SUMMARY

The Afar and the Issa clan (Dir) territory in Ethiopia has continuously shrunk as they have been pushed northwards by the Issa Somali. The Afars believe that the Awash River, the lifeline of the people that inhabit the southern portion of the Afar regional state, is the Issa clan (Dir) region tightened and incursions by Issa pastoralists into Afar grazing lands increased, tensions between the groups grew even further. During the 1990s clashes over water holes amplified and became more deadly with the use of automatic weapons. In 2000 Saudi Arabia imposed a ban on animal imports from the Horn due to the outbreak of Rift fever. This ban hit the Issa clan (Dir)](/#actor(624) to move further into the Afar state, where clashes and tensions increased even further. The situation was aggravated by the severe drought that hit Ethiopia in 2002 and that made the search for already scarce resources like water and pasture even more desperate.

The issue of the demarcation of the border between the Afar and the Somali regional state is making the situation even more complicated. When the Ethiopian federation was created in the mid-1990s, the borders between the regional states were only roughly delineated and it was left to the states themselves to work out the issue. In the case of the Afar and the Somali regional states, these have not been able to do so. With the increasing number of Issas in Afar, the Afar population put pressure on the regional administration to expulse them from the region. The Issas, for their part, demanded a referendum, expecting that three important hamlets on the road to Djibouti would be placed in the Shinile region, although they lie within zone three of Afar region. Pushing the issue further, they appointed residents of the three towns to the district councils in Shinile zone. It was not until the war with Eritrea in 1998, which turned the road and railroad to Djibouti into lifelines for the country, that the federal government gave attention to the problem. However, no serious action was taken to address the problem until tensions exploded and led to large-scale violence and the closing of the Djibouti road in the spring of 2002.

The non-state conflict between the Afar and the Issa clan (Dir) is first included in UCDP data in 2002. In April that year, three weeks of heavy fighting led the conflict to cross the 25 battle-related deaths threshold.