Top 10 global flashpoints

Top 10 global flashpoints

Synopsis

Looming conflicts

Top 10 global flashpoints
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Karachi – The year 2021 remained a hub of conflicts across the world from an assault on the US Capitol, horrific bloodshed in Ethiopia, Taliban’s triumph in Afghanistan, great-power showdowns over Ukraine and Taiwan, amid dwindling US ambition on the global stage, Covid-19, to a climate emergency, according to the Foreign Policy report.

However, some measures by the big powers hinted towards retreat of wars as the number of people killed in fighting worldwide mostly declined since 2014.

According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme, the figures at the end of 2020 show that deaths during wars were down, compared with 2014, mostly because of a halt to Syrians massacre.

Similarly, the number of major wars also descended from a recent peak, except for tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

However, for the most part, the 21st Century wars are less lethal than their 20th Century predecessors.

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According to the Foreign Policy, a US magazine, following are the 10 flashpoints that could trigger a major catastrophe, ruining billions of dollars of infrastructure and killing scores of people.

 

Ukraine

The amassing of Russian soldiers on the Ukrainian border creates uncertainty and dismissing it as a bluff would be a great mistake.

A war between the two neighbours, Russia and Ukraine, began in 2014 when Putin expressed reservations on the Western-backed ouster of a Ukrainian president who was a friend of Moscow. Later, Ukraine signed two peace accords, the Minsk agreements, mostly on Russian terms.

In 2021, the simmering conflict again came on the surface after a peace pledge between Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky, who took power in 2019, falls apart.

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In the spring of 2021, Putin amassed over 100,000 troops near the border, only to withdraw many of them weeks later after a meeting with US President Joe Biden. Since November, he’s built up similar numbers.

Russia has a clear stance as it is upset the the neighbour for lacking the follow-through with the Minsk agreements, particularly its denial of “special status” to the breakaway regions, which entails autonomy and, as Moscow defines it, a say in the foreign policy.

 

Ethiopia

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed appeared to be turning the page on decades of repressive rule. Instead, more than a year of fighting between Abiy’s federal army and forces from the northern Tigray region has torn the country apart. A small window may have just opened up to bring the war to a close.

Abiy first ordered federal troops into Tigray in November 2020; following a deadly attack on a military garrison there by loyalists of the region’s ruling party, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Federal forces, supported by troops from the enemy-turned-friend Eritrea, quickly advanced alongside forces from Ethiopia’s Amhara region, which borders Tigray, installing an interim administration in the Tigrayan capital, Mekele, in December 2020.

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Over subsequent months, TPLF leaders regrouped in the countryside, mobilising Tigrayans livid at massacres, rapes, and havoc wreaked by federal and Eritrean troops. An assault on the capital, Addis Ababa, appeared in the offing. Mid-November; however, brought another about-face. A counteroffensive by federal troops and allied militia forced Tigray forces to withdraw back to their home region.

But if federal forces, for now, are ascendant, both sides command strong support and could drum up more recruits. Neither is likely to deliver a mortal blow.

Afghanistan

If 2021 brought one chapter of Afghanistan’s decades’ long tragedy to a close, another is starting. Since the Taliban’s seizure of power in August, a humanitarian catastrophe has loomed. The UN data suggests millions of Afghan children could starve. Western leaders shoulder much of the blame.

The Taliban’s win was swift but long in the making. For years, and especially since early 2020, when Washington signed a deal with the Taliban pledging to withdraw the US forces. In the spring and summer of 2021, the Taliban began taking control of towns and cities, often persuading Afghan army commanders demoralised by the impending end of the Western support to surrender.

The government collapsed in the middle of August, and the Taliban entered Kabul mostly without a fight. It was a stunning end to a political order Western powers had spent two decades helping to build.

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All this comes on top of a punishing drought. Although overall violence levels are significantly down from a year ago.

 

US and China

Shortly after pulling out of Afghanistan, the United States announced a new pact with Australia and the United Kingdom to counter China. Known as AUKUS, the deal will help Canberra acquire nuclear-powered submarines. It was a stark illustration of Washington’s aspirations to deter Beijing.

In Washington, one of the few views shared across the aisle is that China is an adversary the United States is inexorably at loggerheads with. The US leaders see past decades of engaging China as enabling the rise of a rival that exploits international bodies and rules to its own ends, repressing opposition in Hong Kong, behaving atrociously in Xinjiang, and bullying its Asian neighbours. Competition with China is becoming an ordering principle of the US policy.

 

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Iran, US and Israel

The nail-biting brinkmanship between Tehran and Washington instigated under Trump may be over. But as the hope of reviving the Iran nuclear deal fades, another escalation looms.

Biden took office pledging to rejoin the nuclear deal. His predecessor had unilaterally withdrawn Washington in 2018, re-imposing sanctions on Iran, which, in turn, stepped up its nuclear development and power projection across the Middle East.

The Biden administration lost time posturing about who should make the first move and refusing substantive goodwill gestures. Still, for a few months, talks made some progress.

Then, in June, Ebrahim Raisi won Iran’s presidential election, giving control of all the country’s key power centres. After a five-month hiatus, Iran returned to the table, driving a harder bargain. At the same time, it is accelerating nuclear development.

When the deal took effect six years ago, Iran’s breakout time, the time it would take to enrich enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon, was around 12 months. It is now estimated at three to six weeks and shrinking.

