A wrecked Ethiopian tank BMP-1 and the bodies of dead Ethiopian soldiers were abandoned and scattered on the streets of Massawa, Eritrea, in February 1990 during the second Battle of Massawa in northeast Africa.

    In the second Battle of Massawa in northeastern Africa, the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF), in Operation Fenkil against Ethiopian forces, a week-long battle over the Red Sea port city of Massawa broke out between February 10 and 17, 1990. The streets of Massawa, Eritrea, were littered with a wrecked Ethiopian BMP-1 tank and the bodies of dead Ethiopian soldiers left behind. The tanks were tanks provided by the Soviet Union to the Derg regime.

　Operation Ferkin brought about the liberation of the port city of Massawa from Ethiopian forces by the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) after three days of fierce fighting from February 8 to February 10, 1990 Operation Fenkir by the EPLF marked the end of Ethiopian colonialism in Eritrea. The Ethiopian army took hundreds of Massawa residents hostage and refused to surrender, using sacks of grain as cover The EPLF attacked by sea and land in a coordinated effort. After Massawa fell into EPLF hands, the Ethiopian Derg regime bombed indiscriminately for 10 days with napalm and cluster bombs against the civilian population of Massawa while withdrawing with what remained of its human and material resources. It left many dead, wounded, and traumatized in Massawa, with destroyed infrastructure scattered on the ground.

　In March 1988, Ethiopian troops, together with Soviet military advisors, were defeated by the EPLF in the Battle of Alphabet in northern Eritrea, and Alphabet fell and was withdrawn. The Soviet Union effectively ended relations with Ethiopia and the Soviet military establishment pulled back. For nearly 30 years, the Ethiopian air force continued to bomb Eritrea with napalm bombs that generated temperatures between 800 and 1200 degrees Celsius. After the Soviet forces pulled out, the Ethiopian military began trading Israeli cluster bombs with Farasha (Ethiopian Jews). The cluster munitions released small bomb grains upon detonation and spread over a wide area, devastating the Eritrean civilian population.

　　The Ethiopian-Eritrean border conflict erupted from May 6, 1998 to June 18, 2000. Although it originated as a border conflict, the scale of the conflict was extremely large and casualties were high, as both sides bombed each other's capitals. Only the Korean War, the Indochina War, the Vietnam War, the Iran-Iraq War, and the Ethiopian-Eritrean and Russian-Ukrainian wars have had a death toll exceeding 100,000 among the interstate conflicts that have broken out since World War II.