Modern Conflicts

For the first 6 months of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainians were entirely on the defensive, holding the lines against Russian attacks. But beginning in September of 2022, the Ukrainians shocked the world by going on the offensive themselves. This is the story of the largest counteroffensive seen in Europe since the Second World War, and how the momentum of the war in Ukraine suddenly and decisively shifted in Ukraine's favor.

By loss of life, the worst human conflict that began in the 21st century was the so-called Tigray War in Ethiopia, which lasted between 2020 and 2022. This video attempts to explain this terrible conflict's causes and why it went as badly as it did.

The civil war in Syria has been one of the most tragic, largest and consequential conflicts of the 21st-century. What initially began as protests against the country's long-standing regime steadily morphed into a full-blown civil war that has lasted for more than a decade and become one of the world's most complicated proxy-battlegrounds, as outside powers like the US, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia all directly intervened supporting various different factions.

Over the summer of 2014, a previously obscure organization in Iraq suddenly catapulted itself to worldwide attention and infamy through a series of lightning-fast military conquests across Iraq and Syria. That organization would quickly become known around the world as ISIS, and by 2015 they had carved out a de-facto state ruling over as many as 12 million people. But ISIS didn't just come out of nowhere, and this video attempts to explain how circumstances and opportunities aligned in the 2010s to provide them with a rapid rise.

By August of 2014, the group calling itself ISIS had exploded onto the world stage and rapidly conquered about half of Syria and a third of Iraq. But that same month, the United States decided to militarily intervene against the group. It would be the beginning of ISIS’s undoing, as this video covers how the growing coalition of nations and organizations aimed at destroying ISIS grew between 2014 and 2016, ultimately resulting in ISIS losing all of its territory and its leader just a few years later in 2019.

For over a year, the Russian and Ukrainian armies threw just about everything they had into a massive battle for control over the small city of Bakhmut in the east of Ukraine. The fight for the city gradually evolved into the most significant and most catastrophic battle fought in Europe since the Second World War, with tens of thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks committed by both sides.

For nearly 200 years, the Kurdish people have never had a truly independent state of their own. At a population of around 45 million today, that makes the Kurds one of the largest nations that does not have their own country. They are currently divided between the borders of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, and about 15 million Kurds live within Turkey. From time to time over the centuries, there have been demands and calls from among the Kurds to establish their own separate country, but that call has perhaps been the loudest from within Turkey, where ever since the 1980's into the present day, the Kurdistan Worker's Party, or PKK, has waged a violent campaign of insurgency and terrorism against the Turkish state for independence that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands since it began. This is the story of Turkey's most horrible, enduring, and tragic modern conflict.

Myanmar is a country located in Southeast Asia that has been locked in some form of civil war or another ever since its independence decades ago back in 1948. For most of the country's history since 1962, its government has been directly ruled by the country's military in one of the world's most heavily authoritarian regimes. This military regime engaged in one of the worst genocides of the 21st-century against Myanmar's Rohingya people from 2016 to the present, and overthrew the once-in-a-generation democratically elected civilian government in a coup d'etat in 2021, which has led to the latest chapter in the country's long-running civil war that has since in fewer than 3 years claimed the lives of tens of thousands. This episode in Modern Conflicts explains how Myanmar became the only failed-state in Southeast Asia.

Israel & Gaza Before 2023

The Lebanese Civil War