Abiy Ahmed

Abiy Ahmed Ali has been prime minister of Ethiopia since 2018, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, and a year after that was directing a war in which hundreds of thousands died. He was born in Beshasha to an Oromo Muslim father and an Amhara Christian mother, joined the rebellion against the Derg as a teenager, and served as a radio operator in the Badme war with Eritrea. He later helped found the Information Network Security Agency, the state's cyber-surveillance body, and entered parliament in 2010. He became prime minister in April 2018 after years of Oromo protests broke the ruling coalition, and his first months were extraordinary: he released political prisoners, unbanned opposition movements, invited exiles home, appointed a cabinet half of women, and made peace with Eritrea after twenty years of frozen conflict. The Nobel committee cited that peace. He then dissolved the ethnic-federal ruling coalition into a single Prosperity Party, which the Tigray People's Liberation Front refused to join, and the quarrel deepened when Tigray held a regional election he had postponed nationally. Fighting began in November 2020 and lasted two years, drawing in Eritrean troops and producing massacres, mass rape and a blockade that pushed Tigray towards famine, with estimates of the dead ranging from three hundred thousand upwards. A truce was signed at Pretoria in November 2022. Conflict has since spread to Amhara and Oromia. He has also pursued the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile against Egyptian objection, and rebuilt central Addis Ababa on a scale that has displaced many thousands.

• Lived: 1976 CE – ?
• Nationality: Ethiopian
• Roles: head_of_government, politician