The world Iran left overlooked: assassination attempts, suicide bombings, and shifting alliances

An assassination attempt on the US president.
A surge of coordinated attacks in Mali.
Rising violence in Chad.
Continued fighting in Lebanon.

As the Iran war reaches 60 days, what’s emerging isn’t a clear path forward, but a global landscape shaped by distraction, opportunism, and escalation. While attention remains fixed on Iran, violence elsewhere is accelerating — often with far less scrutiny.

In this episode of Conflicts of Interest, ACLED CEO Professor Clionadh Raleigh and Bron Mills unpack the significant developments over the last 48 hours alone - and the dynamics driving this moment — from stalled negotiations and economic pressure in Iran, to the resurgence of conflict across the Sahel and the Middle East.

The question isn’t just whether the Iran war will escalate — but how many other conflicts already are.

For more conversations like this, subscribe to Conflicts of Interest and watch the full episode on YouTube. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Distraction is a super powerful tool within geopolitics, right? If people you thought were gonna give you pushback are no longer doing so, that is the perfect moment to move. At the moment, you know, minus the nudity in the dragons, it's quite game of thernies.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

And at this point, I think the only thing that would probably surprise me would be the dragons.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Conflicts of interest brought to you by Accled.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

Hello everybody and welcome back to Conflict of Interests. My name is Cleaner Raleigh, and I am the director of Accled, and I'm here today again with the lovely Bron Mills to discuss our increasingly chaotic world.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Yeah, I mean that's a nice way of putting it. I think firstly the thing that we need to touch on is Trump in the news this morning saying he can't imagine that there's a profession that is more dangerous. Of course, talking about his own job after the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondence Association dinner. What what do you make of this in the first instance?

SPEAKER_02 0:58

This is the third assassination attempt on a US president within the last, I think, two years. You know, it's very serious, right? I mean, and this is the third attempt that's gotten to the point where there's been a gunman, right? There's been, I'm sure, a lot of others, you know, it's been referenced that Iran, for example, has attempted to do the same. Yeah, it's serious. I think that in the US, they have a really significant problem with lone wolf gun ownership and a really intense, like hyper-radicalized, hyper-extremist political culture that is resulting in these acts. I will say that one of the things that I found super disturbing about the initial days in the war in Iran was that people kept on saying things just super casually about how Trump should be assassinated, that this wouldn't happen if Trump had been assassinated. And these were reasonable people. They're not, you know, it wasn't on the internet. That's what I mean. And I was like, geez, that's it's such a it's such a strong thing to say. I think it was in part because people were like, you know, there's a bit of a tit for tat with Ayatollah Khameni being assassinated. So, you know, if it's open season on leaders, people have a list of ones that are particularly destabilizing. But that language, you know, that way of of constructing a political position is normalized, is what worried me about it, and extremely dangerous, and is part of the disorder that I think that we've been predicting for a while. And for the US will have a very particular signature to their disorder, and it will be more of this.

SPEAKER_00 2:33

And the uh other examples have been quite public. Even when thinking back to when we were talking about what happened with Charlie Klerk Kirk, obviously that wasn't a target on the president, but even those kind of attacks have been in these really kind of public spaces. Is the fact that this one was more at a kind of closed-off invite-only dinner increasing cause for concern?

SPEAKER_02 2:50

I just think it's like where he was, right? So it's like, where's the president? I'll go there. And, you know, you don't often know where a political figure is if they're a particularly high-level one like a president. It's as worrying for the mayors who who feel probably like sitting ducks in countries all over the world, or people who are representing a particular population. We can all remember the US senator who was attacked basically during a constituency meeting in um in Arizona, I believe. It was many years ago now, or Nancy Pelosi's husband, or all sorts of ways in which people shape their threats and risks onto political figures. It's opportunism a lot of the time.

SPEAKER_00 3:32

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And then for Trump, it's a a big week he's coming into this week because midweek will mark the 60 days of the conflict in Iran. It's a key milestone for lots of reasons. A, it's catchy, 60 days, easy to remember. But also he's got to take the the war to Congress, right?

