Ethiopia has ordered six Sudanese diplomats to leave the country, a senior Ethiopian official said on Wednesday, November 4, in a sharp new deterioration between two neighbours who now accuse each other of backing the other's enemies — Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on one side, and rebels in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region on the other.

Source: Reuters

The six are staff members of the Sudanese consulate in Assosa, the Ethiopian border town close to Sudan, and they were ordered to leave within 48 hours, the senior Ethiopian official told Reuters. The official did not provide a reason for the decision.

The expulsion is the latest step in a dispute that escalated on Sunday, when Sudan's government formally complained against Ethiopia to the UN Security Council and the African Union's Peace and Security Council. Read: Sudan files UNSC and AU complaint over Ethiopia drones

What Sudan alleges — drones launched from Ethiopian soil

In that complaint, Sudan accused Ethiopia of allowing the RSF to use its territory to launch suicide drones against civilian infrastructure in Sudan. A report by Sudan's foreign ministry and military intelligence, reported this week, counts 70 assaults involving 187 one-way attack drones between February and October, with October alone seeing 28 attacks using 97 drones. The report names Asosa airport, the Kurmuk-Gizen border area and the Bahir Dar airbase as alleged launch sites — which is why the choice of the Assosa consulate for the expulsions carries weight.

Source: Know Afrika

According to a separate report by the army-aligned Transitional Sovereignty Council, those drone strikes killed 176 soldiers and 484 civilians between February 15 and October 27. Among the incidents it cites is an October 3 strike on displaced families at Wad el-Mahi that killed 26 women and four children. These are Sudanese official figures, reported as allegations; they have not been independently verified, and Ethiopia denies helping the RSF.

Ethiopia's counter-charge — Tigray

Addis Ababa denies it supports the RSF in Sudan's civil war, which has displaced more than 14 million people since it erupted in April 2023, according to UN figures cited by Reuters. Ethiopia in turn has accused Sudan, Egypt and Eritrea of supporting Tigrayan rebels who launched an offensive against government forces in September. All three countries have denied this. The allegations and counter-allegations, which both sides deny, have raised fears that the two wars could bleed into each other, spawning a broader conflict in the Horn of Africa, Reuters reported.

The United Nations' humanitarian leadership in Sudan warned this week that the drone campaign is hitting the civilian systems people depend on. UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator Denise Brown told UN News that energy and fuel sources appear to be systematically targeted, that hundreds of aid trucks are stranded by fuel shortages, and that at a hospital just outside Khartoum, 25 people needing dialysis had their treatment stopped when the electricity went out. The World Food Programme, she said, has had seven hits on its convoys this year and 20 over the past two years.

Source: UN News

What happens next

No Sudanese response to the expulsions had been reported by Wednesday morning, and Ethiopia gave no public reason for the order. The dispute now sits formally before both the UN Security Council and the African Union's Peace and Security Council, which in a joint statement published November 2 rejected any parallel governing authority in RSF-held areas of Sudan and called for a cessation of hostilities. Behind the drone row sit older grievances, including Nile waters and Ethiopia's Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which downstream Sudan and Egypt view with suspicion. Analysts quoted this week urge caution: Sudan's army is already stretched fighting the RSF, and a second front with Ethiopia would push still more refugees into border states that are already struggling.