Conflicts

The 2026 Israel-United States strike on Iran was the joint offensive that began on February 28, 2026, when Israeli and U.S. forces attacked Iranian military, regime, and nuclear-linked targets. The operation turned long-running confrontation over Iran's regional posture and nuclear program into direct interstate war involving major retaliatory strikes across the Middle East. The conflict combined preventive-war logic, alliance warfare, missile retaliation, energy-route risk, and the problem of escalation once a shadow conflict becomes open combat.

The Northeastern Syria Conflict (2026 phase) is the contemporary struggle over power, security, and territorial control in the Kurdish-led areas of northeastern Syria after the major shifts of the Syrian civil war and the collapse of the Assad regime. It combines local administration, Turkish pressure, ISIS afterlife, U.S. involvement, and uncertain reintegration into a changing Syrian state.

On 3 January 2026, the United States launched Operation Absolute Resolve, a military intervention in Venezuela that captured President Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores after years of escalating confrontation between Washington and Caracas. U.S. forces struck air-defense targets across northern Venezuela and deployed operators into Caracas to seize Maduro, who was later transported to New York to face narcoterrorism charges. The operation also triggered an immediate leadership vacuum, with Vice President Delcy Rodriguez moving into the acting presidency amid claims of casualties among Venezuelan, Cuban, and U.S. personnel. The intervention brought years of sanctions, diplomatic breakdown, narco-trafficking accusations, regime-change pressure, and hemispheric power politics into open military intervention. It links coercive regime removal, oil politics, Latin American intervention history, and the recurring problem that external military success in decapitating a regime does not by itself answer who will govern the state that remains.

The Ecuadorian Security Crisis is an organized-crime and state-security emergency that escalated sharply in January 2024 when President Daniel Noboa declared an internal armed conflict against criminal groups. The crisis involves prison control, gang violence, assassinations, extortion, drug-trafficking routes, port logistics, judicial intimidation, emergency decrees, and military-police operations.

The Afghanistan-Pakistan Border Conflict is a recurring low-intensity confrontation along the Durand Line involving Pakistani security forces, Taliban-led Afghan border forces, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan activity, cross-border strike claims, and competing sovereignty narratives. The post-2021 Taliban takeover in Afghanistan changed the conflict's operating environment by giving Pakistan a new interlocutor in Kabul while failing to remove Pakistan's concern over TTP sanctuary and attacks. The conflict links border demarcation, militant safe haven disputes, Pakistani counterterrorism, Afghan Taliban diplomacy, propaganda around frontier clashes, civilian exposure in border communities, and the security politics of a disputed frontier. It is best tracked as a recurring crisis system rather than a single battle, because the dispute returns through repeated incidents, denials, and retaliatory pressure.

The Red Sea Crisis that began in late 2023 erupted when Yemen's Houthi movement started attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, declaring solidarity with Palestinians during the Israel-Hamas war. Using drones, anti-ship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and other asymmetric tools, the Houthis disrupted one of the world's most vital trade routes through the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint, forcing shipping companies to reroute around the Cape of Good Hope while the United States and United Kingdom answered with naval operations and direct strikes on Houthi positions in Yemen. The crisis links irregular maritime coercion, missile warfare, regional solidarity politics, and chokepoint vulnerability to global trade disruption. What emerged was not just a shipping-security problem but a wider confrontation involving Yemen, Israel, Western militaries, and the broader Axis of Resistance, showing how a local armed movement can impose global economic and strategic costs with relatively limited means. Maritime pressure can scale from local militancy into system-level economic disruption.

The Israel-Hamas War began on 7 October 2023, when Hamas and associated Palestinian armed groups launched a large surprise attack from Gaza into southern Israel, killing approximately 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and taking around 250 hostages. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Israel declared war and responded with a major air, ground, and naval campaign aimed at destroying Hamas's military and governing capacity and recovering hostages, with the IDF advancing systematically through northern, central, and southern Gaza and causing massive destruction of infrastructure. The war became one of the most consequential conflicts of the 2020s because it combined massacre, hostage-taking, urban warfare, humanitarian collapse, mass displacement, regional escalation, U.S. policy pressure, and legal proceedings at the International Court of Justice. Gaza Health Ministry figures for October 2023 to January 2025 put Palestinian deaths at over 46,000, alongside widespread famine, the displacement of nearly the entire population of 2.3 million, and the destruction of hospitals, schools, and residential areas. Israel faced international criticism and an ICJ genocide case filed by South Africa. The conflict also expanded regionally, with Hezbollah opening a second front from Lebanon, Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, and Iranian missile strikes on Israel, while hostage negotiations remained a central issue throughout.

