hard deadline. After that, the only formal link left is whatever third capital both sides still use. Egypt is already inside the accusation, and one of its diplomats has been ordered out, so Cairo is a poor mailbox. The fighting in Afar, the displacement Browning described, and the unanswered claim of Eritrean troops across the border are the facts that will decide whether this stays a diplomatic rupture or becomes a second front. Asmara has severed the ties. It has not said what the corollaries are.