CONFLICTED

Thomas and Aimen are back together for another Q&A! This week we answer your questions on the many and varied crises that seem to be engulfing the Middle East and the world in 2025…Thomas and Aimen begin by analysing the complex and tumultuous situation in Syria, exploring the recent resurgence of violence, the role of disinformation, and the internal conflicts among the Alawite community...

This week on Conflicted, Ronnie Hamada is back with Thomas to describe his experiences as a Kurdish civilian during the Syrian Civil War, as we continue our retrospective on that most complex of conflicts. And this week, after setting up some Kurdish history last time, Ronnie takes us through what it was like to live through the Arab Spring protests as a university student, where he saw his...

This week for our Conflicted Community members, we return to Yemen for an interview with, Dr Elisabeth Kendall, an academic whose work has covered so many varied manifestations of the country’s culture, politics, and the conflict that has engulfed it for the past decade.Elisabeth is a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Cambridge, where she is also the Mistress of Girton...

This week on Conflicted, we begin in earnest our retrospective on the Syrian Civil War, where we will be inviting actual Syrians from a multitude of different perspectives, to tell us about their experiences of the war. After setting the scene with our old friend Wassim Nasr last time, over our upcoming episodes, we’ll be creating a kind of narrative history for you, our listeners, as we make...

This week for our Conflicted Community members, we have an interview with the Egyptian political activist Dalia Ziada, whose incredible personal story crosses so many of the major events in the modern middle east, from the Arab Spring, to October 7th.Dalia is an award-winning Egyptian writer and political analyst whose work focuses on governance, geopolitics, and defense policy. In Egypt, she...

Conflicted takes on… the Syrian Civil War. In the wake of the fall of Assad, with the Syrian Civil War over, at least for the moment, Conflicted is bringing you a bit of a retrospective. In the coming episodes, we’ll be inviting Syrians and other people who experienced the conflict, from a multitude of different perspectives, onto the show to tell us about their experiences of the war. In doing...

The Conflicted Community is back for another Q&A for all of our dearest listeners. This week, in the first time Thomas and Aimen have got together since the Gaza ceasefire deal, they discuss its implications for the region and the world, with the help of listeners' questions.From the motivations of the parties involved in the ceasefire, to the question of Israeli settlements in the West Bank,...

Conflicted comes to the end of our Ethiopia series with an episode beginning at the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, and charting the country's tumultuous course through the late 20th century. This was a time characterised by a brutality the country had not witnessed before, as the Communist military dictatorship, known as the Derg, wreaked havoc on the country.Ethiopia in the 70s and 80s...

Last week, a deal between Israel and Gaza was struck to bring back the Israeli hostages and to bring an end to the bloodshed which has engulfed Gaza over 15 months of fighting, since October 7th 2023. It’s a deal which has brought relief to many, not least the families of hostages and civilians in Gaza, but also questions from others who see Israel as having failed to fully dismantle Hamas and...

Happy New Year to all of our dearest listeners!In our second episode of 2025, Thomas and Aimen are doing a Q&A session with all of your questions posted on Discord, and we’ve got some excellent ones this week. We’ll be doing a post-mortem of the zombie ideology of baathism now it has been seen off in Syria; we’ll look at why al-Julani is delaying elections for four years time; we’ll ask how...