January 1, 2025: This is our annual summary of current war zones and an overview of where it’s all heading. After this overview there is the alphabetical list of the war zones and a quick summary of how the local violence has been proceeding. Since we have been covering this sort of thing for over twenty years now, there are many war zones that have gone quiet. We left most of those in summary, with a note that those wars had gone dormant, and maybe extinct. History shows that dormant is more common than extinct. Forever wars, or at least multi-century ones, are an ancient tradition.

Overall things are a lot more peaceful than the headlines or Internet chatter would have you believe. Like most major trends, world peace sneaked up on everyone and a lot of people have not noticed. Thanks to modern technology, especially ubiquitous access to cell phones and the Internet, any mayhem anywhere on the planet easily becomes another news item for a global audience. This gives the impression of more violence when it is nothing more than unprecedented general access to violence that until recently was never broadcast worldwide and accompanied by video. That gives a false impression that has not been widely acknowledged.

Civil Society Versus Tribal Loyalties

A major misunderstanding many political and military leaders make is to underestimate the amount of time it takes to fundamentally change a nation from a source of war and disorder to one of peace, prosperity, and unity. The fundamental misunderstanding is that the lack of civil society, as in a widely accepted set of cultural and political practices that create widespread trust, means that there is no quick fix for a chaotic area mired in war and mayhem. It takes generations of sustained effort to achieve a civil society. Without a civil society to work with, the best you can do is temporarily pacify. That’s why so many peacekeeping efforts never seem to end. On the other hand, nations with a civil society, like Japan and Germany after World War II, can change swiftly and effectively. That is why nations with lots of corruption and not much human development are so prone to violence and wars that never seem to end.

The worst of these troublesome areas have come to be described as failed states. That is, an area that never was a unified and stable state and is still cursed with fundamental political instability. Some examples are Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and many African states that were created by colonial rulers who underestimated the durability of tribal traditions and the difficulty of creating a civil society.

Empires are usually created via conquest but that has become more difficult in the last century. The urge to establish new empires is much diminished now, largely because of the disastrous after-effects of national socialists Nazis, international socialists Soviet Union and ethnic nationalists World War II Japan. But the urge for defunct or legendary empires to be revived still exists. You can see it happening with China, Russia, Iran, Turkey and Islamic radicals seeking to revive the medieval caliphate.

At the same time there are also problems with democracies. As Winston Churchill put it, democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. To make matters more interesting, all democracies are different, often drastically so. Despite all that, having the people as the ultimate source of political power manages to function in a wide variety of cultural environments. Democracy is also a perpetual work-in-progress and always a few major missteps away from degrading into totalitarianism or chaos.

China Goes Fascist

Meanwhile Eurasia finds itself beset by several major imperial revival efforts. In the east there is China, where the current dynasty is actually a bunch of communist party leaders trying to stay in power using the appeal of lost, several centuries earlier, imperial glories. Just as Hitler described his imperial effort as the “Third Reich (German empire)” in the tradition of the Holy Roman Empire and the 19th century German Reich, so does China claim legitimacy because of ancient claims by earlier Chinese empires.

Back in the 1980s China adopted a semi-market economy and finally went through the industrial revolution. This involved shedding most of its socialist responsibilities. With the presence of a nationalist dictatorship, you have a repeat of what happened nearly a century ago. China has a self-appointed leader-for-life running what is officially known as a socialist dictatorship. Back in the 1930s Germany had a free-market economy run by the National Socialist German Workers Party or NSDAP and known as Nazis. Spain had a similar government with a dictator technically acting as regent for a deposed monarchy. Japan had a market economy, but its constitutional monarchy had been usurped by a military coup that put a military dictatorship in power that ruled in the name of the emperor. Italy was run by a dictator who was a lifelong socialist but also a nationalist dictator promising to revive the Roman Empire on the cheap. That did not end well. But that was then, today the fascists are the same but a bit different.

Fascist China now and Fascist Germany in the 1930s were very similar but there were some key differences. In the 1930s the U.S. had the largest GDP in the world and Germany’s was second. But back then the American GDP was more than twice the size of Germany’s while today the Chinese GDP is about two thirds the size of the American one and may match it in a decade or so. Reports from China indicate that the Chinese have been cheating with their GDP statistics.

The German military was one of the most effective on the planet with an impressive record of winning battles and losing wars. The Chinese military has a much less illustrious track record and usually prevailed, when they did prevail, because of their ability to mobilize more soldiers for a longer war than their opponents could handle. Historically Chinese armies often looked good on paper but usually proved to be paper tigers when the fighting began. The American military has become one of the most effective on the planet. China has similar goals to 1930s Germany. China has territorial claims on neighbors and wants more territory and resources for its huge population. The Chinese believe in the racial superiority of the Han ethnic group, which most Chinese belong to, and a historical destiny to rule the largest possible empire. Until the 18th century China was the largest nation-state on the planet and had been so for thousands of years. But it went into decline for two centuries. Most Chinese agree that it is time for China to once again be the most powerful state in the world. This is causing problems.

The neighbors, and the rest of the world, are more alarmed than inclined to submit. Russia and India, two potential victims, have nukes. This was something earlier Chinese empire builders never had to face although the Mongols did a pretty impressive job of “killing everyone and burning everything” over a wide area. Like current nuclear powers, the Mongols learned to use the application of massive violence more as a threat than as a regular practice.

The Weak Links

Then there is Russia, where former communist era secret police officers, led by Vladimir Putin, are trying to use imperial nostalgia and the more familiar, to these former KGB professionals, police state tactics to at least stay in power and, if possible, Make Russia Imperial Again. Putin, the Russian leader since 2000, as president or prime minister, is officially opposed to the return of leader for life rule in Russia despite his exceptionally long and questionably legal rule. Russia, like China, is a semi-market economy run by a nationalist dictator. For historical analogy, think of Russia as the equivalent to World War II Japan while China is the wealthier and more powerful Nazi Germany.

Russia’s western neighbor is another revived empire, the European Union or EU. Many Europeans see the EU as an unintended effort to revive a European empire that never really existed, although Charlemagne came close for a short time in the 9th century, and a thousand years before that the Romans were a contender. There isn’t much nostalgia in Western Europe for these traditional empires but many Europeans back a kinder and gentler empire that is based more on voluntary cooperation than coercion. The EU has run into problems because many Europeans see the EU developing into an unelected bureaucracy that can make all sorts of new rules and even foreign policy without any regard for what their constituents and, technically, employers, the European voters want. A growing number of Europeans think this EU Empire is a mistake and are demanding that their local politicians, who are still responsible to the voters, at least more so than the EU officials, fix this problem or get their country out of the EU. The imperial officials are not pleased with this ignorance and ingratitude by their subjects and are fighting back in a losing battle to keep their new empire together. So far, only Britain has withdrawn from the EU and did so in 2020. Since then, Britain has thrived or just survived depending on who you ask.

The Great Nuclear Ceasefire Stumbles On

Despite the growing military power of China and saber rattling from Russia, the major military powers continue the GNC or Great Nuclear Ceasefire that began in the 1950s, when Russia got nuclear weapons, and soon realized they could not afford to use them without risking more destruction than past foes like the Nazis, Imperial French or Mongols inflicted. As more countries got nukes, an attitude of, we can't afford to use them, but they're nice to have, prevailed and the unprecedented truce persisted. There have been wars, but not between the big players who have the largest and most destructive conventional forces. Because of the GNC a historical record was broken in 1986, as there had never been before, since the modern state system developed in the 16th century, such a long period without a war between major powers. That is the kind that we could afford, these days, to get nuclear weapons. Even the current Ukraine War Russia indicates they would not use nuclear weapons.

Since the Cold War ended in 1991 there have been fewer wars, at least in the traditional sense, and the GNC holds. Not only have there been fewer wars since the 1950s but there has been a lot less poverty, especially since the Cold War, and so many communist governments, ended in 1990. The communist nations failed economically and most of them rapidly reduced poverty once they had a free market economy. At the end of the Cold War, in the late 1980s, 40 percent of the world population lived in destitution, also defined as extreme poverty. Three decades later, that poverty rate was down to ten percent and currently it is under ten percent. Most of the remaining extreme poverty occurs in badly governed areas of the Middle East, especially Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan as well African nations like Libya, Congo, and Sudan that are also the scene of wars or general disorder.

The downside is that there are a lot more low-level rebellions and civil wars, but overall a lot less death, destruction, and extreme poverty. Most people are unaware of this situation because the mass media never made a lot of the GNC as it was something that was just there and not worth reporting. Besides, adopting the attitude that nuclear bombs, power plants and medicine are evil sells if you are in the news business. Calling any incident, with a lot of gunfire and a few dead bodies, a war has also been misleading. The fact is, worldwide violence has been declining since the end of the Cold War and the elimination of Russian subsidies and encouragement for pro-communist, or simply pro-Russia or just anti-West, rebels, and terrorists. The media also has a hard time keeping score. If you step back and take a look at all the wars going on, a more accurate picture emerges. In light of that, take sensational reporting of the Chinese threat with a bit of skepticism.

Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022 and that was the first major war since the 1930s when World War II began and was raging worldwide. The Ukraine War is local, but it involves a major power, Russia, that was a more powerful major power before the Cold War ended in 1991 and the Soviet Union dissolved, losing half its population. The Ukraine War is the first step in rebuilding the Russian empire that was run by monarchies for centuries until the early 1920s when the communist Soviets took over. The former components of the Soviet Union do not want to rejoin any Russian empire and that is why Ukraine fights so hard against the invading Russians.

With the exception of Ukraine, there are examples of international opposition to empire rebuilding. This was the case with Iran, which had economic sanctions reinstated in 2018. This led to a reduction in violence because of less Iranian financial support for the foreign wars and international troublemaking in general. That changed by 2023 when Iran fired over a thousand rockets and missiles and saw all of them intercepted. There was one fatality, as a Palestinian man was killed by falling rocket debris.

Most current wars are basically uprisings against inefficient, corrupt, and oppressive police states or feudal societies which are seen as out-of-step with the modern world. The Internet and widespread adoption of smartphones made most people on the planet aware that a better life was not only a possibility but that many people, especially in the West, had lived the good life for generations.

Many revolutions are led by radicals preaching failed dogmas like Islamic conservatism, Maoism, and other forms of radical socialism, that still resonate among people who don't know about, or care, about the dismal track records of these creeds. After 1991 Iran replaced some of the lost Soviet terrorist support effort. Iran kept Hezbollah, Hamas, and a few smaller groups going, and that's it. Israel destroyed Hezbollah in 2023. Terrorists in general miss the Soviets, who really knew how to treat bad boys right. No one has yet replaced the Soviets in that respect, an accomplishment even most Russians would rather not dwell on.

Current Wars

Listed in alphabetical order. Text underneath briefly describes current status.

AFGHANISTAN

In 2024 the country is suffering from hunger with half the population getting insufficient food. The Taliban enforced strict dress codes for women and prohibited women from working outside the home. Most women no longer have access to healthcare and are banned from ports.

All this began back in 2021 when the elected IRA/Islamic Republic of Afghanistan collapsed and was replaced by the Pakistan backed IEA/Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It was the Pakistan military that backed the Taliban and the Afghan heroin cartels. Over the last few years, the Pakistan military had found a way to run the government without a coup and all the resulting criticism and sanctions. The defeat of the IRA was accomplished via corruption, intimidation, disruption of the economy and a bungled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The original withdrawal plan was for a thousand or more U.S. and NATO troops to remain to advise and train the IRA security forces and monitor the corruption. The IRA wanted to survive but to do that they had to keep receiving billions a year from foreign donors, mainly the United States. Refusal to cooperate meant termination of aid and nearly all the foreigners would leave. The Americans got a new government in early 2021 and that led to fatal changes to the withdrawal plan. Everyone was ordered out but was given three additional months to do it. That gave Pakistan and the Taliban an opportunity to increase their pressure on the IRA, which now believed the Americans were going to abandon them.

The new IEA declared a great victory but found that few people, not even most Afghans, saw this as a win. Foreign aid ceased. Nearly $10 billion of IRA cash held in foreign banks, in an effort to reduce corruption, was frozen and no one would recognize the IEA as the successor to the IRA. Several countries designated Afghanistan as a terrorist organization. For the people of Afghanistan, especially the women, that designation seemed appropriate.

