Is Eritrea “invading Ethiopia”, as a Channel 4 News post on X asked?

What was claimed

On 8 October, Channel 4 News posted a video on X under the headline “Horn of Africa crisis: Why is Eritrea invading Ethiopia?” By the following day the post had been viewed more than 60,000 times.

The question is not an open one. Asking why Eritrea is invading takes the invasion as given. The post does not attribute that to anyone.

The post carries a link to channel4.com. A search engine’s listing for that address, dated 8 October, recorded the same headline with a standfirst stating that “troops from Eritrea have launched an incursion into northern Ethiopia’s Tigray region”. We were not able to preserve that listing, and the address itself leads nowhere: by 10:04 UTC on 9 October it was returning “Page not found” A, and it was still doing so, with an HTTP 404 status, when we checked that afternoon B. We found no copy in the Wayback Machine and no segment on the subject on Channel 4’s programme page for 8 October. Whether an article was published and withdrawn, or never went live, we cannot say.

So this check is confined to the headline. For readers of the post, the headline is the claim, because the link behind it opens nothing.

What the record shows

We looked for anything that would establish, independently of the parties, that Eritrean troops have entered Ethiopia.

• Residents of Adigrat told the BBC they saw convoys of Eritrean soldiers. The BBC said it “is unable to report from Tigray” and “has not yet been able to independently verify any of the reported troop movements” C.
• Two witnesses told Reuters they saw dozens of soldiers they identified as Eritrean. Reuters said it could not verify their accounts E.
• Eritrea’s information minister denied, according to Reuters, that Eritrean forces were there, and accused Ethiopia of fabricating allegations F.
• ACLED, a conflict monitor, said Eritrean troops near Adigrat were hit by drone strikes, and AFP reported three anonymous witnesses saying the same D. The Associated Press said it could not verify ACLED’s account, and that ACLED had not answered a question about the basis for it G.
• AFP cited an unnamed foreign security source estimating 5,000 to 8,000 Eritrean soldiers in Tigray H.
• Neither government responded on the record to the agencies’ questions D H.

Every item on that list is anonymous, unverified by the organisation reporting it, or from a party to the conflict. The accounts are consistent with one another, and they may prove right. But no journalist on the ground, no satellite imagery and no neutral body such as the United Nations or the African Union has confirmed that Eritrean troops are in Ethiopia. Nothing in the record describes anything that could be called an invasion of Ethiopia, which is a larger claim again than an incursion into one part of Tigray.

Our verdict

Unsupported. Channel 4 News’s post took an Eritrean invasion of Ethiopia as established. The public record consists of unverified witness accounts, claims by the Ethiopian government, a conflict monitor’s report and an Eritrean denial. That is a story about reports, and it was presented as a story about facts, with a link that leads to no story at all. If independent evidence emerges, we will update this fact check.