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Yemen

Yemen’s war faded from headlines in 2021 but remains devastating and could be poised to get worse.

Houthi rebels have encircled and advanced into the oil- and gas-rich governorate of Marib. Long underrated as a military force, the Houthis appear to be running an agile and evolving multi-front campaign, pairing offensives with outreach to soften local tribal leaders’ resistance.

They now control Al-Bayda, a governorate neighbouring Marib, and have made inroads into Shabwa, farther east; thus, cutting off supply lines to Marib.

Of Marib governorate itself, only the main city and hydrocarbon facilities nearby remain in the hands of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi’s internationally recognised government. Should those sites fall, it would mark a sea change in the war.

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Israel and Palestine

Last year saw the fourth and most destructive Gaza-Israel war in just over a decade, illustrating again that the peace process is dead and a two-state solution looks less likely than ever.

The trigger for this latest outbreak was occupied East Jerusalem. The threatened eviction of Palestinian residents of the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood coincided in April 2021 with clashes during Ramazan between stone-throwing youth and Israeli police using lethal force on the compound that comprises the Haram al-Sharif, holy to Muslims, and the Temple Mount, holy to Jews.

That set off a chain reaction. Hamas, which controls Gaza, fired long-distance rockets indiscriminately into Israel. Israel responded with a harsh aerial assault, sparking an 11-day conflict that killed more than 250 people, almost all Palestinians, and left in ruins what remained of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. West Bank Palestinians demonstrating in solidarity were met with the Israeli army’s live fire.

In Israeli cities, Palestinian citizens took to the streets, sometimes clashing with West Bank settlers and other right-wing Jews, often supported by Israeli police.

 

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Haiti

The Caribbean nation has long been tormented by political crises, gang warfare, and natural disasters. Nevertheless, this past year stands out for many Haitians as particularly bleak. A few expect a brighter 2022.

In July, hit men assassinated President Jovenel Moïse in his home; his security detail apparently did nothing about it. Shell-shocked elites squabbled over who would run the country. (Succession lines were muddled as Moïse had appointed Ariel Henry as his new prime minister but Henry had not yet been sworn in.) Henry eventually became the country’s interim leader but has struggled to assert authority.

An earthquake in August destroyed much of southern Haiti. Rampant kidnappings by gangs that lord over much of the capital of Port-au-Prince have hampered international relief efforts. Criminals’ seizure of oil terminals brought the country to a standstill in early November.

Haiti; meanwhile, lags behind the rest of the Americas in distributing the Covid-19 vaccines.

Increasing numbers of Haitians are seeking better prospects abroad; many new departures and indeed many Haitians who left the island some time ago, are camped out along the southern US border.

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Myanmar

Since the February 2021 coup, a crackdown by the country’s military, known as the Tatmadaw, on mostly peaceful protests has fuelled broad-based resistance, ranging from civil disobedience to armed clashes with security forces. A deadly stalemate exacts a terrible human toll.

If the generals hoped to reboot Myanmar’s politics, they miscalculated. Piqued at Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy’s landslide win in the November 2020 elections, military leaders called the vote rigged and detained civilian politicians.

Their plans for new elections seemingly aimed at installing friendlier faces to power. Instead, mass protests against military involvement in politics rocked towns and cities. A crackdown, resulting in hundreds of deaths fuelled fiercer resistance.

 

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Militancy in Africa

Since 2017, Africa has suffered some of the world’s most ferocious battles between states and militants.

The militancy on the continent is nothing new, but revolts, linked to the Al-Qaeda, have surged in recent years.

Weak states struggle against nimble militant factions across vast hinterlands where central governments hold little sway.

Parts of the Sahel have seen spiraling bloodshed, mostly due to fighting involving militants, whose reach has extended from northern Mali to the country’s centre, into Niger, and across rural Burkina Faso.

Boko Haram’s insurgency has lost the swaths of northeastern Nigeria it controlled some years ago, and the movement has fractured. But splinter groups still wreak tremendous harm around Lake Chad.

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In East Africa, Al-Shabab, remains a potent force, despite more than 15 years of efforts to defeat it. The group holds large parts of Somalia’s rural south, operates shadow courts and extorts taxes beyond those areas, and occasionally mounts attacks in neighbouring countries.

There’s little to show for years of foreign efforts to build up indigenous armies.

Africa’s newest fronts, in northern Mozambique and eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, are also troubling. Insurgents who claim a new state province in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado region have stepped up attacks on security forces and civilians.

Nearly a million people have fled the fighting. Militants have loose ties to the state networks that stretch both up the continent’s east coast and into Congo’s war-torn east.

Mozambique’s government, which long resisted outside involvement in Cabo Delgado, finally agreed last year to let in Rwandan troops and units from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a regional bloc.

Those forces have reversed insurgent gains, though militants appear to be regrouping. Rwandan and SADC forces risk a protracted war.

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In Somalia and the Sahel, Western impatience could be decisive.

If foreign efforts wind down, battlefield dynamics would undoubtedly shift, perhaps decisively, in the militants’ favour.

The Sahel governments need to improve their relations with citizens in the countryside.

Somalia needs to repair relations among elites and late December saw another eruption in a drawn-out election feud. No one knows whether compromise with militants is feasible, what it would entail, or how populations would view it.

But the military-centric approach has mostly spawned more violence. If foreign powers don’t want the same dilemma haunting them in a decade’s time, they need to prepare the ground for talks with the militant leaders.

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