Modern Conflicts

For 4 long years, the largest city in Syria was torn apart in one of the largest and most ferocious battles of the 21st century. This is the story of how and why Aleppo was so fiercely fought over between the regime of Bashar al-Assad and his allies on the one side, and various rebel factions and their allies on the other.

In 2008, the Russian Armed Forces initiated a full-scale land, sea and air invasion into the country of Georgia in what would ultimately become the first European war of the 21st century.

Across the 1990's and early 2000's, the Republic of Chechnya attempted to secede from Russia and achieve independence. What followed was more than a decade of brutal warfare and violence that saw no real winners. This is the tragic story of the two wars fought between Russia and Chechnya.

In March of 2003, the United States and its allies invaded the country of Iraq under the pretext of dismantling Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and ending his regime's sponsorship of terror. But the US did so with no UN approval, the invasion was widely condemned as an act of aggression abroad, and no weapons of mass destruction were ever discovered. This is the tragic and dark story of America's invasion of Iraq.

Beginning in 2015, the Russian Armed Forces began a large-scale military intervention in the Syrian Civil War on behalf of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. It ended up turning into a triumph of geopolitics for the Kremlin, and here's how.

In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed into 15 newly independent states. Among these 15 was the Republic of Moldova. However, not everyone within the republic wanted to be independent. 470,000 people in the breakaway republic of Transnistria declared independence from Moldova, desiring to remain a part of the Soviet Union. The first war in Europe fought after the Cold War began as a result.

Since 2017, the People's Republic of China has been carrying out the largest genocide of the 21st century, targeted against the Uyghur people of Xinjiang, or East Turkestan.

The longest war in American history was the one fought for nearly 20 years in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021. It was so long, it lasted for nearly 8% of all American history from 1776 to the present day. This is the story of that conflict.

On the 24th of February 2022, nearly 200,000 Russian soldiers under direct orders from Moscow invaded Ukraine, sparking the largest war seen in Europe since 1945. During this first phase of the invasion, the Russians seemed intent on capturing the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and toppling the Ukrainian government. But this objective would fail, and their planned blitzkrieg would gradually transform into a brutal war of attrition.

After Russia failed to capture the Ukrainian capital by April, their army began to refocus everything on the eastern front and the battle for the Donbas: the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk. This episode covers the invasion of Ukraine between April and September of 2022.

Yemen is one of the largest and most important countries in the Middle East. In 2014, the country descended into an initially two-sided civil war between the Shia-adjacent Houthis allegedly supported by Iran, and the largely Sunni government supported by Saudi Arabia. The Saudis eventually intervened in the war alongside an international coalition that is still ongoing today, and which has generated one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes of the 21st-century.

Libya was once among Africa's wealthiest and most prosperous nations. But for the past 12 years, ever since 2011, the country has known almost nothing but warfare, chaos, and instability. There have been two civil wars fought across Libya, and a third is looming going into 2023. This is the story of how Libya shattered during the 2010's.