Issue No. 119

Abiy's Drone Diplomacy in Baku

At the end of February, Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed departed on a rather unusual visit to Baku, Azerbaijan. Slated as a meeting between two emerging powers, a focus on trade and investment frameworks was particularly emphasised by Foreign Minister Gedion Timotheos. More importantly, of course, was the signing of a comprehensive defence agreement by the two countries on 27 February. Spanning drone technology, armoured vehicles, artillery shell production, and air defence, the new agreement builds upon a framework from November 2025, which also included reference to refurbishing T-72 tanks, electronic warfare, and military-industrial manufacturing. Though war has not yet returned to Tigray as many feared, Abiy's vision of a militarised domestic —and regional —posture no doubt requires more hardware.

And as an ascendant so-called "Middle Power", hydrocarbon-rich Azerbaijan can deliver. In particular, Azerbaijan is able to call upon a host of high-spec drones sourced from Turkey and Israel, including the substantial Bayraktar Akıncı from Ankara and kamikaze types from Israel, including the IAI Harop and Orbiter-1K. Since 2022, the grinding war of attrition in eastern Ukraine has proven a grim laboratory for drone warfare and new technologies, but Azerbaijan similarly dramatically demonstrated their battlefield potential in its 2020 blitzkrieg offensive against Armenia during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. That conflict has since cooled, and with Baku's arms industry keen to export, where else is better than the Horn of Africa?

Meanwhile, Ethiopia looks to be an eager customer. Simmering conflict in western Oromia against the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) since 2018, and the raging Fano insurgency in the Amhara region has stretched the Ethiopian military thin-- let alone counting the calamity of the 2020-2022 Tigray war. Today, though, many tens of thousands of repositioned federal soldiers remain on the edges of Tigray, with substantial quantities of heavy weaponry deployed. War has not yet erupted, and hopefully, it will not, but Abiy will not want to be caught out again and has thus gone drone shopping in Baku.

It was just five years ago that Tigrayan forces pushed out from the mountains, routing the Ethiopian army and reaching deep into the country's centre. Only injections of Turkish and Emirati-supplied drones saved Abiy's regime, with this military material subsequently deployed into conflicts in western Oromia and Amhara-- often with devastating, and indiscriminate, effect. Already in Ethiopia's arsenal are Chinese-made Wing Loong II, Turkish Bayraktar TB2, and Iranian Mohajer-6 drones. Furthermore, Ethiopia is developing its own drone technologies, with PM Abiy Ahmed inaugurating the SkyWin Aeronautics Industries drone plant in March 2025. But sophisticated drone self-sufficiency still appears some distance away, and Abiy has grand plans now.

And Ankara has made it clear that it opposes yet another conflict in the Horn of Africa, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan travelling to Addis to make this-- and his opposition to Somaliland recognition-- explicit. Erdoğan's concern, and Ankara still holds sway in Ethiopia, relates to the broader constellation of forces and internationalised conflict in Sudan, and the dangers of a war in northern Ethiopia that pulls in Eritrea, metastasising further. 

Indeed, domestic wars are not the only conflicts on Abiy's mind. This week, Sudan's military government accused Addis of permitting drone strikes on behalf of the Rapid Support Forces and their Emirati patrons into Sudanese territory. At the onset of the war in April 2023, Addis sought a nominal independence on the conflict despite its close relationship with Abu Dhabi, but in recent months, it has begun taking a more assertive stance—most notably building a major training base for the RSF in Benishangul-Gumuz. Now, if the Sudanese army's accusations that drones are now targeting Sudan from Ethiopia are correct-- and it is highly probable that they are-- it represents another major escalation at a perilous moment for the region.

For now, though, any Baku-facilitated drones are likely to represent a drop in the ocean, with Iran, Turkiye, and the Emirates having led the way in mid-priced drone warfare in the Horn. Indeed, Azerbaijan is far from the only country that has sought to expand its blossoming arms industry into the Horn of Africa, either as a testing ground or with pure profit in mind. In particular, investigations into the glut of weapons circulating in Sudan have documented sources from not only Russia, Turkiye, and the UAE, but also China, Serbia, and Yemen as well. While sophisticated military hardware, such as Bayraktar drones, may be operated only by trained technicians, the proliferation of light weapons across the Horn of Africa poses a security dilemma for years to come. 

The appeal of drones is manifold; cheaper than a conventional army, they allow a government to strike far beyond its territorial limits and target massed fighters, infrastructure, or leaders at will. Still, it is no military panacea, but for the beleaguered Ethiopian military, a new injection may well represent a significant asset in any new war with Mekelle or Asmara. In neighbouring Somalia, meanwhile, dozens of American and Turkish drone strikes last year inflicted substantial casualties on both Al-Shabaab and Islamic State-Somalia, with varying impact on the battlefield. 

Like Addis, Mogadishu has similarly courted Baku over its military capacities, with a bilateral security pact agreed last year in the Azerbaijani capital. Details, though, are scarce, with the Somali Defence Ministry merely stating that the pact covers "defence and defence industry cooperation", which "paves the way for enhanced technical support and military knowledge-sharing to bolster Somalia's defence capabilities." No discernible Azerbaijani military technology has been recorded so far in the Somali capital; perhaps not needed, given Ankara's recent deployment of a coterie of advanced weaponry to Mogadishu, including battle tanks and F-16 fighter jets. In the Horn, though, one incident that Baku may be more keen to forget was the difficulty of securing the release of 18 Azerbaijani citizens from Eritrea after their vessels were detained in 2024.

Though just one trip among many, Abiy's visit to Baku is emblematic of the broader age of the "Middle Powers", and of a world order increasingly remade through transactional alliances rather than fixed blocs. And in the Horn, countries once distant from the region's security landscape—from Israel to Pakistan—are now drawn into widening constellations of military cooperation stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. Few remember the horrors of the Tigray War or the ethnic cleansing of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh just a few years ago; yet the conflicts that produced them remain unresolved. Instead, what endures are the technologies forged in those wars—now circulating through an increasingly crowded marketplace of power in the Horn of Africa.

​The Horn Edition Team