Drug production in Afghanistan continues and depends on the Pakistan military for support. The drugs are winning as they usually do wherever they get established. There are not too many narco-states because they all follow the same script. Eventually locals get fed up with the local violence and the growing number of addicts. That leads to more violence and the drug gangs are crushed although usually not completely eliminated. Eventually can take a long time and such is the case with Afghanistan. Compare that to how it worked in Colombia from 2000 on, and Burma after World War II and Iran in the 1950s. The only thing that nearly everyone in Afghanistan can agree on is that opium and heroin are bad. Nearly ten percent of the population is addicted to drugs, mostly opiates and another ten percent make a better living or get rich from the drug trade. Most Afghans consider drug gangs the biggest threat and these are largely run and staffed, like the IEA, by Pushtun tribesmen from four southern provinces. The Pakistan-backed Afghan Taliban have created a heroin-producing Islamic terrorist and gangster sanctuary in Afghanistan. If you want to know how that works, look at Chechnya in the late 1990s and Somalia or Yemen in the early 21st century. No one has come up with any cheap, fast, or easy solution for that. Meanwhile, Afghanistan's core problem is that there is no Afghanistan, merely a collection of tribes more concerned with tribal issues than anything else. The IEA runs Kabul, the largest city in Afghanistan, but not much else.

ALGERIA

Elections were held this year and most people suspected the results were manipulated to favor the party in power. Oil and natural gas production increase brings more prosperity to the population. Algeria changed its constitution so it can become a supplier of peacekeepers throughout Africa and the world.

BALKANS

The Balkan states in southeast Europe consist of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria. Croatia, Greece, Kosovo and Montenegro. With a population of 55 million and a combined GDP of less than $400 billion, the region is relatively prosperous. One problem the Balkans has encountered in the last year was over 20,000 refugees from Middle Eastern nations like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. The migrants are on their way to more prosperous destinations like Germany but cause some problems in the Balkans as they pass through.

Over the last decade there was some Islamic terrorist activity there and the usual border disputes and crippling corruption. One ominous development is the growing number of mosques and religious schools being built and maintained by Saudi Arabia. These facilities are very hostile to non-Moslems plus any Moslems who disagree with the strict Saudi version of Islam which has been the source of so many Islamic terrorists since the 1980s. Balkan Moslems are increasingly hostile to the Saudis for this, and the Balkans did not become the Islamic terrorist sanctuary many feared.

CENTRAL ASIA

This region is defined as the nations of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Over the last decade there was a problem with local efforts to get some serious Islamic terrorist activity going. These efforts failed. Islamic terrorism is popular in Central Asia and the thousands of young men who sought to join Islamic terror groups didn’t do it in Central Asia. The vast majority travel somewhere else to act on their impulse to be active Islamic terrorists. Many Central Asian men joined ISIL, but not in Central Asia. With the elimination of the ISIL caliphate in Syria and Iraq in 2018 there were lots of documents and survivors, like families of ISIL men, some ISIL members, and local civilians, who could be questioned and lots of data analyzed. The results were some accurate numbers about Central Asian participation in ISIL though the end of 2018. Between 3,000 and 5,000 Central Asians made it to Syria. Over half survived and got out. More worrisome was the fact that for every Central Asian who tried to get into Syria, two or three were stopped at the Syrian border with Turkey and turned back or arrested. The Turks collected data on those turned away and some of those were later captured or killed in Syria. Some of those turned back eventually made it in, but few returned home to become active Islamic terrorists. That is the pattern; many get radicalized, leave, and never return. The result is that during the last decade there were few Islamic terror attacks in Central Asia. After each of these the response was swift and usually led to the capture of those responsible and others who were among the usual suspects but not known to be active. This effective counterterror response motivated many radicalized young men to seek a safer nation in which to defend Islam with extreme violence. Most of the nations involved here were part of the Soviet Union until 1991 and still had effective secret police. The local dictators encourage ruthless suppression of any dissent. People are putting up with it so far but popular anger at the corruption and inefficient government is growing. The region has become an economic and diplomatic battleground for Russia and China and China is winning. This is something Russia doesn’t like to discuss, but among Russians the real threat is from the east, not the west.

CHAD

A landlocked nation in North Africa that shares a border with Libya, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Nigeria and Niger. While 55 percent of the 19 million population is Moslem, 41 percent is Christian. Chad is poor, with a GDP per capital of $700. This is one of the five lowest in the world. From 1900 to 1960 Chad was a French colony. Unlike other French colonies in Africa, not much was done to modernize Chad’s economy and infrastructure. After 1960 Chad was ruled by a number of dictators and regularly ravaged by civil wars. After 1990 democracy took root and there have been several elections since then. Chad has even become a major supplier of peacekeepers throughout Africa, especially in Nigeria against Boko Haram.

CHINA

China has the second largest economy, with a purported annual GDP of $18 trillion. This is second to the United States with $27 trillion. Chinese growth has been spectacular because their GDP in 2005 was only $2.3 trillion. Current per-capita income for China is $13,000 versus $84,000 for the United States. Despite its large economy, China has four times as many people and that lowers the per-capita income. The global average for all nations is $14,000. China's GDP growth rate has been spectacular with most of the growth taking place between 1980 and 2020. The Chinese GDP was only eleven percent of the Americans in 1960 but by 2023 was 65 percent of the United States. During the last decade growth has slowed because of a massive real estate speculation crisis and revelations that provincial officials had not been reporting accurately on their dismal and growing economic problems. The government could issue positive press releases, but the average Chinese knew what was going on, which led to reduced consumption and many with spare cash getting their money out of China. This is illegal but happens anyway thanks to the number of government officials willing to take a bribe.

Then there is the population problem. Government officials have been providing false information on how many Chinese there are. Even its government admits the population fell from 1.5 to 1.4 billion in the past ten years. But it isn’t 1.4 billion, it’s actually 1.2 billion or less, and will be no more than 1.1 billion by 2031. This explains why there are not enough young workers and too many retired ones. And this will get worse – China’s female fertility rate (number of children produced by one female of child-bearing age, which must be at least 2.1 to avoid population decline) dropped from 1.2 to 0.6 in the past five years. That means population collapse. This was the result of a 1980s population control effort that mandated couples could only have one child.

Several decades of enforcing the one child policy prevented China's population from spiraling out of control over the last few decades. But it also meant that there are now too many old people relative to too few young workers. This shortage first became visible after the 2020 covid19 pandemic hit China. Mandatory quarantines on urban areas forced many members of the working population to stay at home. This was enough to trigger a sustained economic depression that continues. President Xi Jinping took control of the situation and made it worse. Xi Jinping continues to mismanage the economy while making himself an unpopular dictator.

Meanwhile, the shortage of young workers has increased, as the first members of the one child generation reached working age. These workers demanded more money and attention. Wages moved up rapidly, and there's still a shortage of workers. There's also a shortage of skilled people in the armed forces. Plenty of low skilled or inept volunteers, but not the ones that are most needed, and in demand.

The one child program has not only halted rapid growth of the Chinese population but permanently changed perceptions of what the optimal family size should be. The enforcement of one child families was strictly enforced in urban areas, while those in rural areas could usually have two children. These policies forced parents to lavish more attention on fewer children. As a result, the children were better educated and accustomed to a higher standard of living. While chided as little princes, these youngsters were more economically successful than their parents and brought a new verve to the economy and culture.

Suddenly most Chinese came to believe that this was one of the secrets of Western success. The economic superiority of the foreigners had long been something of a mystery. Chinese feel inherently superior to those smelly apes with the round eyes and bad manners. In fact, economists, and other social scientists, including Chinese ones, always understood the value of small families. Most Chinese were unconvinced and the one-child policy provided the needed example to demonstrate the economic superiority of smaller families. This created several generations of labor shortages and the growing fiscal and political costs of supporting a huge, by Chinese standards number of retired elderly workers who had to be taken care of. All this has caused a halt to spectacular economic growth and sustained economic stagnation that supreme leader Xi Jinping cannot find a solution for.

Since it takes twenty years for an infant to become a productive worker and begin family creation, and China presently has proportionately so few females of child-bearing age, let alone the inclination to have even one child, China’s population and GDP collapse in the next 30-40 years is certain. China is only temporarily a great power. South Korea, Europe, Russia, Ukraine and Turkey face similar demographic crashes.

Meanwhile President Xi Jinping has consolidated power, with significant constitutional amendments allowing for extended presidential terms. This centralization of authority has been unpopular along with the growing use of surveillance state techniques. The growing prevalence of government surveillance cameras and effective facial recognition technology has made it difficult for people to protest unpopular policies. That increases the degree of discontent.

China continues to expand its military capabilities with larger investments in modernizing the People's Liberation Army (PLA). This includes advancements in cyber warfare, space technology, and naval power, which are pivotal to China's strategic ambitions in the South China Sea and beyond. The PLA's assertiveness in regional disputes, coupled with its global economic Belt and Road Initiative, reflects China's long-term strategic vision of enhancing its geopolitical influence while minimizing direct confrontations. The 2023 discovery that the Chinese military was so corrupt that it failed to produce enough spare parts for its existing military aircraft, rockets, missiles and warships to operate for even a few days in an invasion of Taiwan indicates that estimates of Chinese military capability are speculative.

Religion, while constitutionally protected, is tightly regulated, with the state exercising stringent control over religious practices. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) promotes a secular ideology, often clamping down on religious groups perceived as threats to its authority. This has led to international criticism, particularly regarding the treatment of Uighur Moslims in Xinjiang and the repression of Christian congregations. Despite these restrictions, religious communities continue to adapt, finding ways to practice their faith within the bounds of state oversight.

Past mistakes are catching up with China as it continues its post-Cold War policy of aggressive territorial claims and risking, but not going to, war with its neighbors. Internally China is creating the fictional Big Brother surveillance state of the novel 1984. This has more to do with internal politics and the need to distract an increasingly wealthy and concerned population from local problems with corruption, pollution and ineffective government. Domestic unrest has been growing louder and more visible to Chinese and the world. Examples include nationwide protests against rigid covid19 shutdowns. Before that it was the large-scale freedom protests in Hong Kong during most of 2019 and into 2020. This was about Chinese abuse of the special status Hong Kong is supposed to enjoy until 2047, but it is also about the corruption and financial recklessness in the rest of the country. China ignored the Hong Kong protestors and is dismantling the guaranteed, until 2047, freedoms for Hong Kong. The widespread covid19 protests were another matter, so the government backed down and at the end of 2022 is still seeking a way to regain total control of the population. Outside China, the government pursues an ancient, and often quite successful, strategy that emphasizes what appear to be high-risk policies but are actually long-range efforts to wear down the opposition and eventually assume control of the objective with little risk or cost. Or so China believed until the Americans, and many other victims, pushed back.

COLOMBIA/VENEZUELA

The South American nation of Columbia is largely at peace. Next door in Venezuela it’s not as peaceful. Recent elections have put Nicolas Maduro back in office for another six years of misrule in Venezuela. The problem was that his opponent Maria Corina Machado won the vote by a large majority. Maduro, as the incumbent, controlled the counting of votes. Despite the fact that surveys indicated most voters chose Machado, Maduro managed to rig the outcome to favor him. There were days of riots over this vote tampering. Maduro still had the support of the security forces and was able to jail hundreds of demonstrators and survive this popular uprising against him.

Now Maduro must face or ignore a host of old problems. For example the 2016 peace agreement with FARC/Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia that was supposed to end a half century of violence did not work. There was less violence in some areas, but many of the pardoned FARC members moved their operations and continued their criminal activities in more remote areas. Soon there was more FARC violence than before although it was now happening in rural areas that had previously been peaceful.

In 2017 FARC demobilized, as agreed. The demobilization did not bring peace because the demobilized FARC members then formed nearly three dozen new gangs that engaged in a variety of criminal activities including robbery, drug dealing, kidnapping for ransom and multiple other forms of violent mischief. These crimes are rarely punished because the gangs either bribe, intimidate or murder judges presiding over these cases.

The mayhem is enhanced by thousands of landmines still present in some areas. Police and soldiers in rural areas often engage in illegal activities rather than trying to prevent them. Corruption among long enforcement personnel is the norm, especially in rural areas where it’s easier for security personnel to conceal what they are up to. This is especially true when the international drug cartels are involved. The cartels regularly offer security personnel a choice; take the bribe money or get killed for opposing the gangs.

Then there are the problems caused by millions refugees leaving Venezuela. Neighboring Columbia offered them amnesty and refuge, which most of the Venezuelans accepted. Some of the Venezuelans moved on to Europe or the United States for better opportunities. The Americans asked the Colombians to block the movement of Colombians and Venezuelans to the United States and paid Colombia a substantial sum to make it happen. Some migration was blocked, but many refugees got to the U.S. border anyway.

Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, and a lot of problems caused by all that money. It wasn’t helping the average Venezuelan and over seven million Venezuelans have left their oil-rich homeland since 2015. The endless violence in Venezuela means it is safer to be a Venezuelan anywhere but Venezuela. The primary cause of this is local strongman Nicolas Maduro, who has remained in control since 2020 because he purchased the support of military commanders, armed militias and foreign allies like Russia, China, Iran and Cuba. Maduro would have no useful foreign allies if it were not for the huge oil resources Venezuela sits on. The oil wealth has long been a source of political discord and violence and that is what has kept Maduro alive.

