Hold Your Fire!

Two rival armies are driving Sudan toward full-blown civil war. Fighting between the Sudanese armed forces, led by Abdelfattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary force led by Mohamed “Hemedti” Hamdan Dagalo, is tearing apart cities and towns across the country, including the capital Khartoum. The battles have already killed hundreds of civilians and left millions more fa...

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in power for two decades, faces a stiff challenge in Türkiye’s forthcoming election, which will take place only a few months after devastating earthquakes killed some 50,000 people. The vote comes at a time of evolving Turkish foreign affairs. Some years ago, Ankara was boxed in, its relations with its neighbours, the Gulf and some of its Western NATO allies fraught...

Over recent months, the Somali army, backed by clan militias, has recaptured areas in central Somalia from Al-Shabaab militants. Profiting from local anger at Al-Shabaab’s predation, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s government has deployed Somali forces to Hirshabelle and Galmudug states, just north of the capital, Mogadishu, to fight militants. The campaign has reversed some of Al-Shabaab’s gain...

Last week, Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed to restore diplomatic relations in a deal brokered by China. The two countries had broken off ties in 2016, after Saudi authorities executed a prominent Shiite cleric and dissident, prompting protesters in Tehran to sack the Saudi embassy. Last week’s deal follows several rounds of talks, hosted by Iraq and Oman over recent years, between Iranian and Saudi o...

The past few weeks have seen U.S.-China tensions ratchet up. In early February, a U.S. fighter jet shot down what Washington concluded was a Chinese spy balloon off the east coast of the U.S., prompting loud condemnations from Beijing. Later that month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, after meeting with top Chinese diplomat Wang Yi at the Munich Security Conference, warned that China was c...

One year into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, prospects for a settlement remain bleak. On 21 February, President Vladimir Putin announced in a belligerent yearly address that he would suspend Russia’s participation in New START, its last remaining nuclear arms control treaty with the U.S. The speech followed U.S. President Joe Biden’s surprise visit to Kyiv, during which he reaffirmed Was...

Nigerians will go to the polls on 25 February to elect a new president. The election is shaping up as a three-way contest between Bola Tinubu, a veteran Nigerian politician from the ruling All Progressives Congress party, Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president, and Peter Obi, who appears to have won over many young Nigerians. A cash crisis, caused by a bungled government policy to replace old ban...

This week on Hold Your Fire! , Richard Atwood speaks with Mark Malloch-Brown, president of Open Society Foundations (OSF), Crisis Group trustee, and former UN Deputy Secretary-General and UN Development Programme administrator, about challenges facing open societies today. They talk about the erosion of democracy around the world, including in the West, authoritarians’ increasing global influence...

On Friday last week, a Palestinian gunman killed seven civilians in occupied East Jerusalem, the deadliest such attack for years. The shooting came the day after a raid by Israeli forces in a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin, also the deadliest such operation for years. The week’s violence follows months in which more Palestinians died, according to human rights groups, than in the past...

On 24 January, Rwanda's defence forces fired a missile at a DR Congo army jet for allegedly violating Rwandan airspace. Congolese officials called the incident an “act of war”. The shooting has ratcheted up already high tensions between Rwandan and Congolese authorities, with the two governments at loggerheads since the resurgence of the M23 rebel group in late 2021. The M23 was defeated in 2013 b...

Today we're bringing you a bonus episode on Ethiopia and Eritrea from Crisis Group's The Horn podcast. The contemporary rivalry between Eritrea and Tigray goes back several decades. After an almost-17-year-long civil war starting in the mid-1970s, the Eritrean EPLF and Tigrayan TPLF jointly defeated Ethiopia’s Derg regime in 1991, resulting in Eritrea’s independence and the TPLF taking power in Et...

On this week’s Hold Your Fire! Richard Atwood is joined by Comfort Ero, Crisis Group’s president and CEO, and Stephen Pomper, chief of policy, to reflect on 2022 and look ahead to 2023. They talk through “10 Conflicts to Watch”, Crisis Group’s yearly flagship commentary co-published with Foreign Policy magazine. They discuss Russia’s war in Ukraine, its global ramifications and what it says about...

