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 College. Her research explores how militant jihad groups use 'soft' culture (poetry, literature, son...
Mar 05, 2025•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 sense of this most complex of conflicts from as many angles as we can. In this episode, Thomas invites o...
Feb 26, 2025•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 co-founded the Liberal Democracy Institute in 2015, she is the Executive Director of the Center for Mid...
Feb 19, 2025•24 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast 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 so, we want to create a kind of narrative history as we make sense of this most complex of conflicts f...
Feb 12, 2025•2 hr 30 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast 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, to what Trump has planned for the region and some questions about the Palestinian Authority and the fut...
Feb 05, 2025•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 was one dominated by horrifying episodes of mass death – from the Red Terror which engulfed the coun...
Jan 29, 2025•1 hr 14 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast 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 finish the war aims they began their assault on Gaza with. In this episode, recorded last week on Febru...
Jan 22, 2025•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 HTS will be able to maintain territorial integrity in the future; and we’ll assess how Hamas still has an...
Jan 08, 2025•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast To bring in the new year, we have a special Conflicted Community episode this week– an interview with none other than Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative British MP and ex Minister of State for Security. Tom is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a veteran of both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak’s Conservative cabinets. He remains a big figure in the party, having run unsuccessfully for party leader in 2024, and is one of the most outspoken of all British MPs when it comes to the UK's securit...
Jan 01, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast After a short emergency interlude into Syria, Conflicted Season 5 returns to our exploration of the fascinating land of Ethiopia. Moving now to the 20th century, where one man dominated the country: Emperor Haile Selassie, King of Kings. Haile Selassie is a name synonymous with a few things: Ethiopia’s age of regal power in the 20th century; being the only African monarch to withstand Western colonialism; and, of course, the religion in Jamaica which reveres him as a god, Rastafarianism. But Hai...
Dec 18, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast ANOTHER EMERGENCY EPISODE Things are, as ever, moving at lightning speed in the Middle East, as last weekend on December 8th, Bashar al-Assad and his Syrian regime fell. After 13 years of civil war, and more than 50 years of his family’s rule, in an extraordinary turn of events rebel groups from the south and the north marched on Damascus. Assad has fled to Moscow; the future for Syria is unclear. It’s one of the most momentous events in modern Middle Eastern history, so this week Thomas invited...
Dec 11, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast EMERGENCY EPISODE In another hugely dramatic turn in the Middle East, the Syrian civil war has reignited. On November 27th 2024, Abu Mohammad al-Julani’s HTS reconquered huge swathes of the North West of the country, including the key city of Aleppo. Conflicted is here with an emergency explainer episode to try and decipher exactly what has gone on in Syria over the past week, and indeed the past decade, to give you the context you need to understand it. Thomas and Aimen are going back to a coun...
Dec 04, 2024•2 hr 32 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week for the Conflicted Community, Thomas and Aimen are giving their take on, you guessed it, the US election and the return of Donald Trump to the White House. That’s right, dearest listeners, it’s Donald Trump part 2, and this time, who knows what’s in store for America, the Middle East and the world. After assessing how Trump got in and a look at his eccentric picks for top jobs in his administration, we take a look at what this all means for US foreign policy in the Middle East – will w...
Nov 27, 2024•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Conflicted’s tour of Africa takes another turn, this time to the East, as we head to the horn of Africa to learn about that most ancient of lands… Ethiopia! Ethiopia is the cradle of humanity – the place where some of the oldest remains of homo sapiens have been found, and its history through antiquity is equally rich. In this episode Thomas and Aimen are going way back in time to tel us about great African civilizations like the Aksumite Kingdom, and all the fascinating stories that intersect w...
Nov 20, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Conflicted is back, continuing our trip across La Françafrique this week, with a survey of the last 10 years in Francophone West Africa, and yes, you guessed it: it’s insurgencies, jihadi movements and coups galore! Thomas and Aimen open up with a discussion of the anti-jihadist activities being carried out by the French in the Sahel since 2013, including the infamous operations Serval and Barkhane. But as jihadi movements grew, the French found themselves in hot water, which got even hotter as ...
Nov 06, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast On this week’s Conflicted Community episode, we invite the researcher and author Jack Margolin onto the show, to talk about his recently published book, The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army. Jack is an independent researcher and expert on modern mercenaries, focussing on conflict finance, guns and crime in data, who previously worked with the The Center for Advanced Defense Studies. Continuing our Africa focus this season, Jack and Thomas discuss how Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of...
Oct 30, 2024•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Bonjour tout le monde! In this week’s Conflicted, Thomas and Aimen are going continental as they continue their survey of Africa, with the first of a two part series on French West Africa, aka La Françafrique! France’s West African colonial possessions are relatively unknown in the English speaking world, but from Chad to Senegal, their histories are fascinating, and remind us of the disturbing continued tentacles of colonialism on the continent… In this first episode, Thomas and Aimen take us b...
Oct 23, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast 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 newly updated version of his 2011 book, Jerusalem: The Biography. At the one year anniversary of Octo...
Oct 09, 2024•57 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Lebanon. The head of the Hezbollah snake has been cut off, and the repercussions are already being fel...
Oct 02, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 about the roots of the conflict raging in Sudan today, from the development of an Arab Spring style r...
Sep 18, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Gaddafi of Libya. If you’ve been listening closely to this season, you’ll remember that Gadaffi has been ...
Sep 11, 2024•2 hr 32 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 week. All this, plus thoughts about Hizb ut-Tahrir, anti-semitism and so much more… To listen to the ...
Sep 04, 2024•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Sudan’s ruling Three Arab Tribes – the tribes who have fixed the country’s course to conflict and cau...
Aug 28, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast 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 power in the new reality for the country in the 20th century. But what would these tensions lead to? ...
Aug 14, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast 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 these targeted killings? What next for Hezbollah and Hamas? And how will Iran respond? Thomas and Aimen ...
Aug 07, 2024•13 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 defiance of them all? Sudan’s Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, a self-styled revolutionary religious messiah who cam...
Jul 31, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast 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 texts of the Church Fathers and comment on them as he goes, making them relevant to today. It’s a fasc...
Jul 22, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 really are covering a lot. From the Islamisation of North Africa, to the ISIS cells forming on the Ea...
Jul 17, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast 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 to find out more about Thomas’ spiritual journey. We’re putting out this episode to all of our dear l...
Jul 10, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast 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 from the brink. To learn more about this fascinating historical episode and its resonances today, Conf...
Jun 26, 2024•13 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