The oil wealth is only a century old. Oil production grew rapidly in the 1920s so that, when World War II broke out in 1939, Venezuela was the third largest producer after the United States and Russia. On the downside Venezuelan oil was more expensive to produce and refine because of its tar-like consistency. That meant Venezuela received less money per barrel than other nations. While Venezuela has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil still in the ground, this petroleum is not as valuable or as easy to pump and sell as elsewhere. That is a minor problem compared to chronic corruption. This has been the case since the beginning, before Spanish colonial rule was overthrown in the early 19th century. The post-colonial governments were largely democratic and less corrupt but not by much. The oil industry was owned by a few families and these families spent a lot of that money to maintain their ownership. Venezuelan oil assets were not nationalized until the 1970s and at that point government careers became far more attractive.

How to handle oil income was always a political issue but one reform government after another was corrupted by the oil wealth. The Maduro government began as another populist reform movement and quickly morphed into another corrupt cartel of cronies. One unique feature of the current corrupt rulers is that they have managed to do more economic harm to Venezuela than any previous political group. Moreover, the current government is relying more on foreign governments to survive. Worst of all the democratic opposition is more fragmented and unable to agree on how to remove the current dictatorship. Most of the 28 million remaining Venezuelans are barely surviving. That is what drove over seven million to flee the country. Those remaining are fixated on survival, not reforming the government.

The security forces are first in line for any economic benefits available. Maduro pays attention to advisors from Cuba, Russia and China. All three told him to allow some free enterprise because in small doses it boosts the economy without threatening Maduro’s rule. Maduro was also advised to let anyone leave the country if they wanted to, but to strictly control who could get back in. The basic advice was to remain in power because eventually the regional and international pressure would decline and ways around the sanctions would be found. Iran had nothing encouraging to say about that approach. This was what Russia was doing and, while Russia said they were doing fine in the face of continued sanctions, the average Russian described a different, and less encouraging reality. This was especially true since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Western nations, who provide customers and services that make Venezuelan oil profitable, are able to apply pressure on Maduro to behave. Maduro has not cooperated and currently the United States is offering a $15 million reward to anyone or any group that will make it possible for the U.S. to arrest and try Maduro for his crimes. As a cornered despot, Maduro must continue to rule or risk ending up in an American prison. Staying in power and avoiding a rebellion by angry Venezuelans forced Maduro to allow new presidential elections. Maduro believed he could manipulate the election process and get himself installed as a legitimate head of state. That would make him immune to any U.S. efforts to move Maduro to an American penitentiary.

National leaders trying to flee their country with large amounts of money now have to deal with international restrictions on taking that much money with you. In the last decade international regulators helped Nigeria reclaim large sums which larcenous governors of Nigerian states sought to take with them into exile. Stolen money is no good if the only place you can take it is Iran, Cuba or North Korea. Cuba will actually help wealthy people bring their stolen money to Cuba but expects the wealthy visitor to pay large sums to the Cuban government to remain free and wealthy in communist Cuba. North Korea is another option but few wealthy outlaws take it because the North Koreans will take your wealth and then expel you if they have a chance to do so. Iran is somewhere in between. They will tax your wealth but living in an Islamic religious dictatorship is not pleasant for a foreigner.

CONGO

Diplomatic and local opposition eventually persuaded the incumbent, since 2001, President Kabila to stop trying to become a president-for-life. Kabila tried to revive the one-party dictatorship based on corruption and exploiting ethnic divisions. The current, since 2001, president and his father, who was president from 1997 until his assassination in 2001, had grown up opposing that sort of thing but here it was again. Kabila was supposed to leave office after the 2016 elections selected a new president. He could not run again and was unable to get the constitution changed. He was forced to allow elections at the end of 2018 but was able to rig the vote to get someone willing to cooperate with the corrupt system Kabila wanted to keep going. Félix Tshisekedi, the new president, would presumably benefit if he went along. Tshisekedi instead took on Kabila and his powerful parliamentary coalition. Tshisekedi found allies in the UN and among donor countries and blocked Kabila’s efforts to hide his corrupt activities while president.

By 2021 the mining contracts Kabila agreed to with China were being audited and evidence of extensive wrongdoing by Kabila and China were documented. China is losing those contracts, so Kabila is very much on the defensive, as are his cronies in parliament and the courts. The misdeeds of Kabila were the reason Congo was facing widespread chaos and civil war that is made worse by the ongoing ethnic divisions. Solutions have been sought since the 1960s and in 2013 the UN tried something novel, a special combat brigade of peacemakers. This brigade was given a license to kill, and kill as often as needed, to eliminate the last few rogue militias operating in the east. This solved many of the peacekeeping problems there, at least temporarily.

Despite that, multiple tribal and political militias, plus an increasing number of bandits, continue to roam the eastern border area, perpetuating the bloodiest and least reported war of the 21st century with over six million dead. There is similar but less intense unrest in other parts of the country (especially the separatist minded southwest). The Congolese government discovered that it had to cope with the continuing corruption and lack of order in the east and southwest. The reason was always money, the millions of dollars available each year to whoever has gunmen controlling the mines that extract valuable ores and allow the stuff out of the country. Congo is finally emerging from this deadly chaos. Elsewhere in Central Africa the Burundi civil war threatens to reignite because the current president is trying to defy the constitution and become president-for-life. In the Central African Republic years of chaos, following the overthrow of a corrupt and incompetent dictator, evolved into another Moslem versus Christian and non-Moslems in general conflict.

ETHIOPIA

The 2024 elections were conducted without incident and former Minister of Foreign Affairs Taye Atske Selassie was elected. There was no opposition candidate. Meanwhile the Ethiopian civil war continues. Despite numerous international efforts to broker peace, the conflicts between government forces and various regional factions show little sign of abating.

Clashes have intensified in the northern regions, leading to further displacement of civilians and exacerbating the already dire conditions in refugee camps. Aid organizations are struggling to deliver essential supplies due to the ongoing violence, and there are increasing concerns about food insecurity and health crises.

Diplomatic efforts are ongoing, with the United Nations and African Union calling for immediate ceasefire talks. However, deep-seated mistrust between the warring parties poses a significant obstacle to meaningful negotiations. The international community remains vigilant, urging all sides to prioritize humanitarian relief and work towards a sustainable resolution.

The current civil war in Ethiopia began in November 2020 when the TPLF/Tigray People's Liberation Front attacked security forces because of disagreements with the ruling EPRDF/Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front over how the nation should be ruled. Tigray has feuded with the central government for centuries. This time the complaint was that prime minister Abiy Ahmed had reorganized the ruling EPRDF as the Prosperity Party and the TPLF saw this as an effort to reduce Tigrayan power in the government. The TPLF refused to join the Prosperity Party and sought to take control of the government.

The fighting went on for so long because the EPRDF has a large country to administer. The current population of Ethiopia is 123 million. The armed forces and national police are spread thin. The armed forces have 136,000 personnel and a billion dollar a year budget, which is less than one percent of GDP. The TPLF had a Tigray militia force that could call on up to 100,000 armed men but could not move them around because nearly all were armed only to defend their villages or neighborhoods. The army was joined by an Amhara militia. Most of the fighting and casualties occurred in Tigray. The Tigray forces threatened to drive on the capital Addis Ababa. That sort of thing is not unknown in Africa where lots of pickup trucks and a few good roads leading to the capital, plus poorly organized security forces, make a threat to “drive on the capital” something that can happen.

The TPLF was aided by another rebel group, the OLA/Oromo Liberation Army in western Ethiopia that had been formed in 2018 when the larger OLF/Oromo Liberation Front made peace with the central government. The OLA has only a few thousand members and not all of them are willing or able to take a weapon and join an effort to advance on Addis Ababa. But it doesn’t take much of an armed force equipped with rifles, pistols, and machine guns in a few dozen motor vehicles to pose a threat, at least on the electronic media, to the national government. With OLA advancing from the west and TPLF from the north, the potential for scary and lucrative headlines was too much to resist. In the last week the situation suddenly changed, with the government forces advancing.

There were other factors at work here and one was that electronic media has been slow to appear in Ethiopia. Telegraph, telephones, wireless telegraph, radio, TV, cell phones and the Internet all eventually arrived but are not widely available to a lot of Ethiopians. A decade ago, there were about half a million Internet users, but now it is 20 percent of the population and perhaps more because many more people can afford to spend time at Internet Cafes. This is a common expansion method for the Internet but it was slower than usual in Ethiopia because the central government was quick to put controls on cell-phone use by making it mandatory to use a government approved SIM card. Individual satellite phones required government permission to enter the country.

Another problem is literacy; only about half the adult population can read. Many cannot read that well because they only had a few years of schooling and left to work after attaining basic literacy in one of the three main languages used by the Amhara, Tigray and Oromo regions. That explains why the Amhara get most of the blame for the decades of communist Derg Party dictatorship. Now an Oromo prime minister, with the backing of many Amhara, is seeking to reduce the power of ethnic politics in Ethiopia. A noble goal, but many people in Tigray and Oromo see this as another oppressive scheme coming from “the center”. That is Addis Ababa and highland plateau that has always been the center of the kingdom/empire/republic that survives by introducing new ideas to keep Ethiopia completive with potential foreign threats. With more literacy and a smattering of electronic media the rebellions are being organized and defeated more quickly. Accusations of ethnic atrocities travel faster and with more impact by the subsequent clarifications that diminish or invalidate the initial claim.

Apparently Ethiopian forces avoided that threat by using drones and smaller quadcopters to monitor the roads plus the armed opposition and their condition. The government also armed some of its non-combat air force aircraft to provide air support. Government forces have been advancing down the key highways and chasing the rebels out of roadside towns they had occupied. The rebels reply that this is part of their plan and they will strike back soon and crush the government forces. That’s not how it works when the rebels are diehard splinter groups from larger ethnic rebel organizations that made peace with the central government. The current plan is for government change to depend less on ethnic differences and animosities.

Over 600,000 have died so far, at least half of them civilians. Many more civilians fled their homes temporarily to avoid violence or looters. The local damage and refugees were often the result of ethnic violence in communities nowhere near the armed rebels and government forces. This is the ethnic problem the proposed government program wants to overcome. Ancient practices often resist change, which is why they still exist. Reforms have been generally agreed on for generations but local politics and paranoia have always been a local obstacle that will flare into violence quickly and then dissipate. Electronic communications and media make it all happen more quickly than in the past, but not a lot more effectively.

Claims were made of much higher casualties but verifying such claims is difficult and time consuming in Ethiopia. Politicians and community leaders on both sides have kept talking, because the fighting is not going to be decisive unless there is agreement between the three major ethnic groups. The TPLF and OLA are not going to get to Addis Ababa and the security forces are not going to end the violence in Tigray or Oromia by force. A negotiated settlement is still underway, and the fighting has subsided but not ended, because the main TPLF demand is that prime minister Ahmed resign.

The two rebel groups got to within a few hundred kilometers of the capital and admit they were supplied by what they could steal along the way. Foraging is an ancient logistics method but has limitations, especially when the government forces have a more modern resupply system. The government has easy access to foreign suppliers, who can use air freight services to get what they need quickly. The travel disruptions have hurt many Ethiopians who want nothing to do with this fight. Vital supplies of food and other essentials have been reduced by the fighting along the few paved roads that can handle the heavy truck traffic. More remote communities that depend on food aid are going hungry for reasons they don’t fully comprehend.

Tigrayans had a reputation as determined and skilled fighters, but they were part of Ethiopia because they were outnumbered in a country that has long been the only Christian majority state in North Africa, and the only African state or region that escaped colonization by Europeans. The Italians tried and failed in the 1930s to turn Ethiopia into a colony. This war against the only Christian kingdom in Africa was widely criticized at the time.

Ethiopia is an ancient Christian kingdom that survived for so long because at its core there is some of the best farmland in the Sahel, a semi-desert region south of the Sahara Desert that extends across Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. The Ethiopian plateau gets plenty of rain and contains one of the main sources of the Nile River. Surrounding this lush plateau are deserts and semi-desert grasslands.

Most Ethiopians converted from ancient faiths to Christianity in the 4th century. Four hundred years later the new and expanding Islamic caliphate attacked and eventually seized the coastal Eritrea region but could not get much further for a long time. In the 1400s the Ottomans made some more damaging attacks on Abyssinia, so more than five centuries after that the ancient Christian kingdom became something of a legend in Europe because ancient Abyssinia no longer had access to the sea and getting messages, like letters from European kings and emperors to the Abyssinian emperor failed. For a long time, it was unclear if the legendary Christian State still existed.

After 1492 European ships with their new technology began showing up off the East African coast. One of these expeditions from Portugal reestablished links to the Abyssinian emperor and even provided crucial assistance when another Moslem army threatened them. Centuries of Moslem armies attacking had made a mark and left Abyssinia/Ethiopia with a 30 percent Moslem minority. The threat of Moslem armies from the east led Abyssinian emperors to seek allies to the west and thus the lowland Oromo people became part of the empire and most were converted to Christianity. The Oromo were culturally similar to the Amhara and speak a related but different language. The Amhara and Oromo are the Christian majority, although only about half of Oromos are Christian, and the Oromo are the largest minority. The Tigray people are north of the plateau and all that is left of the larger Christian population along the Red Sea coast that were lost to Islam.