Haiti has long suffered political crises, gang violence and natural disasters, but the past two years have been especially cruel. In July 2021, gunmen murdered then President Jovenel Moïse in his home in the capital Port-Au-Prince. Ariel Henry took over as prime minister, supposed to shepard the country to elections. But rampant violence renders a credible vote impossible, and Henry’s dismissal of...

Winter is setting in as the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine approaches. Recent months have seen Ukrainian forces advance, but whether front lines will continue to shift as the weather changes remains unclear. Russia, which has mobilised some 300,000 new soldiers in recent months, has reportedly sent them to the front lines with little preparation. It claims to have...

The 2022 FIFA World Cup kicked off this week in the Qatari capital Doha. The tournament comes at a time of fast-evolving politics in the region. Just a few years ago, a spat within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) saw Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) break diplomatic ties with and blockade Qatar, frustrated in part by Doha’s support for Islamists across the Middle East and North A...

In this episode of Hold Your Fire! Richard Atwood is joined by Finland's Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto for a wide-ranging discussion from the war in Ukraine to peacemaking efforts in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East. They talk about Western support for Ukraine and the danger that Russia uses nuclear weapons. They discuss the role of diplomacy and prospects for a mediated settlement to the...

On 2 November, the Ethiopian federal government and Tigrayan forces reached an agreement to cease hostilities and end almost two years of bloody war in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region. The truce came after the Ethiopian army, together with Eritrean troops and forces from the Amhara region, which borders Tigray, made rapid advances into Tigray over  recent weeks. It raises hopes that peace i...

Last Sunday in Brazil, former leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won a tightly fought presidential run-off against incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro’s supporters took to the streets in angry protest against Lula. Although Bolsonaro narrowly lost out, he and the populist movement he has whipped up enjoy considerable support, hold a legislative majority and several key governors...

On 20 October, Chadian security forces killed more than 50 protesters on the streets of Chad’s capital N’Djamena and other cities and towns. Demonstrators had taken to the streets in anger at an extension of the country’s transitional period that allows President Mahamat Déby to hold power for another two years and then possibly contest elections, despite his previous pledges to stand down. Mahama...

Clashes between rival factions rocked Libyan capital Tripoli over the summer. The fighting pit forces loyal to UN-backed Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dabaiba against supporters of Fathi Bashagha, who last March was appointed prime minister by Libya’s eastern parliament and has formed an alliance with Khalifa Haftar, a powerful commander from the east. The clashes were triggered by a march on Tripoli...

The war in Ukraine took another nasty turn this week. Last Saturday, a blast destroyed parts of the Kerch bridge, which links Russian-occupied Crimea with Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin blamed Ukraine for the explosion and announced retaliatory strikes on cities throughout Ukraine. This latest escalation comes after Ukrainian military gains in September prompted Putin to announce a parti...

On 30 September, a group of young army captains, led by Ibrahim Traoré, seized power in Burkina Faso. They ousted Interim President Paul-Henri Damiba, who himself had come to power in a coup last January. In a televised speech, Traoré blamed Damiba for failing to check terrorism and violence. A few days before the coup, Islamist militants had attacked an army convoy carrying humanitarian aid to th...

On 31 July, a U.S. drone strike killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in the Afghan capital Kabul. Zawahiri appears to have been living in a house maintained by the family of powerful Taliban Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani. His death came almost a year after U.S. troops pulled out of Afghanistan and the Taliban routed the former Afghan security forces and seized power. The Taliban’s uncom...

Just a few months back, a humanitarian truce in Ethiopia offered a glimmer of hope that an end might be in sight to the war in and around the country’s northern Tigray region. Fighting pitted the federal government, forces from the Amhara region, bordering Tigray, and Eritrean troops on one hand, against Tigrayan forces on the other. In March, the federal government and Tigrayan leaders announced...

World leaders are gathering this week in New York for UN General Assembly week, in an event that looks set to be overshadowed by Russia’s war in Ukraine and skyrocketing food and fuel prices. In a two-part episode, Richard talks first to Crisis Group’s Europe and Central Asia Program Director Olga Oliker to get the latest on Russia’s war in Ukraine, particularly how Ukrainian forces recaptured lar...