Season 4 of Conflicted is coming soon on June 28th!

Algeria has been at the vanguard of Middle Eastern developments for over two hundred years. For this reason, it’s the perfect prism through which to revisit all the historical themes from this season.

With the assassination of Al Qaeda leader Aymen al-Zawahiri ringing in their ears, Aimen & Thomas turn their attention once again to Afghanistan, focusing this time on the Soviet invasion in 1979 and the rise of global jihadism that followed.

This episode describes Saddam’s blood-soaked rise to power and his tragic and ultimately futile decision to invade Iran, thus inaugurating the 20th century’s bloodiest and costliest conventional war.

It was out with the Shah, in with the Ayatollah; and the consequences have been without parallel—for the Middle East, and the world.

War, terrorism, kidnappings, assassinations, and an ever-present threat to the global economy—the story of OPEC has it all!

Circling back to the Arab world after a brief excursus further afield, this episode of Conflicted takes up the themes of sectarian strife and political radicalism and applies them to the country that has perhaps been most affected by the Clash of Civilizations: Lebanon

Having flitted around the edges of the Ottoman Empire for most of this season, now we’re going straight to the jugular: the heart of that empire, the city of Istanbul.

From the Arab world, we now journey eastward to the Indian Subcontinent. Ancient, vast, and spiritually rich, the lands that comprise the nation-states of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh underwent one of the great traumas of the 20th century: the end of British rule and the Partition of the Raj.

Now that we’ve told the story of the rise and fall of Nasserism, we turn to Libya and its handsome and charismatic dictator, Col. Muammar Gaddafi.

We’ve finally reached the climax of the Cold War in the Middle East: the 6-Day War of 1967 and its dramatic sequel, the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The outcomes of both wars are well known; less so the political machinations leading up to them.

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Jordan and Iraq both received Hashemite monarchs—and the rivalries and ideological conflicts that followed still reverberate today, perhaps nowhere more powerfully than on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

In this episode, we talk about Syria. Or ask the question, really: What is Syria? Syria has been described as a “ fulcrum of geopolitical hegemony...” — a bit like Ukraine, interestingly — “...a fulcrum of geopolitical hegemony in the Middle East.”

Before the next episode, we have something a little different for your ears - an intro to a whole new podcast - Behind the Sun.

Having avoided it for as long as possible, Aimen & Thomas finally turn their attention to the state of Israel: its backstory, its modern re-emergence, and its impact on the civilizational fault lines criss-crossing the Middle East.

Following on from our last episode, another CIA adventure in the Middle East kicks off this episode on Egypt.

In this episode, we shift our focus to Iran. Nobody could have known this at the time, but with hindsight we can see that at the beginning of the Cold War, Iran had somehow become a whirlpool swirling with all of the 20th century’s clashing ideological and political forces.

In the last episode we talked about how the American half of the Cold War was established in Saudi Arabia. Today, we’re shifting our focus to the other half of that epic conflict: the Soviet Union.

In this week’s episode, we focus attention on Aimen’s homeland: Saudi Arabia. Arabia is as old as time, and we explore how the depth and profundity of its history inform the present day.

Listen to Thomas and Aimen travel back in time once again to the Cold War, how the two world superpowers collide, the repercussions on other continents, and how The Middle East is involved..