Ethiopian Migrants in Libya: Why Tigray’s Displaced Are Risking the Journey to Europe

After the wind knocks laundry from the line, Abeba Berhane steps out of her shelter in Hitsats IDP camp in Ethiopia’s Tigray region.  She shakes the dust from the fabric and hangs it back in place. The camp, home to about 15,000 displaced people, according to local authorities, lies in Asgede district west of Shire in a dry stretch of land not far from the Eritrean border. Berhane has lived here for five years with her husband and eight of her nine children, displaced from Rawyan in western Tigray when war erupted in late 2020. 

The war was fought between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and Ethiopia’s federal government, backed by Eritrean forces and allied regional militias. It began in November 2020 after months of escalating tensions between Addis Ababa and the TPLF, which had dominated Ethiopia’s ruling coalition for nearly three decades before Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office in 2018. The conflict was marked by widespread allegations of war crimes and a near-total siege that triggered a severe humanitarian crisis. The two-year conflict forced more than a million people from their homes and killed up to 600,000 according to researchers at Ghent University in Belgium, with this high-end figure also cited by the African Union. Hitsats is one of its stark reminders. Camp residents like Berhane cannot return home. Parts of western Tigray remain under dispute.

Three years ago, Berhane’s daughter, 25-year-old Merhawit Zerya, left without telling the family where she was really going. She said she was heading to Addis Ababa to look for work. Instead, she began the journey north toward Libya, hoping to reach Europe.

The clothes Berhane just lifted from the dirt are not her daughter’s. But she says they remind her of the few garments Merhawit left behind in a drawer before disappearing. “I keep her clothes carefully,” Berhane says. “They are the only things she left with me.”

Months passed without news. Then the phone rang. “They used to make us listen to her crying by beating her,” Berhane says. The men on the other end of the line demanded money. “They asked us if she is our daughter. We denied that because we could not afford to pay.” The traffickers demanded 1.8 million birr, roughly $11,500, a sum the family could never raise.

For more than a year, Merhawit was held in a detention facility in Libya controlled by traffickers, her mother said. Human rights groups and UN agencies have documented how migrants on the Libya route are frequently imprisoned in informal facilities run by armed groups and smuggling networks, where extortion, torture, and forced labor are common. In prison, Berhane says, she drank dirty water and developed kidney problems and tuberculosis. When she became too sick to be exploited, her captors released her. She is now in Tripoli, no longer in the traffickers’ custody but still in a precarious situation. According to her mother, she has no legal documents, limited access to work, and fears being detained again. But returning to Ethiopia would mean going back to displacement and hardship.

Before the war, the family owned livestock, cars, and a large farm in Rawyan. Displacement reduced their lives to a shelter in this isolated camp, far from the land they once cultivated. “She could not accept this kind of life,” Berhane says of her daughter’s decision to leave. Merhawit had promised to support her siblings, including a brother with a heart condition. Now, from Libya, her daughter tells her something Berhane cannot forget. “I would rather die in the sea than return to the kind of life you are living there.” She has also made her intentions clear: “If I get the chance, I will still try to cross to Europe.”

Berhane sometimes goes to church to ask for help for Merhawit, but it is never enough.  Sending money for costly medicine is nearly impossible. 

She is not the only mother in Hitsats waiting for a call from Libya. According to camp representatives, nearly half of the families here have at least one relative who has left in recent years, most of them young men and women heading north.

I would rather die in the sea than return to the kind of life you are living there.

Merhawit Zerya

Across Ethiopia, migration has surged as economic hardship deepens. Inflation reached 13.5% in 2025, according to the Ethiopian Statistical Service, and the poverty rate rose to 43% this year, according to the World Bank, reversing decades of progress. 168,400 people exited Ethiopia along the Eastern Route between January and September 2025, according to the International Organization for Migration, most traveling through Djibouti and Yemen toward Saudi Arabia. Tigray is one of the main regions of origin. IOM data shows that 31% of migrants on the Eastern Route in 2025 came from Tigray — a figure based on monitored transit points and likely an undercount.

Another, less documented route runs west through Sudan into Libya, with Europe as the intended destination. In its latest report on the Northern Route, the IOM noted that tracked movements nearly tripled between 2021 and 2022, though data remain limited. The IOM tallied  894,890 migrants in Libya in 2025, of which 40% were from Sub-Saharan Africa, with 1,513, (0.17%) from Ethiopia.

In Tigray, still struggling to recover from war and with flare-ups and ongoing tensions threatening a renewal of active conflict, migration has become a calculated choice for many. The conflict formally ended in November 2022 with the Pretoria Agreement. But peace has not brought stability. Infrastructure remains damaged, farmland abandoned, and public services strained. Jobs are scarce, and recent reductions in US humanitarian assistance have further weakened already fragile support systems.

Nearly 800,000 people remain displaced across Tigray, many sheltering in schools, unfinished buildings, or camps like Hitsats. Large parts of western Tigray remain under Amhara forces’ control, and Eritrean troops continue to maintain positions in the north.

Politically, the region remains unsettled. The TPLF, which before the war was a main player in Ethiopia’s political scene for decades, has had its legal status revoked by the national election board and is excluded from Ethiopia’s June 1 elections. The party itself is internally divided between factions advocating dialogue with Addis Ababa and others rejecting cooperation with the federal government. Key provisions of the peace agreement, including the disarmament and reintegration process and the restoration of contested territories, remain unimplemented.

