War & Conflict Archive

It has been more than 14 years since the U.S. military last fought large formations of conventional enemy troops. Unless the unthinkable happens with North Korea, American forces may not see a large-scale traditional war for many more years to come, if ever. Yet, every day, the military, intelligence community, law enforcement and other government agencies face a plethora of shadow enemies, ranging from complex criminal-terrorist networks to ideologically motivated individuals. While the risk of conventional war or gray-zone aggression from an adversary state is not gone entirely, the 21st-century security environment is dominated by nonstate challenges. This is an […]

Relations between the United States and Turkey are continuing down a turbulent path. In the most recent incident, on July 18, Turkey’s state news agency, Anadolu, published in both Turkish and English sensitive information about the U.S. military footprint in northern Syria. Anadolu’s report included the troop levels and precise locations of 10 American military bases stretching across the Kurdish-controlled regions of Syria. Although the news agency claims the information was discovered through regular reporting by its journalists in Syria, Washington clearly believes the Turkish government was behind the leak. “We would be very concerned if officials from a NATO […]

JAKARTA, Indonesia—Two months after a coalition of extremist groups affiliated with the self-proclaimed Islamic State swept into the city of Marawi in the southern Philippines, provoking a large-scale military siege to retake it, the militants continue to maintain control of sections of the city. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been evacuated from the charred and bombed-out city, a testament to the power of the militants to challenge an underequipped and inadequately trained Philippine military. Since the siege began, President Rodrigo Duterte has repeatedly trumpeted the army’s incipient victory. Now it looks likely that Duterte will deliver his State of […]

On July 9, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s long-awaited announcement finally came: The self-proclaimed Islamic State’s occupation of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, was over. In its wake, the Islamic State left thousands dead, and victory in Mosul, after perhaps the worst urban warfare this century, looked more like devastation. Over a million people were displaced. While the fighting is not over, the eventual outcome—the Islamic State’s defeat in Mosul—is not in doubt. Still, much of the city is in ruins without even the most basic public services, and that’s the good news. The bad news is where things are likely […]

The defeat in Mosul of the so-called Islamic State was supposed to be good news for Iraq. But challenges that remain—ranging from Shiite militias’ new role and Sunni Iraqis’ enduring mistrust of each other and Baghdad, to the lack of state capacity to restore basic services—mean that Mosul’s nightmare will just continue. For some modest signs of constructive political change that is happening in Iraq, we need to look deeper, at local and regional developments. The recapture of Mosul on July 10 by Iraqi forces, with the help of Shiite and Kurdish militia, was supposed to usher in a new […]

Earlier this week Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared Mosul freed from the forces of the self-styled Islamic State, the result of the longest and most destructive urban battle of the 21st century. Elsewhere in Iraq, the Islamic State is close to losing most of the territory it once controlled. Across the border in Syria, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces are driving the group out of its stronghold in Raqqa. Soon it may lose Deir Ezzor, the last urban center it controls. While this is all good news, the Islamic State is far from eradicated. Many of its foreign fighters […]

The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, called them “starve, surrender and slaughter” tactics. Former Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called them a “war crime.” Sieges have been especially brutal on civilians in Syria’s civil war, yet they remain the Syrian government’s favorite strategy for retaking territory and purging key regions of the country of its opponents. In May, the United Nations undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Stephen O’Brien, accused Bashar al-Assad’s government of exploiting civilian suffering as a “tactic of war.” The regime’s bloody, four-year campaign to recapture the battered city of Aleppo, which ended in a four-month siege […]

Diplomacy is a mendacious business. “An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country,” one 17th-century wit supposedly quipped. Diplomats are still expected to massage, twist or conceal facts to suit their countries’ national interests. By contrast, international institutions are generally meant to make diplomacy a marginally more honest business by upholding higher standards of objectivity. Organizations like the United Nations and World Bank draw a lot of their credibility from the assumption that they tell the truth. In the last century, the League of Nations and then the U.N. pioneered the global […]

Last month, a militia that had been holding Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, the son of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, announced he had been released in accordance with an amnesty law passed by a parliament based in the eastern city of Tobruk. In response, Fatou Bensouda, the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, issued a statement calling for Gadhafi’s arrest so he could face crimes against humanity charges in The Hague. However, in a testament to the political and security factors that have dogged the court’s work in Libya for years, Gadhafi’s whereabouts are unknown, and he does not appear to […]