Ethiopian Airlines suspended flights to Mekelle, Axum and Shire on September 23, 2026, after Tigrayan forces seized the regional capital's airport overnight, cutting Tigray off from scheduled commercial air service for the first time since the immediate aftermath of the 2020-2022 war.

The state-owned carrier — the only airline operating scheduled flights into Tigray — cited the "current situation in Tigray region" and apologized to affected customers, pledging to notify them when service resumes.

How did the airport seizure unfold?

Local sources told Reuters that Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) fighters took control of Alula Aba Nega Airport in Mekelle from federal police during the night of September 22-23. A taxi driver at the airport told The Associated Press that TPLF fighters carrying light weapons ordered him to leave, declaring no flights would land. He reported hearing no gunfire during the takeover.

What aircraft fly the suspended routes?

Ethiopian's northern Ethiopia schedule deploys Boeing 737 narrowbodies on the trunk Addis Ababa–Mekelle service, with De Havilland Dash 8-400 turboprops on Axum and Shire. Daily Axum flights only restarted on June 9, 2024, after repairs to the airfield and terminal damaged during the war.

Ethiopian relaunched Addis Ababa–Mekelle on December 28, 2022, roughly 14 months after the ceasefire that ended the fighting. The Axum restoration took another 18 months, a stop-start pattern of incremental reopenings that the new seizure now reverses in a single night.

Why has fighting resumed?

Federal and regional officials have traded blame for the escalation. Getachew Reda, an adviser to Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and a former TPLF leader, accused Tigrayan forces of attacking government positions in neighboring Afar and Amhara. Tigray's regional government countered that its forces were responding to air and artillery strikes launched on September 22.

Both sides have accused the other of breaching the November 2022 Pretoria agreement, a deal that ended the two-year war between the federal government and Tigrayan forces.

What does the suspension mean for Ethiopian's network?

The three routes are small links in the airline's wider domestic and long-haul network. Direct seat-count impact is limited. But the routes carry strategic and humanitarian weight: each reopening since 2022 has been framed by federal authorities as a normalization milestone, and the latest seizure reverses that progress within hours.

Passengers rebooking onto road or rail transit from Addis Ababa will face delays measured in days rather than hours, particularly for medical referrals and business travel that historically dominated the Mekelle bookings. Belly-cargo capacity on the northern routes is also lost, cutting a distribution channel humanitarian organizations had come to rely on.

What happens next?

Ethiopian's customer advisory provides no timeline for restoration. Charter or military flights could theoretically access the airfield if security conditions changed, but the carrier's commercial schedule has no visible contingency plan for the northern points. Until federal forces retake the airfield or a negotiated handover restores civilian access, Tigray's three airports revert to the no-fly status they held during the war years, and Ethiopian's northern schedule resets for the second time in four years.