What the Europeans contacted in the early 1500s was a new and more powerful Ethiopian empire founded in the 1200s by the largest group in the highlands, the Amhara. Both Tigray and Amhara people share the plateau but the Tigray were always more advanced economically and culturally because they were closest to the ancient Nile kingdoms. What the Tigray learned was passed on to the more numerous Amhara who became culturally and politically dominant in the 1200s. The Tigray are about six percent of the population and nearly all are Christian and have the highest education rate and personal incomes in Ethiopia. The more recently acquired Somalis in Ogaden province bordering Somalia also have about six percent of the national population. The Oromo are 34 percent and the Amhara 27 percent. The Amhara have long led a coalition founded in unity with the Oromo and Tigray.

Prime minister Ahmed is Oromo and a Protestant Christian. His father was an Oromo Moslem while his mother was an Oromo raised in the ancient Orthodox Christian religion. Ahmed believed the country needed more Ethiopians and fewer people who saw themselves as Tigray, Amhara, Oromo or Somali first.

The traditional source of national political leadership has long been the Amhara. That custom was eroded because it was Amhara who formed the communist Derg government that replaced the monarchy in the 1970s.

Ethnic politics has crippled Ethiopia since the monarchy was overthrown in 1974 and replaced by the Derg, an even more repressive and dictatorial communist group that also exploited ethnic rivalries and survived with massive support from Russia. That support was all gone by 1991 and the democratic EPRDF took power. The EPRDF consisted of many former Derg factions, like the TPLF. The many ethnic parties and their militias had a difficult time agreeing on a new constitution and how democratic Ethiopia would be governed. The first national elections were held in 1995. One faction, Eretria, controlled the tiny coastline Ethiopia had access to and gained independence in 1993 via a national referendum. While Eritrea was now independent there were still disagreements about where the border should be, and in 1998 this led to a ruinous, for both countries, two-year war. Eritrea has still not recovered but the EPRDF gained national support for the way it handled the war and negotiated an end to it.

The EPRDF kept winning elections and some ethnic groups claimed the elections were not honest. Foreign observers could find no massive fraud and backed EPRDF claims that the dissatisfaction with the voting was more a matter of some ethnic groups not gaining as much national support as they believed they should. The TPLF was the most powerful and persistent critic of the new Prosperity Party as even more unfair to Tigrayans. Tigray is considered the source of the ideas and cultural practices that led to the formation of the Abyssinian kingdom, then empire and the larger Abyssinia that finally became known as Ethiopia in the 20th century. The older entities known as Abyssinia were much smaller than 20th century Ethiopia.

The EPRDF, even after it reorganized as the Prosperity Party, was still a multi-ethnic coalition dominated by Amhara, Oromo, and Tigrayan people who had long dominated national politics. The Prosperity Party was meant to be more effective at negotiating ethnic disputes without risking civil wars. Despite the religious differences, it is the ethnic groups that drive the conflicts.

Ethiopia is 67 percent Christian, 31 percent Moslem, and the rest smaller and often older religions. The largest religion is the ancient Ethiopian Orthodox with 43 percent of the population while other Christian sects comprise 24 percent. That means less to most Ethiopians than the fact the Ethiopian population is dominated by the Oromo who are 34 percent of the population, Amhara who are 24 percent and Tigray who are six percent. The unity of these three groups keeps Ethiopia united and when these three cannot agree on something, there is trouble. When the three groups agree on something there is peace and that agreement is still being sought to end the civil war that began in 2020 and continues to fester. The situation remains fluid, and updates are expected as new developments unfold.

INDIA-PAKISTAN

India is largely at peace and prospering while neighboring Pakistan continues struggling with the Islamic terror groups it created and supported for so long, plus the internal corruption and mayhem that policy has created. There are relatively new threats, like the Pakistani Taliban or TTP, which first appeared in 2007 and has recently become a more frequent threat. This is particularly the case in large cities like Karachi. As the major port for Pakistan, Karachi has long hosted many different religious and political groups, including the TTP.

Unexpected events in neighboring Afghanistan added to Pakistan’s problems. In August 2021 the elected Islamic Republic of Afghanistan/Islamic Republic of Afghanistan collapsed and was replaced by the Pakistan backed Islamic Emirate Afghanistan/Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It was the Pakistan military that backed the Taliban and the Afghan heroin cartels. Over the previous few years, the Pakistan military had found a way to run the government without a coup and all the resulting criticism and sanctions. The defeat of the IRA was accomplished via corruption, intimidation, disruption of the economy and a bungled U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The original withdrawal plan was for a thousand or more U.S. and NATO troops to remain to advise and train the IRA security forces and monitor the corruption. The IRA wanted to survive but to do that they had to keep receiving billions a year from foreign donors, mainly the United States. Refusal to cooperate meant termination of aid and nearly all the foreigners would leave.

The Americans got a new government in early 2021 and made fatal changes in the withdrawal plan. Everyone was ordered out but with three additional months to do it. That gave Pakistan and the Taliban an opportunity to increase their pressure on the IRA, which correctly believed the Americans were going to abandon them. The Americans did make an unexpected quick exit because a new government in the United States decided that was the thing to do. The new IEA declared a great victory but found that few people, not even most Afghans, saw this as a win. Foreign aid ceased. Nearly $10 billion of IRA cash held in foreign banks, in an effort to reduce corruption, was frozen and no one would recognize the IEA as the successor to the IRA.

Countries in the region expect the IEA to collapse in a few years, which will leave the country a narco-state without any central government. Drug production in Afghanistan depends on the Pakistan military for support. The drugs are winning as they usually do wherever they get established. There are not too many narco-states because they all follow the same script. Eventually locals get fed up with the local violence and the growing number of addicts. That leads to more violence and the drug gangs are crushed although usually not completely eliminated. Eventually can take a long time and such is the case with Afghanistan. Compare that to how it worked in Colombia from 2000 on, and Burma after World War II and Iran in the 1950s. The only thing that nearly everyone in Afghanistan can agree on is that opium and heroin are bad. Nearly ten percent of the population is addicted to drugs, mostly opiates, and a slightly smaller group make a better living or get rich from the drug trade. Most Afghans consider drug gangs the biggest threat and these are largely run and staffed, like the IEA, by Pushtun tribesmen from four southern provinces. The Pakistan-backed Afghan Taliban want to create a heroin-producing Islamic terrorist and gangster sanctuary in Afghanistan. If you want to know how that works, look at Chechnya in the late 1990s and Somalia or Yemen in the early 21st century. No one has come up with any cheap, fast, or easy solution for that.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan's core problem is that there is no Afghanistan, merely a collection of tribes more concerned with tribal issues than anything else. The IEA runs Kabul, the largest city in Afghanistan, but not much outside Kabul. Neighboring countries, especially Pakistan, are not cooperating. For example, Pakistan now demands truck drivers from Afghanistan carry government identification documents if they want to enter Pakistan. This slows down trucks seeking to cross into Afghanistan, which depends on Pakistan for most of its imports and the primary market for exports. Afghanistan is landlocked and two primary border crossings, each on a heavy-duty multi-lane road from Pakistan, carry most of the goods. Because of misrule by the IEA, the Afghan economy is weaker. New rules consist of a list of things you can’t do because they clash with the strict interpretation of Islamic law and traditions by the government. This has halted a lot of economic activity, especially trade. The negative impact of this eventually forced the IEA to drop a lot of the rules that hurt the economy and made many Afghans very angry at the government. This endangered the lives of IEA officials because most Afghans still have access to weapons, just in case. The current economic problems are a case that justifies an armed response. Foreigners, especially Pakistanis, are often the targets.

Pakistan also has a problem unique to the region; armed forces that have since the 1950s dominated the political process and become very wealthy, corrupt, and politically powerful as a result. Islamic terrorist violence inside Pakistan has sharply declined since 2014 when public outrage forced the military to shut down the last sanctuary for Islamic terrorists in North Waziristan. Some Islamic terror groups in North Waziristan were not under the military’s control and some were trying to turn Pakistan into an Islamic dictatorship. That would have threatened the Pakistani military and could not be tolerated. Islamic terrorist violence did not completely disappear in Pakistan after 2014 and the military blamed that on outsiders like India, Afghanistan, and the United States. In mid-2021, after nearly two decades of American support for the Afghan government, withdrawal resulted in the overthrow of the elected government and a halt to two decades of economic growth.

Pakistan also has to deal with a growing non-violent Pushtun Rights movement that wants to get the Pakistan military out of the tribal territories on both sides of the Afghan border. The military has responded with arrests, kidnappings, and murder. At the same time the Pakistani generals continued sheltering and supporting Islamic terror groups that only attacked foreign nations, especially India. This contributed to growing hostility towards the military within Pakistan and escalating international criticism. In 2018 the U.S. became more public about the fact that Pakistan was dishonest and unreliable. The Americans pointed out that they had foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the previous 15 years, and Pakistan gave back nothing but lies and deceit. This backlash began in 2011 when a U.S. raid into Pakistan killed Osama bin Laden with evidence implying that the Pakistani military had given him sanctuary there.

This also angered many Pakistanis because it showed that the generals had lied about their involvement with sheltering bin Laden. That raid also made it clear that the military was unable to detect or stop the invading Americans or stop local Islamic radicals from later carrying out revenge attacks that left hundreds of civilians dead. Then came another series of confrontations between the Pakistani military and the civilian government which, by 2018, the military had clearly won by gaining control of key judges and a newly elected president. That was because old scams still worked. The generals created more confrontations with India and declared that Islamic terrorism was no longer, since 2013, the major threat to Pakistan. The main threat was once again India. This merely increased Indian, American and Afghan anger at Pakistani support of Islamic terrorism and the inability of the Pakistani politicians to control their generals.

India also disrespected the Pakistani military by continuing to consider China the main security threat to South Asia. India has to deal with some internal unrest, which does far less damage than what Pakistan has to deal with. Islamic terrorist violence, mainly in Indian Kashmir, is less of a problem than tribal rebels in the northeast and Maoist communist ones in eastern India. Both these threats are being slowly diminished while Pakistan continues to make unofficial war on its neighbors. Another problem is that the Pakistani economy is becoming more dependent on Chinese investment as well as Chinese diplomatic support and arms exports. The Pakistani pro-Islamic terrorist attitudes have left it with few allies besides China, Iran, and North Korea.

Pakistan needs economic help, but mostly from Pakistanis as the ills that torment Pakistan can only be resolved from within. That is happening despite opposition from the military because the defense budget is unusually high and too much of it goes to support the lavish lifestyles and foreign bank accounts of senior officers. That has caused a financial crisis that other nations, especially Arab oil states, the United States and international lenders like the IMF and World Bank have kept from becoming a catastrophe. But now the financial problems are so great that all the usual sources of emergency cash are insisting that defense spending be curbed or there will be no more financial aid. The house of cards Pakistani generals built and maintained since the 1970s was collapsing, not because of religious or military issues but because the nation the generals had plundered for so long was bankrupt and no one is willing to bail them out this time.

Political chaos in Pakistan declined because of the February 8th national elections. The votes are still being counted but it is certain there will be some changes in parliament. Many voters were angry at the poor performance of the existing parliament even though former prime minister Imran Khan was the target of an army effort to disrupt Kahn’s effort to limit army influence over the political process. In August 2023 Khan was sentenced to three years in prison for financial misconduct and barred from participating in politics for five years. Khan expects his followers to gain enough power in parliament to pardon him. Khan was taken to a prison near the capital to serve his sentence. Khan’s numerous followers are appealing his sentence to the high court. Khan is planning a political comeback in the fall elections. His major obstacle is the military. While he was prime minister, Khan sought to limit the economic and political power of the military and the military pushed back and refused to cooperate. Going after the generals was regarded as a needed move by voters because the generals had become rich and free from civilian control through corruption and did not want that to change. Slowly the army gained control over or cooperation from enough political parties that they got Khan removed from power as the prime minister in April 2022. Khan lost his job as prime minister via a no-confidence vote by a parliamentary majority. He was the first PM to be removed this way.

Most PMs are removed by the president of Pakistan, which is another, less messy, form of no-confidence vote. Since the founding of Pakistan in 1947, no PM has completed their five-year term. The main reason for Khan’s political allies to turn against him was economic; high unemployment and inflation, plus increasing Islamic terrorist violence and some diplomatic disasters. There was another reason, and that was Khan’s efforts to bring the Pakistani military under civilian control. There was much popular support for curbing military power, but the military refused to be curbed and managed to get Khan jailed on corruption charges. This will keep Khan from participating in the January elections and regaining his political power, though perhaps only for a while.