The Sudanese Civil War that began in 2023 is the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), after the collapse of Sudan's post-2019 transition. Fighting erupted on 15 April 2023 in Khartoum following a power struggle between the two military factions that had jointly overthrown the civilian government in 2021, and it quickly became a national conflict of urban battles, territorial contest, regional humanitarian spillover, and atrocity risk, with Darfur reactivated as one of its most dangerous theaters and ethnic cleansing reported in West Darfur. The conflict links military-state fragmentation, militia power, Khartoum urban warfare, Darfur violence, regional diplomacy, and one of the world's most severe displacement crises: over 12,000 killed by counts that are likely far too low, 8 million displaced internally, and 1.5 million refugees in neighboring countries. Both sides have been accused of war crimes, including indiscriminate attacks on civilians, sexual violence, and the targeting of humanitarian aid, and international mediation efforts, including talks in Jeddah, have failed to produce a lasting ceasefire.

The Darfur Campaign in the Sudanese Civil War is the western theater of the war that began in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces. Darfur's conflict is shaped by the region's earlier war, the RSF's origins in Janjaweed-linked networks, local Arab and non-Arab militia politics, and the strategic value of state capitals, roads, camps, and border routes into Chad. The campaign has included urban sieges, mass displacement, attacks on civilians, ethnic targeting, sexual violence, looting, arson, and humanitarian collapse.

The Fano Insurgency is an armed conflict in Ethiopia's Amhara region between Fano militia networks and Ethiopian federal forces, escalating after federal moves to disarm regional and irregular armed formations. The conflict includes urban clashes, rural guerrilla activity, emergency rule, drone strikes, mass arrests, disrupted hospitals, local sieges, and attacks affecting civilians and health services. The conflict sits at the intersection of Ethiopia's post-Tigray security settlement, Amhara grievances, contested territorial claims, fragmented militia command, state consolidation, local autonomy debates, and human-rights abuses by multiple parties. Militia fragmentation, counterinsurgency tactics, and civilian access problems shape the conflict's staying power.

China-Philippines Maritime Confrontations describe the recurring standoffs, blockades, water-cannon incidents, collisions, and coercive patrols around contested features in the South China Sea, especially Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal. The confrontation intensified in 2023 and 2024 as Philippine resupply missions met increasingly assertive Chinese Coast Guard and maritime militia activity. The conflict is important because it sits below the threshold of war while still carrying alliance and escalation risk. It combines maritime law, coast guard operations, grey-zone pressure, U.S.-Philippines defense commitments, domestic political pressure, and China's broader effort to enforce expansive South China Sea claims.

The Russo-Ukrainian War's full-scale phase began on 24 February 2022, when Russia launched a multi-axis invasion of Ukraine after eight years of conflict following the annexation of Crimea and war in Donbas. It is the largest war in Europe since World War II and a central test case for modern conventional warfare, drones, air defense, sanctions, mobilization, and alliance support. The conflict cannot be reduced to a single battlefield narrative. It includes a failed Russian attempt to seize Kyiv, long attritional fighting in the east and south, missile and drone attacks on civilian infrastructure, Ukrainian long-range strike adaptation, Russian mobilization and fortification, Western military assistance, and continuous information warfare.

The M23 Offensive in Eastern DRC is the renewed campaign by the March 23 Movement in North Kivu and neighboring areas after years of relative dormancy. The offensive grew from unresolved grievances after earlier M23 demobilization, weak state control in eastern Congo, regional rivalry, contested citizenship and land issues, and allegations of external support. Since the resurgence, the conflict has included territorial advances, displacement around Goma, abuses against civilians, attacks on state forces, regional diplomatic initiatives, and pressure on MONUSCO. The offensive connects armed-group politics, Congo-Rwanda tensions, peacekeeping limits, mineral-rich borderlands, and civilian protection failures.

