CONFLICTED
An ex-Al Qaeda jihadi turned MI6 spy and a former monk turned filmmaker, have been embedded at the heart of conflicts in the Middle East. Together Aimen Dean and Thomas Small unpack the realities of war, fundamentalism and their global implications through first-hand experience.
Episodes
May 7, 2025 • 73 mins
This week on Conflicted we are drawing our narrative arc on Syria to a close with our second episode with filmmaker and political activist, Matar Ismaeel.
Last time Matar told us about his experiences filming protests in 2011 as the Syrian revolution began, being tortured in Assad’s prisons, and witnessing firsthand the brutal siege of Southern Damascus.
This episode Matar finishes his remarkable story with us - from recounti...
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April 30, 2025 • 23 mins
The Conflicted Community is back to talk about the headlines we can’t seem to escape - Donald Trump and his tearing up of the economic world order.
This episode, Thomas sits down with Giri Rajendran, the holder of no fewer than 3 degrees in economics and finance from the London School of Economics. Giri has worked as an economist in transatlantic defence before moving to work in finance, first in private wealth management and ...
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April 23, 2025 • 96 mins
The Conflicted Community returns with another episode on the complex and multifaceted Israel-Palestinian conflict, focusing on the ideological dimensions that shape perceptions and identities.
This time, Thomas invites on Tom Khaled Würdemann, a PhD candidate at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Heidelberg in Germany on the perspective of Palestinian intellectuals towards Israel between 1960 and 2000. He teaches ...
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April 16, 2025 • 62 mins
Conflicted returns with another episode in our series on the Syrian Civil War, this time with a new contributor, who begins today a two episode arc where we’ll be looking at the Siege of Southern Damascus…
Thomas Small has invited on Matar Ismaeel, a documentary filmmaker and political activist from Masyaf, Syria. Now back in his homeland after years of exile, Matar speaks to us from Masyaf itself, relaying an extraordinary story ...
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April 9, 2025 • 22 mins
This week, Thomas speaks with Hamza Howidy, a Palestinian activist originally from Gaza now living in exile in Germany. Hamza shares his extraordinary story of growing up under Hamas rule and the constant threat of Israeli military action on the one hand, and the brutality of Hamas on the other.
Hamza was forced to leave Gaza due to his involvement in protests against Hamas in 2019 and 2023, taking the dangerous journey across th...
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April 2, 2025 • 23 mins
This week for the Conflicted Community we begin a series of conversations about the conflict in Israel and Palestine, with Palestinians themselves, to shed some light on the Palestinian perspective of this most complex of conflicts. And this week it is the turn of Khalil Sayegh, a Palestinian Christian political analyst, who shares his personal journey from Gaza to Ramallah, to Washington D.C.
In this episode, Khalil tells us abo...
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March 26, 2025 • 84 mins
Conflicted brings to an end our three part series with Ronnie Hamada, a Syrian Kurdish civilian, whose experience of the Civil War has been thrilling us over the past few episodes...
Thomas and Ronnie open with the impact of the Battle of Aleppo on the Kurdish province of Afrin, highlighting the rise of jihadist groups and the challenges faced by the Kurdish community. Ronnie also shares his harrowing experiences living under sie...
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March 19, 2025 • 23 mins
Thomas and Aimen are back together for another Q&A! This week we answer your questions on the many and varied crises that seem to be engulfing the Middle East and the world in 2025…
Thomas and Aimen begin by analysing the complex and tumultuous situation in Syria, exploring the recent resurgence of violence, the role of disinformation, and the internal conflicts among the Alawite community which have been sparking new fears of int...
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March 12, 2025 • 70 mins
This week on Conflicted, Ronnie Hamada is back with Thomas to describe his experiences as a Kurdish civilian during the Syrian Civil War, as we continue our retrospective on that most complex of conflicts. And this week, after setting up some Kurdish history last time, Ronnie takes us through what it was like to live through the Arab Spring protests as a university student, where he saw his classmates attacked by Assad backed thugs...
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March 5, 2025 • 24 mins
This week for our Conflicted Community members, we return to Yemen for an interview with, Dr Elisabeth Kendall, an academic whose work has covered so many varied manifestations of the country’s culture, politics, and the conflict that has engulfed it for the past decade.