At the same time, relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea have again deteriorated. Both governments have recently reinforced positions near contested areas, raising fears that Tigray could once again be drawn into confrontation.

For many young people, the future feels suspended.

Hitsats lies in a dry plain near the Eritrean border. Built to host Eritrean refugees fleeing the war that began in 1998, its aging concrete structures now house Tigrayan IDPs in improvised living spaces between two rocky hills.

Near one of the few functioning wells, people queue with yellow jerrycans to draw water. On a nearby hill, three large water tanks once supplied the camp. Two were destroyed by strong winds, and only one remains operational. Without sufficient storage, access to clean water remains fragile. At a food distribution point, women wait for sacks of sorghum. Not far away, young boys try to sell small dried fish caught from a nearby pond. Every source of income matters here.

Just months ago, videos filmed by local activists showed severely malnourished residents. In December, Ethiopian and international outlets reported that at least 50 IDPs had died amid acute food shortages since July 2025 alone. Camp coordinator Keshi Mebrahtu says that 335 people have died in the camp since 2022 due to hunger, illness, and lack of medicine. “Many were already weak,” he says. “Without food and medical care, they could not survive.”

After the videos spread online, fundraising efforts, including campaigns organized by TikTok users, brought temporary relief. “These last two months have been better. Lives have been saved,” says Keshi Mebrahtu, the camp’s coordinator. “But this is not continuous support. It is not a sustainable solution.” Conditions remain precarious, with shortages of food, clean water, and medical care still defining daily life. “The sustainable solution we want is to return to our homes. That is the lasting solution we hope for.”

Migration, he adds, has become increasingly common. “In our opinion, from the total number of people in the camp, between three to four thousand people have gone to migrate to Sudan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and other places.”

Mebrahtu asks around the camp if anyone else is willing to speak. Several people step forward. Among them is a soft-spoken man who insists on telling his story. Gebremedhin Araya Kidanu, 46, says that he was displaced from Humera in western Tigray five years ago. He says he was arrested by occupying federal and Amhara forces on suspicion of collaborating with the TPLF and detained for nearly a year before eventually reaching Hitsats with his family. In his shelter, his wife sits nearby with their youngest daughter as he speaks.

Kidanu is deeply worried about his 26-year-old son, Jonas, who left more than two years ago. For months, the family had no news. “Then one day the traffickers called us,” Kidanu says. “They were asking for 1.5 million birr ($ 9,600) for his release. We cannot pay, so he is stuck there.”

The first time he heard his son’s voice from Libya, he felt relief. “For a long time, I did not know where he was.” The relief quickly turned to fear. “They told us that if we did not send the money, we would never see him again.”

Before the war, Kidanu and his family were farmers in Humera. They had land, a house, and livestock. Jonas had just joined the regional police. “After the war, we lost everything. Now we survive here in very difficult conditions,” he explains.

Today, the family goes from shelter to shelter asking for contributions. At one point, he sends his daughter inside. She returns carrying a large poster board they use when walking through the camp and nearby villages. The amount is written in bold letters across the cardboard: one million birr ($6 415). The family begged relatives and acquaintances for help and managed to send 150,000 birr ($962). It was not enough, and Jonas remains imprisoned in Libya. “They kept him in prison. The traffickers continue to ask for more money,” he adds. At times, the traffickers send videos of Jonas being beaten.

Jonas has told him that since he is already in Libya, he wants to try to cross to Europe rather than return. “Because he has taken the risk so far, he wants to continue,” Kidanu says. He keeps his phone in his hand as he speaks. It rarely leaves him. He waits for the next call.

The decision to leave is rooted in more than poverty, says Yirga Alemu, a Tigrayan independent researcher in sociology. “The war is finished but the political and economic situation is so tense that some families are even pushing their children to leave out of fear that a new war will break out,” he says. “Many young people no longer want to join the army. Before the war, there was a common cause. Today, Tigray is divided. People no longer trust.” 

In Mekelle, Yohannes Giday, spokesperson for the Tigray Youth Association, says the failure to implement the peace agreement and the continued displacement of people from western Tigray are central to the crisis. “Yes, the guns have fallen silent, but the war continues in other forms. Rehabilitation and reconstruction have not yet begun. Infrastructure and social services are totally or partially damaged, looted, or reduced to ashes.”

Giday says that a recent survey conducted by the association in the region paints a stark picture. Forty percent of young people say they intend to cross a border to seek work abroad, most of them between 25 and 35 years old. Unemployment affects 81% of youth in Tigray. 

Meanwhile, tensions between Addis Ababa and Asmara have escalated again. The African Union Commission has warned of the risk of renewed war. Ethiopian officials have called on Eritrea to withdraw its troops, while TPLF figures have hinted they could reconsider their position if the peace agreement collapses. Reports of troop movements near contested areas have heightened fears that Tigray could once again become the battleground.

For the hundreds of thousands still displaced, the threat of renewed conflict is not an abstraction. In the courtyard of his shelter in Hitsats, Kidanu sits with his phone in his hand, waiting for a call that may bring either relief or another demand for money.