India has a more stable government and, when you take population size into account, less terrorist deaths than Pakistan. India never had a problem with the military interfering in politics because from the beginning the military was subordinate to the elected government and that never changed.

In eastern India, the CPI/Communist Party of India is accused of trying to revive its violent radical faction, the recently depleted Maoist communist rebels even though its leaders do not approve of Maoist violence and have cooperated with Indian efforts to keep the Maoists from rebuilding their strength and ability to launch attacks. During 2022 and 2023 there were fewer deaths attributed to Maoist activity. There are still Maoist factions in eastern India, but the Maoists are found in fewer areas. For the last decade, terrorist related deaths have been declining every year. In 2022 there were 414 terrorism related deaths and so far in 2023 there have been less than 400.

India’s communist Maoist rebels were once considered one of the most dangerous terrorist groups worldwide. Total deaths caused by the Maoists was lower in 2023 than 2022 when they were 98. Such deaths were 147 in 2021. Terrorism related deaths in India also include Islamic terrorists in northwest Indian Kashmir and tribal rebels in the northeast. The Maoists operate in eastern India, and the areas where they are active have shrunk considerably over the last decade because of energetic government efforts to eliminate them.

In 2024 there were 630 deaths in India from all forms of terrorism, compared to 480 in 2023, 434 in 2022, 585 in 2021, 621 in 2019 and 940 in 2018. In 2020 54 percent of the dead were in Kashmir, which was higher than usual. In most years non-Islamic terrorist violence accounts for most of the violence, but in 2020 leftist Maoist rebels in eastern India only accounted for 41 percent of the deaths with another five percent caused by tribal separatists in the northeast. The decline in Maoist activity began in 2009 when India assigned 75,000 additional police to deal with the Maoists. Initially this did not increase Maoist losses but did result in more dead policemen. The Maoists did lose many of their rural camps and, in general, were forced to devote more time to security and less to attacking the government or extorting money from businesses. As always, the government failed to effectively address the social and economic problems in the countryside, where feudalism and corruption are rampant. These problems provide the Maoists with recruits, and support from many of the locals.

Eventually the government did address the local social and economic problems, and this is what deprived the Maoists of areas where they could operate. The police efforts continued and now the Maoists are only active in a small portion of eastern India, where they are more concerned with surviving than expanding or attacking the police. Civilians in Maoist-infested areas are less afraid of providing police with information about Maoist movements or joining pro-government militias to resist Maoist operations. It also became easier to recruit Maoist members to become active informants. These spies are paid monthly, and the sudden affluence of their families often alerts Maoist leaders to the presence of police informants. While details about informants are kept secret, the losses suffered because police had inside information is often obvious. The Maoist decline has demoralized leftist leaders, who have not been able to come up with any way to halt or reverse the losses. Maoists are a radical faction of the once mighty Indian communist party. Many Indian communists were slow to understand why all those East European communist governments, including Russia, collapsed between 1989 and 1991. Despite that many Indians still support communism, but not the violent, ineffective, and increasingly unpopular Maoists.

Pakistani efforts during 2023 to privatize state-owned enterprises were an expensive failure and one of the reasons the economy is in such bad shape. A prime example was the expensive failure of Pakistan Steel Mills. This cost the government $18 billion. This is but one of many cases where state-owned firms were unable to compete, and the losses have grown to the point that they were a major reason for the current economic crisis. India has far fewer state-owned enterprises and the means a more profitable and robust economy. India also lacks problems with military interference in the economy, which is common in Pakistan. There the army generals saw or created opportunities to control many enterprises. That was profitable for the generals but disastrous for the economy. Now the army and the economy find that Pakistan has a poorly performing economy and foreign lenders.

Earlier in 2023 China granted Pakistan some debt relief by deferring repayment of $2.1 billion in loans from China for two years. This included suspending interest payments. Pakistan is the largest export customer for Chinese weapons and the destination for billions in Chinese construction investments. Foreign lenders and investors, especially the IMF (International Monetary Fund), China and Saudi Arabia, have lost patience with Pakistan and are unwilling to take further financial risks there. One financial risk is the $77 billion debt to China and Saudi Arabia. This money is supposed to be repaid between 2023 and 2026. Pakistan doesn’t have the money to make the payments and is trying to negotiate an extension. Until this issue is resolved there will be no more loans or investments from China or Saudi Arabia. A side-effect of all this financial turmoil is high 47 percent inflation which is felt by all Pakistanis.

The primary cause of all this financial distress is the Pakistan military, which is currently controlling the government in Pakistan. The excessive military influence on Pakistani politics has been an issue since Pakistan was created after World War II. China and India did not have that problem, for different reasons. The Indian politicians insisted from the beginning that the military remain subservient to the elected government. The Chinese communists took control of the Chinese government after World War II and continually reminded the military leaders that their main job was to keep the CCP, or Chinese Communist Party, in power.

In Pakistan the parliament could not control the generals, who periodically took control of the government for a few years and then let the politicians return to power. During those periods when the generals were in charge, they often made poor economic decisions. One was to purchase more weapons from China than Pakistan could afford or pay for. Now Pakistan has more debt than it can handle, and related economic mistakes have put Pakistan in a debt crisis that requires an expensive and politically difficult solution. The major lenders will have to take losses and Pakistan will have to change and reduce what it spends, especially on the military. Unless the Pakistani economy is put right there is increasing risk of popular violence and a civil war.

In late 2023 Pakistan forced 150,000 illegal Afghan migrants back into Afghanistan. The migrants fled Afghanistan to escape the harsh rule of the new IEA government. The migrants were not welcome in Pakistan because they are an economic burden and a source of criminal and terrorist activity. The Afghans tend to live in refugee camps or Afghan neighborhoods in major cities like Karachi. The Afghans provide bases for various criminal organizations, especially in cities like Karachi.

In early November 2023, nine members of TTP attacked the Mianwali air base in Punjab Province. The attackers were repulsed and all of them died. Since then the TTP has attempted no more of these bold but suicidal attacks.

Since the middle of 2023 most of the terrorist and counter-terrorist violence has taken place in southwest Pakistan/Baluchistan and the northwest/Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Over 400 people died in 2023 and the violence continues. In 2023 all terrorist activities caused 1,513 deaths and that grew to 2,200 in 2924,

In the Indian northwest/Kashmir Pakistani terrorists continue to cross the border and kill policemen, soldiers, and civilians. India and Pakistan have been at odds over who controls Kashmir for more than 70 years. India has reduced the Pakistani attacks in Kashmir by upgrading border security so that most Pakistani infiltrators are spotted and killed or forced to retreat back into Pakistan. Northeastern India has long been the scene of tribal violence, but more intense policing coupled with increased negotiations over local grievances has reduced violent deaths by more than 60 percent.

The agreement between China and India to reduce the number of troops both are maintaining in the disputed border area of Ladakh did not last. India recently moved more troops near the disputed area and China protested.

INDONESIA

This area has become quieter over the last decade, and we are no longer covering it regularly. There will still be coverage as needed, mostly about counter-terrorism efforts that have been quite successful so far. Islamic radicals remain active, and the government apparently does not want to provoke them. The Islamic terrorist threat remains as does ethnic unrest, even though both problems continue to be contained rather than addressed.

IRAN

In 2024 Iran launched over 300 hundred UAVs and ballistic missiles at Israel on April 13th. This was in retaliation for an April 1 Israeli air strike on an Iranian consulate in Syria that killed two senior IRGC/Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders. Iran retaliated with an unprecedented direct attack on Israel using missiles and UAVs launched from Iran rather than just using the usual Iran-backed proxies of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Shia Houthi movement in Yemen.

Israeli air defenses, American aircraft and warships, British aircraft and Jordanian aircraft and air defenses offshore destroyed all of the Iranian UAVs and missiles headed for inhabited areas in Israel. The Jordanians took down Iranian drones violating Jordanian airspace. British jet fighters operated from a base Britain has long maintained on the island of Cyprus. It only takes 40 minutes for an aircraft to fly from the Cyprus base to Israel. Despite the hundreds of UAVs and missiles launched at Israel, the only damage done occurred at an Israeli air force base in southern Israel. The damage was described as minor and there were a few civilian casualties, mainly from the debris of intercepted UAVs and missiles falling to the ground.

After their attack was concluded, Iran said that their retaliation was over. The implication was that if Israel retaliated it would be an unjustified act war. Iran might just appeal to the UN and world opinion to declare Israel the aggressor. Israel did retaliate and destroyed most of Iranian air defense systems as well as the factories that produced key components for rockets and missiles. Iran was unable to detect or resist this attack, which was humiliating.

Meanwhile Iran-supported groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and various other terror groups like ISIL/Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant were ordered to attack Israel. Iran was so desperate to destroy or weaken Israel that it cooperated with extremist Arab Sunni Moslems, who rarely cooperate with each other and often attack members of the minority Shia Islam factions like Iran.

Iran is unique in that it is a nation of Indo-European people living in a region dominated by Arab Sunnis and a relatively small number of Israeli Indo-European and Semitic Jews. Hatred of Jews and Christians is an old custom in the region. This is changing as more affluent Gulf Arabs seek to do business with the even more affluent Jews of Israel and Christians of Lebanon. These new attempts to establish cooperation were disrupted by Hamas, a Sunni Palestinian group that has been around since the 1980s and recently sought to drive Israelis out of Gaza, an area that Hamas ruled for nearly two decades and, until October 2023, only occasionally attacked Israel. Hamas radicals convinced many Hamas Gaza Palestinians to attack Israel and seek to replace Israel with a Palestinian State.

Since late 2017 there have been continuing nationwide outbursts against the religious dictatorship running the country. There was similar activity in 2009 to protest the lack of fair elections. The 2009 protests were put down with force as were the recent ones, with over a thousand dead in 2019 and several hundred since then.

What started in late 2017 was different, with the protestors calling for the corrupt religious rulers to be removed. Some called for a return of the constitutional monarchy the religious leaders replaced in the 1980s after first promising true democracy. Even more disturbing was protests calling for Islam to be banned and replaced with something else, like Zoroastrianism, the ancient Persian religion that Islam replaced, violently and sometimes incompletely in the 7th and 8th centuries. Right before the 2017 unrest the religious rulers saw Iran on the way to some major victories in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen. The optimism turned out to be premature. The good times were supposed to begin in the wake of a July 2015 treaty that lifted the many sanctions Iran had collected for bad behavior since the 1990s. That did not, as many financial experts pointed out, solve the immediate cash crises because oil prices were still low. This was because of continued use of fracking in North America which triggered a massive, more than 70 percent drop in the price of oil in 2013.

Iran made their situation worse by trying to avoid complying with the 2015 treaty while still getting most of the sanctions lifted and for a while that seemed to be working. That strategy backfired when the U.S. accused Iran of violating the 2015 deal and, by the terms of that agreement, the Americans could and did withdraw. That meant many of the sanctions returned in 2018. Even before the American action foreign economists believed the Iranian economy wouldn’t get moving again until the 2020s. Now it is going to take even longer, and most Iranians were extremely very angry about that. The 2017 protests continue, but more discreetly because of the threat of lethal retaliation. The senior clerics are worried and openly seeking a solution that does not include them losing power. Few Iranians are willing to accept that kind of compromise. The religious dictatorship is not only hated, but also seen as corrupt, incompetent, and untrustworthy.

This has led to some odd acts of resistance. For example, in late 2022 a young Kurdish woman was arrested by the lifestyle police and accused of not covering her hair properly with her hijab. While in custody the girl died, apparently from beatings. This led to months of protests. The government refused to change its hijab policy and the protests faded away in early 2023.

There are some more complications. Half the population consists of ethnic minorities. mainly Turks, Kurds, and Arabs, and some of these groups, including Arabs, Kurds and Baluchis are getting more restive and violent, for different reasons. Yet the Islamic conservatives are determined to support terrorism overseas and build nuclear weapons at home, rather than concentrating on improving the economy and living standards and addressing the corruption within their ranks.

Expensive efforts to aid pro-Iran groups in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon made some progress and were presented as examples of the ancient Iranian empire being reborn. The government saw these foreign adventures as a way to distract an unhappy population. This ultimately had the opposite effect as Iranians did the math and realized their poverty was the result of all the billions spent on these overseas adventures. Worse, the destruction of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the pro-Iranian Assad regime in Syria in November and December 2024 made the Iranian money spent there complete losses.

At home the nukes are still important because Iranian religious leaders have been increasingly vocal about how Iran should be the leader of the Islamic world and the guardian of the major Islamic shrines of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia. Iranians believe having nuclear weapons would motivate the Arabs, and many others, to bend the knee. The potential victims are not cooperating and can retaliate. The Arabs have been kicked around by the Iranians for thousands of years and take this latest threat very seriously. That has led to a major reform effort in Saudi Arabia with a new generation of leaders willing to take on corruption and go with alliances that benefit the Saudis. This includes openly working with Israel to deal with the Iranian threat. This was demonstrated when Iran attacked Israel with hundreds of missiles and drones in 2023. The attack failed and Israel retaliated by destroying Iranian air defenses and radars as well as the Iranian ability to manufacture missiles or nuclear weapons. Iran was left blind, defenseless and still able to sell its oil and improve the lives, if that’s what the religious dictatorship wanted. It’s what the Iranian people wanted.

