CONFLICTED

This week we’re thrilled to bring our Conflicted Community an interview with a guest who we all at Conflicted are great fans of – British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore! Simon is an award winning historian of bestsellers including Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, Young Stalin, The Romanovs and his most recent work, The World: A Family History. But today we are here to talk with him about the n...

Thomas and Aimen are back with a vital Q&A as the Middle East enters its most dangerous and precarious moment in recent memory. Israel’s 12 day operation, beginning with an extraordinary operation that blew up thousands of Hezbollah pagers across Lebanon, then escalated this week with the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in a huge strike on Hezbollah’s headquarters in Southern Le...

Thomas and Aimen are back to bring you the final episode in our four part survey of the history and modern conflict in Sudan. In this episode, the pair first take us through the battles between Hasan Al-Turabi and Omar Al-Bashir in the 1990s, with Aimen revealing some fascinating anecdotes about the way Sudan incubated worldwide terror, including Osama Bin Laden, prior to 9/11. And next, we hear a...

Attention dear listeners – there’s been a small change in scheduling as Aimen has unfortunately been incapacitated and unable to record our fourth episode on Sudan. But don’t fret – Aimen is on the mend and will be back bringing us all more incredible insight and anecdotes about the Middle East very soon… So this week, we’re returning to an episode from Season 3 about our old friend, Colonel Gadda...

This week for our Conflicted Community, we answer your listener questions! This week, it’s a grab bag of topics ranging from recent events like the thwarted Hezbollah attacks in northern Israel and the IS attack in Germany. Thomas and Aimen also speak about our recent series on Sudan, giving some updates on what is going on on the ground there, ahead for our final episode in the mini series next w...

This week on Conflicted, Thomas and Aimen continue their exploration into the history of Sudan, focusing on two areas of the country which we’ve left off so far – but which have been hugely influential to the country’s story: Darfur and South Sudan. Both these areas were brutalised during Sudan’s 20th century history, and for remarkably different reasons. But it all comes back to the hegemony of S...

The second episode of our four part series on the history of Sudan is here! As the British Empire loses its hold on the country, new nationalistic movements in Sudan began to develop. With the help of revolutionary Islamic thinkers like Hasan Al Turabi, various movements would vie for supremacy, with those calling for Liberal democracy, communism and Islamism all attempting to gain a foothold of p...

This week for our Conflicted Community, we answer your questions about the recent events and escalation in the Middle East.  From Hezbollah bombing a Druze village in the Golan Heights, to the Israeli response of assassinating Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr, and Hamas political leader Ismael Haniyeh, it looks like escalation into regional war could well be imminent. But how did Israel pull off the...

This week on Conflicted we embark on a four episode exploration of the history of Sudan, to explain the context of the conflict raging there today. In our first episode, we tackle a huge span of history – beginning with the country’s ancient Christian roots, before explaining the period of Islamification and various conquests by the Egyptians and of course the British. But who would rise in defian...

Our very own Thomas Small has started a brand new podcast over on Substack called ‘Life Sentences’ – and we want to give Conflicted listeners a listen to the first episode… Life Sentences is Thomas’ attempt to introduce the world to the Church Fathers – the Christian writers, theologians, mystics and divines who wrote in the first 1000 years of Christianity. The podcast sees Thomas read out the te...

Season 5 of Conflicted is here! In this season, we’re delving deep into a continent whose Islamic heritage is often overlooked, but which is one of the most consequential and politically significant places in the world of geopolitics today. That’s right – in Season 5, Conflicted does Africa! In our opening episode, Thomas and Aimen are giving you an introductory overview of the continent, and we r...

All Conflicted fans know Aimen’s life story – but what about that of his co-host, Thomas Small? Avid listeners will have heard Thomas talk about his Orthodox Christian faith and his time as a novice monk at a monastery on the Greek island of Mount Athos, but the story of how he got there, and why he decided to leave the brotherhood, is a fascinating tale… This week, Thomas and Aimen switch roles t...

The 1860 ‘Damascus Events’ saw Syrian Christians murdered by their Sunni Muslim neighbours in a brutal genocidal moment that reshaped the late Ottoman Empire. It’s an example of how previously harmonious communities can descend into brutal violence in a very short time span. But in the Ottoman Empire’s response to the violence, it’s also an example of how hostile communities can be brought back fr...

