Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has visited neighbouring Sudan on Thursday for meetings with army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, his first visit to Khartoum since a 2021 military coup there.
Relations between the neighbours in the Horn of Africa have been fraught with tensions in recent years,
including over a border dispute and refugees from the two-year conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region.
Sudan’s ruling sovereign council said in a statement that Burhan and Abiy held talks on “ways to strengthen and enhance bilateral relations”.
Abiy and Burhan met in Ethiopia in October, but Abiy last visited Sudan in August 2020, during the transitional government of former Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok.
Tensions heightened between Khartoum and Addis Ababa following the conflict that broke out in November 2020 between Ethiopia’s federal government and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
In November, Ethiopia’s government signed a peace deal with the TPLF to end the two-year war that has, according to the United States, killed as many as 500,000 people.