IRAQ

American and Iraqi forces continue to find and capture or kill groups of Islamic terrorists. In the north Turkey continues to bomb bases of Kurdish rebel groups established in remote areas of northern Iraq. Despite the late 2017 declaration that ISIL was defeated, the Islamic terror group remains active in northern and Western Iraq. ISIL no longer controls large areas of Iraq but is a problem because of its violence, extortion, and causing disorder in several provinces north of Baghdad. It took four years of effort, several hundred billion dollars to pay for an expanded military, battle damage and economic losses plus over 100,000 Iraqi lives, to kill at least 20,000 Islamic terrorists and eliminate ISIL control of Iraqi territory.

That effort created other problems, and opportunities. Iran offered help and was allowed to organize, train, and often lead in combat over 100,000 Iraqi, largely Shia militiamen in what was and still is the PMF/Popular Mobilization Forces. Most Iraqis, including most Iraqi Shia, who are about 60 percent of the population, feared an Iran inspired coup but by early 2018 senior Shia clerics in Iraq and Iran agreed that the militias should stay out of politics. Iran’s government was not consulted on this decision and a minority of pro-Iran Iraqis still want an Iran style religious dictatorship. National elections in 2021 revealed much less support for Iran, despite increased threats and financial promises Iran could not keep. The 2021 elections were mainly about doing something about widespread corruption and mismanagement of the economy. The other Arab oil states in the region, all run by Sunnis, offered peace and investment and the new Iraqi government accepted the offer, even if those Arabs were establishing diplomatic, economic, and military relations with Israel. Iran responded with a failed assassination attack on the Iraqi prime minister plus rocket and mortar attacks on the American embassy and the remaining U.S. troops. Most Iraqis want some Americans to stay, more economic activity with Arab neighbors and an end to Iranian meddling in Iraq.

ISRAEL

Unexpectedly, 2024 was a good year for Israeli security efforts. In December the importance of Hezbollah and their senior leadership ceased to be a problem. Israel used exploding pagers and portable radios, plus airstrikes, to accomplish this. Israel also killed several senior Hamas and Hezbollah leaders including the elusive Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas supreme leader and one of its founders. Sinwar was moving about in Gaza when he and some aides were confronted by some Israeli soldiers. There was a brief gunbattle and the Israelis discovered that one of the dead men was the elusive Yahya Sinwar. Within a day, DNA tests confirmed that Sinwar was dead. His death was a catastrophe for Hamas which had recently suffered the loss of several leaders.

Meanwhile Israel now has acquired Arab allies against Iran. A growing number of Moslem states are establishing diplomatic and trade relations with Israel. After more than a century of increasing anti-Semitism, most of Israel’s Arab neighbors realized that Israel would be a valuable economic, diplomatic, and military ally against common enemies like Shia Iran and Islamic terrorism in general. Israel is also the only nation in the region with nukes and reliable ballistic missiles, which are also used to put Israeli spy satellites into orbit. By the end of 2024 Israel had destroyed Hamas and Hezbollah while expanding its territory into a Syria now free of the Assad dictatorship.

There is growing dissatisfaction in the West and the Middle East with the Palestinian leadership failures and rampant corruption. Palestinians are convinced that Israel has no right to exist and pretending to negotiate a peace deal is useful for obtaining foreign aid and not much else. Arabs in general are now telling the Palestinians to take whatever peace deal they can because cash and other aid from Arab nations will continue to disappear unless the Palestinians solve their own problems with corruption and fixation on destroying Israel. Many Palestinians are willing to change but their corrupt leaders are not and use their war on Israel as an excuse to violently suppress any Palestinian opposition to the current suicidal strategy. This played a role in a radical Palestinian group called Hamas from launching a major attack out of Gaza into southern Israel. Over a thousand Israelis and hundreds of foreigners died or were taken as hostages. Hamas planned to overthrow and replace the current corrupt Palestinian government. That effort failed because the Israeli military was able to counterattack and put Hamas on the defensive and eventually destroy Hamas, Hezbollah and nearly all the groups that had long threatened Israel.

KOREA

In 2024 the South Korean legislature removed an elected president for erratic behavior. It’s not the first time a South Korean president has been forced out of office. In 2023 South Korea declared it would develop and manufacture nuclear weapons. The cause of this is the growing instability of North Korea and doubts about the United States fulfilling its pledge to attack North Korea with nuclear weapons if the North attacks South Korea with nukes. South Korea currently sees North Korea as less stable and more prone to reckless actions against the south. This change in attitudes came after November 2023 when South Korea canceled a 2018 agreement with North Korea that reduced the surveillance and spying, they carried out against each other. South Korea took a closer look at North Korean military activities and concluded that North Korea might be tempted to emulate the recent Hamas attack on Israel and back it with the threat of using nuclear weapons. This is a dangerous form of diplomacy, and it is unclear if North Korea was contemplating such a thing. Now North Korea is temporarily prospering by selling weapons and munitions to Russia in return for cash and much-needed food. This is good news for the North Korean government, which until last year was facing more popular unrest due to poor economic conditions and not enough food. Last year Russia sought to buy weapons and munitions from North Korea to supply their troops in Ukraine. More orders followed and soon this was visible on satellite photos of increased activity on the Trans-Siberian railroad.

It is unclear if North Korea was planning to risk its newly acquired prosperity with an attack on South Korea. Yet this is what South Korea feared and that’s why they canceled the 2018 treaty and resumed surveillance of North Korean military activities. All they could see was increased activity in weapons and munitions factories with most of that production being shipped to Russia along with 12,000 North Korean soldiers. Since 2019, South Korea has not been able to get the North to negotiate about anything.

Not all the new weapons production is sent to Russia. North Korea is keeping the ballistic missile production going and testing more of them with launches into the waters between Korea and Japan. This frightens the Japanese, who note that most of these missiles seem to work and are not fired at their maximum ranges. While North Korea is pleased with this, Japan is also acquiring more BMD/Ballistic Missile Defense systems. Japan has recently increased its annual defense spending 26 percent. Now the Japanese are spending $56 billion a year, the largest Japanese defense budget ever. It is also the sixth year that Japan increased defense spending and the goal is to eventually reach two percent of GDP. Japan and South Korea are now spending about the same amount on defense and are both in the top ten defense spenders in the world. The others are the United States, China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Britain, Germany, and France. South Korea is number nine, spending a little more than Japan at number ten.

Militarily, South Korea is a superpower compared to North Korea. This is obvious when you consider annual defense spending. While the United States accounts for about 40 percent of worldwide defense spending, China, and Russia together only account for about 17 percent. The rest of the top ten are either allies of the Americans or friendly. Ukraine is, in terms of total defense spending that includes donations from NATO countries, figuratively in the top five when it comes to defense acquisitions. This is a dubious distinction for Ukraine, which is using it all to repel a Russian invasion. South Korea has profited from this because NATO member Poland, which borders Ukraine and Russia, has increased defense spending, and purchased nearly $15 billion worth of South Korea weapons and munitions. South Korea produces a lot more weapons and military equipment than the north and the southern weapons and munitions are top grade. One side effect is that once Poland receives all the South Korean tanks, mobile artillery, and rocket (guided and unguided) launchers from South Korea, they will have the most powerful army in NATO Europe. This is to discourage any Russian attacks on Poland or any other NATO nation in the area.

South Korea fears that their more numerous and effective weapons and munitions are not having the desired effect on North Korea. Since the 1990s South Korea has become an economic powerhouse and one of the top ten economies in the world. Because of that South Korea has more friends and trading partners in East Asia than Russia does. South Korea has the wealth and technical skill to build nuclear weapons and reliable ones at that. Russia believes that offending South Korea is a bad idea while disappointing North Korea creates no new problems. Then there are the earlier South Korea efforts to keep nuclear weapons out of the Korean peninsula. The Americans have already taken the lead in this. In 1991 the United States withdrew all its nuclear warheads from South Korea and managed to get the two Koreas to agree not to develop and deploy nuclear weapons. This included both Koreas signing the NPT/Non-Proliferation Treaty. North Korea went ahead and developed nuclear weapons anyway, even though it was obvious that South Korea could do the same and produce more reliable nuclear warheads and more effective submarines to launch them from.

When North Korea violated the agreement, South Korea went ahead and produced SLBMs/Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles with conventional warheads launched from South Korean designed and built submarines. Since 2014 South Korea has been building nine 3,300-ton KSS-III submarines, each able to carry six or ten locally developed SLBM ballistic or cruise missiles with a range of up to 3,000 kilometers. These missiles can carry nuclear warheads instead of the high-explosive ones they currently have. Two of these subs are in service with another two entering service in 2024 and 2026. North Korea realizes they could not develop and build anything similar. South Korea has a growing fleet of locally built submarines that can carry ballistic or cruise missiles. Most South Koreans now approve of building nuclear warheads, just in case North Korea foolishly makes a serious threat to use such missiles against South Korea or any other country. This made North Korea realize that the economically more powerful and technically more accomplished south not only can outproduce the north when it comes to any type of weapon but has actually done so many times and is now a major producer and exporter of modern weapons. South Korea is not impressed with North Korean threats to attack them with devastating effect. The north can attack, but the south can retaliate with far greater destructive force. That is why the north continues to issue threats that South Korea ignores.

The south was not always the major military power, and the current situation is a relatively recent development. There is another complication, much of this traced back to the Korean War that began in 1950 when the overconfident north invaded. The fighting went on until 1953 when both sides agreed to an armistice, not a peace treaty. The combat forces remained in place to avoid a revival of fighting. This created the 250 kilometers long DMZ (four kilometers wide demilitarized zone), which became the border between North and South Korea.

Since 1953 South Korea has become democratic, industrialized and it now has a GDP that is in the worldwide top ten. South Korea also became a major manufacturer and exporter of modern weapons. That included over ten billion dollars’ worth of weapons to NATO countries that border Russia or Ukraine. North Korea held onto its socialist ways and was misruled by the Kim dynasty. On a per capita basis, South Koreans are twenty times wealthier than the average North Korean. North Korea does have some nuclear weapons, but the Kim’s have not yet found a way to turn that into an improved standard of living for the average North Korean.

South Korea has been expanding its arms production since the 1990s and now, because of demand from NATO nations that sent a lot of weapons to Ukraine, South Korea is poised to enter the Top Five.

Big Brother China was openly losing patience with its unruly neighbor. China is, literally, North Korea’s economic lifeline. China is the primary or only source for essentials like petroleum, food, and all sorts of smuggled goods, past a long list of international sanctions. China will tolerate a lot of bad behavior in return for obedience and maintaining order along the Chinese border. North Korea failed in both categories.

Everyone looks to China because Korea has traditionally been a Chinese responsibility and, most of the time, a difficult one. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has obediently gone to China several times since 2018 to receive advice. Kim also met with the leaders of South Korea and the United States. So far lots of the right words but little action. China and everyone else fears that North Korea is going to try and scam its way out of another tight situation and risk the very real wrath of China while doing it. Inside North Korea the official word is that the nuclear weapons are essential and not negotiable. Unofficially, more North Koreans want a change of government or a way to get out. Meanwhile South Korea continues to visibly prosper, with GDP per capita that is more than 20 times larger than North Korea. Being caught viewing videos of life in South Korea or South Korean video entertainment, is now a death penalty offense in North Korea. South Korea is a democracy that impeached and removed an unpopular president. That’s democracy in action and North Koreans are amazed and envious.

KURDISH WAR

The Kurdish majority regions of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran were quieter after 2003 and we no longer cover it regularly as a separate category. There will still be coverage as needed in other sections like Iraq, Israel, and Syria. The 2011 Arab Spring movement shook things up a bit and by 2015 the Kurds were once more at war with Turkey, Syria, and Iran. Turkey was always outraged at the establishment of an autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq and the impact that had on Kurdish minorities in Syria, where an autonomous region is already a reality, for the moment. The Kurds remain under attack in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran while also suffering from internal feuds between those who are willing to fight for a unified Kurdish state and those who are willing to make deals with local governments to obtain benefits for local Kurds, like less economic and cultural discrimination and persecution. The Syrian Kurds thought the Americans might stick around after ISIL was defeated and take on Turkish and Syrian forces to guarantee Syrian Kurds their autonomy. The U.S. was willing to stick around until ISIL was suppressed in eastern Syria and perhaps longer if the Syrian Kurds provide useful support. Americans also remain in northern Iraq. Original coverage is still available in our archives.