Iran is rarely out of the news at the moment: from the death of President Raisi (which we covered in our last Conflicted Community episode), to the rumours of Supreme Leader Khamenei’s illness, and with unrest inside the country ever present, it feels like a country at the precipice. So this week, we again look to Persia to make sense of what Iran’s global strategy actually is. And this week, in a...

Enjoy another clip from a new episode for our Conflicted Community!  This week, Thomas and Aimen discuss the life and times of Iran’s President Raisi – ‘ The Butcher of Tehran’ – as well as doing a deep dive on the fascinating relationship between Iran and Azerbaijan, before Aimen gives us some intel on how Raisi might have died… To keep listening, you’ll need to subscribe to the Conflicted Commun...

Enjoy a clip from the first exclusive Q&A episode for our Conflicted Community! Thanks so much to our supporters for sending in all these brilliant questions on our Discord chatroom. This week, Thomas and Aimen answer your burning questions, from Eurovision to Qatar, visiting corners of the world they’ve not touched on before…  To keep listening, you’ll need to subscribe. And don’t forget, subscri...

Thomas introduces a whole hour of extra content, as Aimen gives evidence to the Foreign Affair Committee in the UK Parliament. To hear more about this trip to the palace of Westminster, as well as other bonus content, sign up to the Conflicted Community! Members also get access to our chatroom on Discord, where you can engage in riveting post-episode debates, and ask questions for upcoming exclusi...

The second episode for our Conflicted Community is here!  This bonus episode is the final one going out to all of our dear listeners on this feed, so to keep listening, you’ll need to subscribe. Subscribers can also join our Conflicted Community chatroom on Discord, which is already brimming with conversation and analysis. All the information you need to sign up is on this link: https://conflicted...

Welcome to the first episode for our Conflicted Community!  We’ll be coming to you every two weeks with interactive episodes for our subscribers. We’re giving the first couple of episodes out for all of our dear listeners, but to keep listening, you’ll need to subscribe. And don’t forget, subscribers can also join our Conflicted Community chatroom on Discord, to discuss everything you hear, and so...

The Conflicted Community is now live!  Want to hear bonus episodes of Conflicted and chat with fellow Dear Listeners? Now you can! We’re going to be putting out new interactive episodes every two weeks for subscribers, as well as giving access to our Conflicted Community chatroom on Discord, where you can engage in riveting post-episode debates. All the information you need to sign up is on this l...

On Friday, January 12th, the Houthis added their muscle to the spreading conflict in the Middle East. By attacking commercial shipping lanes in the Red Sea, they have brought reprisal strikes from a US and UK led coalition which could bring the west into the war and even reignite the Yemeni civil war which has engulfed the country since 2014. We covered Yemen extensively over 5 episodes at the end...

The state of Yemen in 2023 is precarious. After the Arab Spring revolution descended into civil war, the Houthis have cemented their power over large swathes of Northern Yemen, while the traditional ruling parties have fractured and, in many cases, disintegrated. In this final episode of our mammoth exploration of the history of Yemen - and indeed season 4 of Conflicted - we bring things up to the...

The Arab Spring of 2011 may have brought with it hope for a new dawn in Yemen, one of democracy and liberal reforms outside the rule of strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh. But the years that followed saw this quickly undone. The GCC Initiative brokered by Gulf States quickly broke down due to an intense culture of mistrust between all the parties within it. And with the insurgent Houthis growing ever mo...

2011 was a pivotal year for Yemen, and indeed the entire Middle East. After years of wars against the insurgent Houthis in the North, and with years of protests against President Ali Abdullah Selah’s attempts at radical constitutional changes, the Arab Spring which engulfed so many Muslim countries came to Yemen, too. It saw a bottom up revolution take hold in Sanaa, quickly filtering out across t...

Ali Abdullah Saleh, the president of Yemen from 1990 - 2012, described the process of governing Yemen as akin to “Dancing on the heads of snakes”. Such were the profound splits in Yemeni society, and with other strongmen, tribes and insurgent groups vying for their own power, Saleh knew that to keep his newly unified country together from the 1990s onwards would take a dance of real precision. In...