Elisabeth is a professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at the University of Cambridge, where she is also the Mistress of Girton College. Her research explores how...
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February 26, 2025 • 70 mins
This week on Conflicted, we begin in earnest our retrospective on the Syrian Civil War, where we will be inviting actual Syrians from a multitude of different perspectives, to tell us about their experiences of the war.
After setting the scene with our old friend Wassim Nasr last time, over our upcoming episodes, we’ll be creating a kind of narrative history for you, our listeners, as we make sense of this most complex of conflic...
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February 19, 2025 • 23 mins
This week for our Conflicted Community members, we have an interview with the Egyptian political activist Dalia Ziada, whose incredible personal story crosses so many of the major events in the modern middle east, from the Arab Spring, to October 7th.
Dalia is an award-winning Egyptian writer and political analyst whose work focuses on governance, geopolitics, and defense policy. In Egypt, she co-founded the Liberal Democracy Inst...
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February 12, 2025 • 90 mins
Conflicted takes on… the Syrian Civil War.
In the wake of the fall of Assad, with the Syrian Civil War over, at least for the moment, Conflicted is bringing you a bit of a retrospective. In the coming episodes, we’ll be inviting Syrians and other people who experienced the conflict, from a multitude of different perspectives, onto the show to tell us about their experiences of the war. In doing so, we want to create a kind of nar...
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February 5, 2025 • 23 mins
The Conflicted Community is back for another Q&A for all of our dearest listeners. This week, in the first time Thomas and Aimen have got together since the Gaza ceasefire deal, they discuss its implications for the region and the world, with the help of listeners' questions.
From the motivations of the parties involved in the ceasefire, to the question of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, to what Trump has planned for the reg...
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January 29, 2025 • 73 mins
Conflicted comes to the end of our Ethiopia series with an episode beginning at the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974, and charting the country's tumultuous course through the late 20th century. This was a time characterised by a brutality the country had not witnessed before, as the Communist military dictatorship, known as the Derg, wreaked havoc on the country.
Ethiopia in the 70s and 80s was one dominated by horrifying ep...
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January 22, 2025 • 47 mins
Last week, a deal between Israel and Gaza was struck to bring back the Israeli hostages and to bring an end to the bloodshed which has engulfed Gaza over 15 months of fighting, since October 7th 2023. It’s a deal which has brought relief to many, not least the families of hostages and civilians in Gaza, but also questions from others who see Israel as having failed to fully dismantle Hamas and finish the war aims they began their a...
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January 8, 2025 • 17 mins
Happy New Year to all of our dearest listeners!
In our second episode of 2025, Thomas and Aimen are doing a Q&A session with all of your questions posted on Discord, and we’ve got some excellent ones this week.
We’ll be doing a post-mortem of the zombie ideology of baathism now it has been seen off in Syria; we’ll look at why al-Julani is delaying elections for four years time; we’ll ask how HTS will be able to maintain territor...
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January 1, 2025 • 69 mins
To bring in the new year, we have a special Conflicted Community episode this week– an interview with none other than Tom Tugendhat, a Conservative British MP and ex Minister of State for Security.
Tom is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a veteran of both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak’s Conservative cabinets. He remains a big figure in the party, having run unsuccessfully for party leader in 2024, and is one of the ...
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December 18, 2024 • 80 mins
After a short emergency interlude into Syria, Conflicted Season 5 returns to our exploration of the fascinating land of Ethiopia. Moving now to the 20th century, where one man dominated the country: Emperor Haile Selassie, King of Kings.
Haile Selassie is a name synonymous with a few things: Ethiopia’s age of regal power in the 20th century; being the only African monarch to withstand Western colonialism; and, of course, the relig...
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December 11, 2024 • 41 mins
ANOTHER EMERGENCY EPISODE
Things are, as ever, moving at lightning speed in the Middle East, as last weekend on December 8th, Bashar al-Assad and his Syrian regime fell. After 13 years of civil war, and more than 50 years of his family’s rule, in an extraordinary turn of events rebel groups from the south and the north marched on Damascus. Assad has fled to Moscow; the future for Syria is unclear.
It’s one of the most momentous e...
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