LIBYA

Turkey continues to maintain its military forces in Libya and recently announced that Turkish troops would remain in Libya at least until 2026. Russia sent warships to Libya after they chased out of their Tartus port in Syria. A larger Russian presence brings with it more security and prosperity as long as bankrupt Russia can afford it.

At the end of 2024 the rival factions agreed to unite and hold national elections. This is happening despite Turkish efforts to block national elections and bring an end to twelve years of civil war. By early 2020 the Turks had sent enough troops to rescue the GNA/Government of National Accord , a failed UN and Moslem Brotherhood backed government. The GNA failed to attract a national following and now a local military leader with a locally recruited army of trained and better disciplined soldiers is doing what UN diplomacy and threats could not. The eastern force, the LNA/Libyan National Army has been around since 2015, when it was formed in eastern Libya and proceeded to eliminate rivals, especially Islamic radical groups, throughout the country. In early 2019 all that the GNA had left was the traditional capital Tripoli and the nearby coastal city of Misrata. Both cities are dominated by dozens of rival militias, many of them seeking an Islamic government but mainly looking out for themselves. The LNA went after Tripoli in early 2019, from two sides and slowly pushed back the desperate militias, who would lose their independence and lucrative criminal enterprises if the LNA succeeded. The UN condemned the LNA and ignored Turkey shipping in weapons and military advisors to assist the GNA. By the end of 2019 Turkey was threatening to send in combat troops and warships to blockade Libyan ports. The Turkish support violates the UN arms embargo on Libya, as does the support Russia, Egypt, the UAE/United Arab Emirates and a few other countries have provided for the LNA. The LNA agreed to a ceasefire and national elections.

MALI

In October 2024 Mali Army went on the offensive. There was some success but not enough t0 make a significant change in the overall situation. Since 2012, when separatist rebellion in the north was defeated, continued high levels of corruption, ethnic rivalries and Islamic terrorism kept Mali from achieving a lasting peace and much prosperity. In 2021 the situation got worse when there was another military coup, The Mali military has staged three government takeovers since 2012. The last one, in May 2021, was an internal dispute within the military. Since the May coup foreign donors have warned that most of the foreign aid will stop coming if Mali does not carry out a significant reduction in corruption, government ineffectiveness and overall instability. None of these three military takeovers were about corruption but rather anger at the corrupt politicians stealing money meant to finance operations against Islamic terrorist and separatist minorities in the north. The colonels running the military government are unwilling to step down and are trying to make it on their own, despite the large number of UN peacekeepers and French troops dealing with the Islamic terrorist problem up north.

Islamic terrorists continue to ravage the north while in the south the capital is the scene of corruption, double dealing and frustrated, and sometimes arrested, foreign investors. Mali is rich in gold and other minerals but the people never seem to benefit. Chaos is the norm, along with poverty and desperation.

MEXICO

This area has become the home of revolutionary developments. Recent elections resulted in a landslide vote putting a woman in office for the first time. The elections were less violent than usual with only a few dozen deaths. The new president is continuing the successful economic programs of her predecessor while putting more emphasis on early education and improving the pensions and health care for the elderly. Mexico is still at war with the drug cartels, which is the fifth largest employer in the country and constantly hiring to replace drug war losses. The drug trade is restricted to a few areas and ignored by most Mexicans.

MYANMAR (Burma)

Rakhine state has been turning into a war zone where the Arakan are gaining ground as they battled their way south for over five years. The Arakan people are predominant in Rakhine state. Until 1990 this area was called Arakan State. The Arakan militias want their state back and by this year they had taken back most of Rakhine with most of the soldiers defending that area killed or missing. The missing soldiers were usually deserters who changed into civilian clothes and joined the growing number of civilian refugees fleeing the fighting.

Myanmar Army efforts to suppress the tribal forces have not only failed but the fighting has spread to most of Rakhine state. Soldiers have been fighting the Arakan Army/AA rebels in the area since mid-2019 and periods of active combat have been increasingly common in the last few months. Not a lot of casualties but enough armed men shooting at each other to make life miserable and the economy weaker.

The military government allowed democracy to return in 2010. That slowly calmed things down throughout the country. Burma is still subject to violence from tribal separatist militias in the north and radical Buddhist groups. There was another military coup in early 2021, a decade after the military government since 1962 finally gave in to demands for freedom and democracy. By 2010 the army had failed at running the economy or dealing with the rebellious northern tribes. The military negotiated a deal with the democrats that left the military with some of their political power as well as immunity from prosecution or retribution for a long list of past crimes. Once elections were held, the generals realized they had underestimated the degree of popular anger at the decades of military misrule. After 2011, with Burma governed by a government answerable to the people, not a military caste, there were calls for canceling the political privileges the military had retained as part of their agreement to allow peaceful transfer of power. The late 2020 nationwide elections put into power a government that finally had the votes, and determination, to cut the military down to size and make them much less capable of another coup. The generals moved faster than the new government and once more took control of the country on February 1st. That military government remains in control at the end of 2021, mainly because of support from China. There is growing armed and unarmed opposition to the military which has resulted in over a thousand dead and nearly 12,000 arrested, including popular leaders like Aung San Suu Kyi. The economy is in shambles and despite that the population resists and the survival of the military government depends on how much China wants to spend. China refused to contribute more than token assistance, while the rebel militias in the north became more powerful and the Myanmar army began to collapse, along with the military government when there was another major uprising in late 2024 that started in the north and is getting stronger.

NIGERIA

Since 2020 the Islamic terrorism groups faded away while tribal violence became responsible for most casualties. This year kidnapping increased with over 600 people kidnapped for ransom. Most of this took place in the northern states of Borno and Kaduna. There were nationwide protests over cost-of-living increases. The Islamic terror groups’ main activity was staying alive, and they did so via banditry. Back in 2004, Islamic terrorist violence in the northeast appeared and created some lasting problems. There are still millions of refugees plus substantial economic damage in northeastern Borno State, where it all began. There seems to be no end in sight because of the local corruption, but more competent leadership in the security forces reduced the violence. All this was caused by a local group of Taliban wannabes calling themselves Boko Haram. Their activity in the capital of Borno State grew for a decade until in 2014 it seemed unstoppable. It took over a year for the government to finally muster sufficient military strength to cripple but not destroy Boko Haram. This did not get much media attention outside Africa, even though in 2014 Boko Haram killed more people than ISIL did in Syria and Iraq. The main reason for Boko Haram gains in 2014 and 2015 was corruption in the army, which severely crippled effective counterterror efforts. By itself Boko Haram was too small to have much impact on a national scale but the inability to deal with this problem put a spotlight on the corruption that has hobbled all progress in Nigeria for decades.

A new president was elected in 2023 and made considerable progress in changing the corruption. This included problems with tribal feuds and growing unrest throughout the country. This has been especially bad down south in the oil producing region of the Niger River Delta. Violence against oil facilities continues, in part because local politicians and business leaders were part of the oil theft business. Northern Moslems want more control over the federal government and the oil money. In northern and central Nigeria, you have increasing violence as nomadic Moslem herders move south and clash with largely Christian farmers over land use and water supplies. For the last few years these tribal feuds have killed more people than Boko Haram. The situation is still capable of sliding into regional civil wars, over money and political power. Corruption and ethnic/tribal/religious rivalries threaten to trigger, at worse, another civil war and, at least, more street violence and public anger.

PHILIPPINES

The major events in 2024 included improvements in infrastructure with many new roads and upgrades to airports and shipping facilities. This comes after years of little improvement. The difference has been noticeable to most Filipinos. Problems remain including high unemployment, escalating inflation, the local currency, the peso losing more value versus the dollar and general economic stagnation. Chinese claims on Filipino territory in the South China Sea remained unresolved. In 2024 that led to dozens of Filipino and Chinese warships confronting each other in the South China Sea with some violence and a few injuries.

Internal security was another matter. Decades of effort finally reduced or eliminated the internal threat of leftist and Islamic rebellions. Now most Filipinos are more concerned about endemic corruption, widespread drug addiction and the resulting economic stagnation. There is also the Chinese threat, with more Chinese warships showing up in what had been, until recently, unquestionably Filipino controlled waters. Most Filipinos see China as a threat but not as crucial as the internal problems with drugs, corruption, Islamic terrorism, and unemployment. Since elected president in 2016 Rodrigo Duterte did what most Filipinos wanted, he reduced crime and drug violence.

Duterte was succeeded by Ferdinand Marcos Jr.in 2023. The new president continued what Duterte had been doing. This includes maintaining the peace deal with Moslem separatists in the south and continuing to diminish leftist rebel movements. The Islamic minority in the south, led by the separatist MILF organization, retained its autonomy agreement to prevent efforts to expel non-Moslems. There was one condition. MILF had to help destroy Abu Sayyaf, the ultra-radical Islamic terrorist group in the south that is responsible for most of the kidnappings and terror bombings down there. Some MILF factions refused to accept the peace deal and had, along with Abu Sayyaf, aligned themselves with ISIL. Abu Sayyaf integrated itself with the local clan culture and became very difficult to eliminate. The Moslems have, as always, lots of clan feuds and internal violence which will survive the autonomy deal with the government. By 2023 Islamic terrorists and communist rebels were much less active because there were a lot fewer of them and there was much less popular support. The government received record high approval ratings from the voters even as local and foreign critics accuse the government of atrocious behavior.

RUSSIA

President Vladimir Putin sent his armed forces into Ukraine in early 2022 and by 2024 that effort, justified by the Russian need to halt eastward expansion nations joining NATO, had Russia on the defensive. The war at this point has become an endurance contest. President-elect Trump had indicated in his campaign that he would cease aid to Ukraine but reversed that after the election and said the US would continue its support. This dooms Russia, which has shown dramatically increasing signs of strain and is unlikely to continue the war past the summer or fall of 2025. Its railroad system seems to be collapsing overall due to overuse and lack of maintenance. If Russia does not end the war in 2025 and obtain massive Western aid to avert the railroad collapse, that will likely become irreversible with consequent economic collapse, mass refugee flows and millions of population fatalities from starvation and related diseases in Russia and Central Asia’s “Stans”.

Russia continues threatening war with NATO to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and the European Union. Putin declared that Ukraine was part of Russia and ignored the fact that the Ukrainians violently disagreed. Since 2014 Russia has been making a lot of headlines but not much else. The economy is a mess as it stagnates and shrinks. Russia has fewer friends or allies, and the future looks dim. Sending troops into Ukraine during 2014, Syria in 2015, Libya in 2016 and Ukraine in 2022 has not helped solve any of the fundamental problems there but made for great propaganda. What went wrong? Russia entered the 21st century with a new elected government dominated by former KGB secret police officers who promised to restore economic and civil order. They did so but in the process turned Russia into a police state with less political and economic freedom. Many Russians opposed this, and the government responded by appealing to nationalism. Russia has turned into what Germany had become in the 1930s. This included police state ways and the traditional threatening attitude towards neighbors. Rather than being run by corrupt communist bureaucrats, the country is now dominated by corrupt businessmen, gangsters and self-serving government officials that characterized the last czarist government of a century ago. The semi-free economy is more productive than the centrally controlled communist one but that just provides more money to steal. A rebellion against the new dictatorship has been derailed by astute propaganda depicting Russia as under siege by the West and NATO. Opinion polls show wide popular support for this paranoid fantasy, but some Russians continue to struggle for better government and beneficial reforms. For now, most Russians want economic and personal security and are willing to tolerate a police state to get it. The 2022 invasion of Ukraine and subsequent sanctions did more damage than the ruling politicians expected. That atmosphere, plus the anxiety generated by having troops fighting in Syria, Ukraine and Libya scared away a lot of foreign investors and many Russian ones as well. Russia can downplay this in the state-controlled media but without all that foreign and Russian capital the economy cannot grow. Since 2014 most Russians can see daily that they are worse off than before and 2025 appears to be worse with the railroad system failing and that can cause a major famine. Meanwhile China, the only real threat to Russia, quietly makes progress in the east. There China has claims on much of the Russian Far East and is openly replacing Russia as the primary economic, military, and political force in Central Asia.

RWANDA & BURUNDI

This year there were some border incidents with Congo and Rwanda and Rwanda refused American calls to withdraw military forces from Eastern Congo.