The Afghan Conflict after 2021 refers to the security environment that followed the Taliban's seizure of Kabul and the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Large-scale coalition war ended, but violence did not disappear. The Taliban became the de facto governing authority while facing ISIS-K attacks, anti-Taliban resistance activity, cross-border tension with Pakistan, sanctions pressure, humanitarian collapse, and deep restrictions on women and civil society.

The Myanmar Civil Conflict is the nationwide war that followed the military coup of 1 February 2021 and the violent suppression of anti-coup protest. It involves the Tatmadaw, the National Unity Government, People's Defence Force networks, ethnic armed organizations, local militias, and civilian communities caught between armed actors. The conflict transformed Myanmar's long-running peripheral wars into a broader struggle over state authority. It includes air strikes, village burnings, arrests, torture, economic collapse, displacement, parallel governance, and shifting alliances between pro-democracy resistance forces and ethnic organizations. The conflict connects coup politics, insurgency, minority conflict, state collapse risk, humanitarian crisis, and contested legitimacy.

The Tigray War was a 2020-2022 armed conflict between Ethiopia's federal government and forces aligned with the Tigray People's Liberation Front, with Eritrean forces, Amhara regional forces, and other actors playing major roles. The war began after a constitutional and political rupture between Addis Ababa and Tigray's leadership escalated into military confrontation. It included rapid offensives, shifting control of Mekelle and surrounding areas, alleged massacres, sexual violence, ethnic profiling, mass displacement, humanitarian obstruction, and famine-risk conditions. The Pretoria Cessation of Hostilities Agreement ended large-scale fighting but left unresolved questions over accountability, western Tigray, disarmament, and regional security. The conflict demonstrated how a state can combine federal authority, regional forces, and allied intervention while still failing to produce a durable political settlement. The challenge of restoring trust, services, and accountability persisted beyond the ceasefire.

The Islamic State insurgency in Syria is the post-territorial phase of ISIS activity after the loss of its last major enclave in 2019. The insurgency connects the Syrian civil war, SDF detention camps, U.S.-led coalition operations, regime-held desert zones, cross-border Iraq-Syria networks, prison-break attempts, and the long afterlife of the self-declared caliphate. ISIS did not disappear when it lost towns; it shifted toward cells, assassinations, extortion, desert mobility, prison networks, propaganda, and opportunistic attacks in the gaps between rival Syrian, Kurdish, Iraqi, Iranian-backed, Russian, and coalition security systems.

The Oromo Conflict is a continuing security and political conflict in Ethiopia centered on Oromia, the Oromo Liberation Army, federal and regional security forces, unresolved Oromo political grievances, and contested post-2018 reforms. The current phase intensified after parts of the Oromo Liberation Front's armed wing refused disarmament and continued fighting the Ethiopian state. The conflict connects Ethiopia's political transition, Oromia's strategic geography around Addis Ababa, failed settlement attempts, ethnic and regional tension, civilian attacks, and the overlap between local insurgency and national fragmentation. It remains one of Ethiopia's most persistent internal security crises.

The Ethiopian Civil Conflict encompasses overlapping internal wars and insurgencies that intensified after 2018, including the Tigray War aftermath, Amhara-Fano fighting, Oromo Liberation Army activity, intercommunal violence, and federal security operations. It is not a single linear civil war with one front or one settlement. The conflict involves federal forces, regional forces, Fano networks, OLA, Tigrayan actors, and concerns about Eritrean spillover, displacement, aid restrictions, ethnic targeting, accountability disputes, and the difficulty of applying one national narrative to multiple regional wars.

The Haitian Gang Conflict intensified from 2018 onward as armed groups expanded from chronic localized violence into a wider crisis of security, circulation, and governance. Gangs increasingly controlled neighborhoods, roads, ports, fuel routes, and commercial chokepoints while Haiti's political institutions, police capacity, and judicial systems struggled to contain or even map the changing balance of coercive power. The conflict connects territorial coercion, kidnappings, prison breaks, sanctions, international security missions, civilian displacement, and the transformation of gang networks into decisive political-security actors. Non-state armed groups acquired practical governing leverage over movement, markets, and public fear.