SOMALIA

Despite relative peace and prosperity, by 2024 Somalia was unable to turn that into a more permanent condition by holding national elections. Instead, most Somali factions agreed to rely on a system that involved clan elders meeting and working out agreements. Somalia has long been a failed state and over a decade of peacekeeping, massive foreign aid and visible progress, corruption and tribalism continued to block economic progress. Al Shabaab, a local Islamic radical group, was defeated and driven from cities and towns in 2011 but is still around. So is the traditional clan violence, organized crime, and banditry. All these are ancient Somali traditions and al Shabaab survives by reverting to that and becoming the major criminal organizations in some parts of the country. Extortion, smuggling, ransoms and so on have sustained the Islamic terror group. One of the most lucrative sources of plunder is the elected Somali government, propped up by foreign aid, most of which gets stolen. Despite all that Somalia is still a failed state that defies every attempt at nation building. The situation is worse than it appears because Somalia was never a country, but a collection of clans and tribes that fight each other constantly over economic land and water issues. The country remains an economic and political mess, a black hole on the map. Not much hope in sight. There is not a lot of enthusiasm among local leaders for a national government, but all that foreign aid is welcome because it can be taken without risking another clan feud. Piracy has returned and so has political violence. Somali smolders as it always has and not a lot has changed while some aspects have gotten worse.

SUDAN

Throughout 2024 a civil war between the army and the Rapid Support Force or RSF militias has continued. In October 2023 there was another civil war between the government and major portions of the country that violently disagreed with government policies. The SNC/Sovereign National Council, despite being a military-civilian hybrid, was at a stalemate in restoring democracy. The coup was supposed to be a temporary condition to speed things up. That backfired as a lot of the pro-reform civilians declared the military government another effort to restore dictatorship. That’s how Omar al Bashir, the dictator from 1989-to-2019, got his start. What form post-Bashir Sudan will take is one of feuding factions and escalating fighting over scarce resources. The situation in South Sudan, one of the results of Bashir’s misrule, is more settled.

The two Sudans had become quieter since the long-lasting Bashir dictatorship in Sudan was removed by determined popular resistance. South Sudan ended its post-independence civil war when everyone realized that they were destroying what they were allegedly fighting over and maybe a shouting-match was preferable to a death match.

In 2024 the civil war escalated and moved to the capital where government and rebel RSF gunmen fought constantly. The two sides could not agree on how to run the government and decided that a deathmatch was the only way to settle the matter. Civilians caught in the crossfire are fleeing the capital and, in some cases, if they can afford it, leaving the country.

SYRIA

The ruling Assad clan of Syria disappeared at the end of 2024 as Syria was overrun in two weeks by Abu Mohammed Al-Golani and thousands of Islamic terrorists he turned into soldiers for the liberation of Syria from Assad rule. The Assad family fled to Russia and insisted they would return. Golani, a former leader of Islamic terrorist group HTS, now sort-of rules Syria. As leader of Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham/HTS, an Islamist group long active in Syria’s northwest, Al-Golani has evolved from a shadowy militant figure with a $10 million bounty on his head into a revolutionary nationalist and widely recognized political actor.

In 2021 the Assads chose peace over religion in 2021 by quietly abandoning long-time ally Iran for new deals with Russia and the Arab League, as well as Israel. That’s how the Assads, who belong to the Shia minority of Syria, have survived; by changing alliances when necessary. This most recent shift began after the 2011 rebellion of the Sunni majority against the Shia minority. The Assads almost lost but by late 2018 it was clear they had won. The fighting persisted into 2023 because the main participants, like Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Assad government, and several remaining rebel factions could not agree on how to deal with the loose ends. Although initially considered likely to win, the rebels lost because of factionalism. So far over 500,000 have died and a third of the population has fled, mainly to Turkey and Lebanon.

Meanwhile the Assads received over $16 billion worth of Iranian aid since 2012. That was joined by assistance from Russia in 2015 and Turkey in 2016. The civil war also morphed into a proxy war between Iran and the Sunni Arab states and their Western allies. The major factor in the rebel defeat was ISIL, which began as one of many Sunni Arab Islamic terror groups who wanted to turn Syria into a religious dictatorship. Most Syrians just wanted peace and prosperity. The Islamic terror groups, as was their custom, put a priority on determining which of them was the true savior of Islam. ISIL was definitely the most ruthless and best organized and many groups submitted to ISIL, if only temporarily. That weakened the rebel effort sufficiently for the Assads to hang on and become part of a larger anti-ISIL coalition. One thing everyone could agree on was that ISIL had to be destroyed first and by late 2017 that was accomplished.

With ISIL reduced to small groups carrying out terror attacks, the remaining rebels were still not united. At the time ISIL was crushed the rebels controlled about a third of the country but were outnumbered by the Assad forces and most Syrians were increasingly war weary. Most of the deaths occurred after 2013. The killing diminished a bit in 2015 because of sheer exhaustion and picked up again in 2016 because of the Russian air and other support. The stubborn Assad dictatorship had a chance to win after 2015, something some Western nations saw as preferable to Islamic terrorists taking over and requiring a Western invasion to remove such a threat.

In August 2016 Turkish ground forces entered northern Syria to seal the border from ISIL and Turkish separatist PKK Kurds as well as to weaken the Syrian Kurds. The Turks were basically helping the Assads and hurting ISIL and all that made an Assad victory more likely. Before the Assads could resume control of the country, they had to deal with the fact that Israel, Jordan and the Sunni Arab oil states are opposed to the Iranian effort to establish a permanent military presence in Syria. The Assads were not happy with Iranian domination but had to keep quiet about that. Turkey was opposed to any autonomous Syrian Kurdish area in the northeast as well as a permanent Iranian presence. Turkey and Russia are technically allies of Iran in Syria and the reality is that no one trusts Iran. The Russians quietly made it clear they would side with Israel if it came down to that. The Turks are NATO members and traditional foes of Russia and Iran. The current Turkish government is unstable and increasingly unpopular with Turks as well as the neighbors. The unrest in Iran and growing financial problems have reduced Iranian efforts in Syria. The Assads quietly patched things up with the Arab League, with help from Russia and, unexpectedly, Israel. At this point Iranian leaders were aware of what the Assads were going but were unsure of how to deal with it. By late 2024 the Assads had fled to Russia and HTS controlled Syria. Israel took advantage of the chaos to destroy Syrian air defense, the air force and 80 percent of their weapons and munitions. Israel also annexed some Syrian territory to provide a larger buffer zone.

THAILAND

In June 2024 the first Senate elections were held since 2017. In 2023 elections demonstrated that the chaotic nature of Thai elections remained a problem. In the south Moslem separatists have lost a lot of popular support. That was a gradual process that took over a decade to reach the point where separatist violence was no longer a constant threat. For the other 97 percent of Thais, the arguments over the monarchy and the mainly monarchist military are no longer threatening to slide into civil war.

TURKEY

Turkey has, since the 1990s, become more of a problem for itself and many other nations in the region. This mischief remained active in 2024. Its leader for the last two decades survived the 2023 national elections but the opposition became more powerful. President Erdogan remains in office for another five years. Even when out of office Erdogan will remain a political king maker and major factor in Turkish politics. The Turks quietly supported the HTS takeover of neighboring Syria and appears to have provided help to HTS in planning their offensive from bases on the Turkish border. The payoff is supposed to be a more cooperative HTS government, especially when it comes to dealing with the Kurds who occupy 40 percent of Syria in the northeast along the Turkish border.

UGANDA

In 2024 the major controversy was over the politics of coffee and tribal politics. There were also disputes over how government employees should be paid. There were significant improvements in farming and livestock management. Ugandan participation in a growing number of peacekeeping operations in Africa continues to make Uganda the major supplier of peacekeepers in Africa.

YEMEN

The Iran-backed Shia Houthi militia is losing but refuse to make peace out of fear of the consequences. By the end of 2024 Yemen, which occupies the southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula while Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf States occupy the rest, including all the oil wealth. The Houthi militia used their rockets and missiles to fire at merchant ships heading up the Red Sea to the Suez Canal. One of those missiles landed in Israel. Because of all this Houthi mischief both Israel and the United States launched air strikes on Houthi operations as well as economic targets in Yemen. Iran is no longer able to resupply the Houthis with missiles and UAVs because Israeli air strikes destroyed key elements of the Iranian missile production industry. It’s been a bad year for the Houthi militia and several countries plan to make 2025 an even worse year.

A century ago, before oil income dominated Arabian politics, Somalia was the land of promise, Somalia is the only portion of the Arabian Peninsula that receives enough rain for crops. Since World War II Iran has become wealthy and powerful because of oil wealth but made so much trouble that since 2015 economic sanctions have crippled the economy and military adventurism has brought devastating armed reprisals.

Yemen proved to be an embarrassment for Iran and the Saudi/UAE-backed Yemen government. The other Arabs are not willing to suffer the heavy casualties a quick victory would require over militant Yemen. The war dragged on into 2024 but is now faltering because Iran is no longer manufacturing missiles to send to Yemen. Iranian withdrawal from Houthi support occurred this year because Iran was overwhelmed by sanctions and Israeli reprisals.

There are also growing popular protests in Iran against the expensive foreign wars in Syria and Yemen. Despite that, Iran smuggled in more and more weapons. These were not intended for the ongoing Yemen civil war but for use against targets designated by Iran. Until late 2017 there was not much progress in the Yemen fighting, a development that favored Iran. But by early 2018 the Shia rebel coalition began unraveling and Iran suddenly had its own domestic uprising to deal with back home. Yemen unrest evolved into a full-scale civil war in 2015. That was when Shia rebels sought to take control of the entire country. Neighboring Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, quickly formed a military coalition to halt the Yemeni rebel advance. The Arab coalition succeeded and by 2016 pro-government forces were closing in on the rebel-held capital. The coalition did not go after the capital itself because of the expected heavy casualties and property damage in the city. The coalition concentrated on rebuilding the Yemeni armed forces, recruiting allies from the Sunni tribes in the south and eliminating al Qaeda and ISIL groups that had grown stronger as the Shia rebels gained more power. As the fighting intensified in early 2015 Iran admitted it had been quietly supporting the Shia rebels for a long time but now was doing so openly, and that support was increasing.

Many Yemenis trace the current crisis back to the civil war that ended, sort of, in 1994. That war was caused by the fact that, when the British left Yemen in 1967, their former colony in Aden became one of two countries called Yemen. The two Yemen’s finally united in 1990 but another civil war in 1994 was needed to seal the deal. That fix didn't really take and the north and south have been pulling apart ever since. This comes back to the fact that Yemen has always been a region, not a country. Like most of the rest of the Persian Gulf and Horn of Africa region, the normal form of government until the 20th century was wealthier coastal city states nervously coexisting with interior tribes that got by on herding or farming or a little of both plus smuggling and other illicit sidelines. This whole nation idea is still looked on with some suspicion by many in the region. This is why the most common forms of government are the more familiar ones of antiquity like kingdom, emirate or their modern variation in the form of a hereditary secular dictatorship.

For a long time, the most active Yemeni rebels were the Shia Islamic militants in the north. They have always wanted to restore local Shia rule in the traditional Shia tribal territories, led by the local imam religious leader. This arrangement, after surviving more than a thousand years, was ended by the central government in 1962. After 2007 Yemen became the new headquarters of AQAP/Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula when Saudi Arabia was no longer safe for the terrorists. Now there is ISIL and an invading army composed of troops from oil-rich neighbors. By late 2017 the rebels were slowly losing ground to government forces who, despite Arab coalition air support and about five thousand ground troops, were still dependent on Yemeni Sunni tribal militias to fight the Shia tribesmen on the ground. While the Shia are only a third of the population, they are united while the Sunni tribes are divided over the issue of again splitting the country in two and with no agreement on who would get the few oil fields in central Yemen. Many of the Sunni tribes tolerate or even support AQAP and ISIL. The Iranian smuggling pipeline continued to operate, and the Yemen rebels were able to buy additional weapons from other sources because they received cash from nations or groups hostile to the Arab Gulf state, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

The Shia rebels were from northern Yemen and controlled the border with Saudi Arabia. Over the last decade the rebels launched more and more attacks on Saudi targets. The rebels obtained more powerful weapons as well, including Iranian ballistic missiles, which were disassembled so they could be smuggled from Iran to Yemen, where Iranian technicians supervised the missiles being assembled and launched into Saudi Arabia. In the last few years, the rebels have received longer range ballistic missiles that could hit Saudi and UAE oil production facilities on the Persian Gulf coast. The rebels also fired more missiles at targets passing the Yemen Red Sea coast controlled by the rebels. This has always been a potential threat to ships using the Red Sea to reach the Suez Canal in Egypt, at the north end of the Red Sea. Transit fees from ships using the canal are a major source for Egypt, bringing in nearly $10 billion a year. Egypt and Iran are enemies and reducing Suez Canal income is a win for Iran, which supported the Yemen rebels for more than a decade to make that success possible. At the end of 2023 Iran ordered the Yemen rebels to open fire on shipping in the Red Sea, which moves along the Yemen coast on its way to or from Saudi ports or the Suez Canal. Ships unable to use the canal must take the longer route around the southern tip of Africa. This takes more time and increases costs for the shipping company and their customers. In 2024 Americans and Israeli airstrikes devastated ports on the west coast of Yemen and destroyed most of the missiles smuggled in from Iran. Meanwhile Iran was running out of missiles and a tighter naval blockade reduced the number of weapons reaching the Shia Houthi militia in Yemen.