SPEAKER_02 3:51

Yeah, that's right. So, I mean, Trump is kind of famous for trying to sidestep some of the regulations around conflict in general. But as you said, I think what's more concerning is less the kind of logistics of Congress and more that this has become just this standoff, right? This shapeless thing that we're all either waiting to be escalated or waiting to be resolved, although neither seems particularly close at hand. Strikes in the region have mostly ceased since the ceasefire began, and that ceasefire is being extended kind of ad hoc. There remains two main pressure points to some degree, which is of course the Strait of Humus and the blockade of that, and Lebanon. Both Washington and Tehran are using their economic muscles in this, as I think you mentioned before, this high-stakes game of chicken. So Iran does dominate the headlines, but it's not because of movement, it's because of non-movement. Last weekend we had an Iranian entourage go to Pakistan but not meet the US. And then the US was kind of like, well, are we gonna go or are we not gonna go? And then JD Vance did not go because it wasn't a high enough group to meet him. And what this is obviously suggesting is that there's there is a fracture within internal Iranian decision making. But again, the IRGC, the hardliners, are I think in control of that too at this moment. I really do think that it's particularly important to not believe that two and two make five if Iran is involved. And uh let me explain my logic here, which is that there's a bit of a debate amongst people who've been commenting on Iran that they are not going to give this up. They are ideologically so, as my daughter would say, locked in to this position. And that's true. They are extremists at the top of the IRGC, especially because of the promotions due to the decapitation campaign by Israel. But what I really want to emphasize is that the blockade is simple in its enforcement mechanism, and it's also very strategic in its intention, which is that no matter how much the IRGC can radicalize or is radicalized or can force the civilian side of the Iranian government to accede to its will, no matter how much that happens, if they don't have any money coming in, or if they don't have any ways in which they can provide for their population, this can't go on, right? It just won't go on. And the Trump administration is using the most effective tool to bring down the IRGC from inside. And now I'm not suggesting that it's going to dissipate or disappear, but I am suggesting that no one can eat ideology, right? No one can survive on really extreme stances on geopolitical realities. And that is going to come to a head, which is, I think, why you have an extremely tense game of chicken, as you put it. Some people are comparing it to after June of last year. And I actually think it's much, much, much more fraught than that. Because the blockade has backed Iran into a corner. It doesn't want to be there, it will continue to lash out, but there's no way out of this other than to accede to some of the things that those enforcing the blockade are demanding.

SPEAKER_00 7:06

And it seems to me that that kind of standoff, and I think you've you've described it before as like we can't just leave this limping along. And I think that that is largely where the headlines are at the moment. It's kind of will they, won't they? Lots of guesswork, lots of, you know, who's gonna crumble first, and then lots of is this 60 days a mark something that the president is going to respect? And so I think that stuff is still quite heavy in the headlines. But as we approach that 60-day mark this week, we've got all sorts of stuff coming from Atlet about things that may have been overshadowed or overlooked across that 60-day period. I think we could do a whole new series of things that have just happened in the last 48 hours. And so I wonder if we could run through those quickly because I think that, I mean, just catching up on a Monday morning has been relatively exhausting. If we start with what's happened in Mali over the weekend with the seemingly coordinated attacks on the government, what's led up to that? How how are we here?

SPEAKER_02 8:04

So we just did a podcast on this last week with Henny about what's happening in the Sahel and this epicenter. And in that podcast, I asked Henny about the siege that had been happening with J N around Bamako. And I said, like, what's gonna happen with it? And he said that something's brewing, right? There's there's a lot of rumor, is how we uh he put it, that something is happening, and then something did happen about I think two days after we were talking about it. And what happened was that this siege broke because J N then made a coordinated attack, not just on Bamako and very, very key figures like the Minister of Defense, and apparently they're going now after the Minister of Intelligence, etc., but the airports, other big cities, Cadal, et cetera. And I know we want to focus on what's happening in the world, but I just want to say this siege is not all that different than this blockade, right? You don't, you don't bring out this weapon and then decide to just back off without any actual subsequent action. And that's why I think people should learn from something like this. The siege went on for quite a while until they got the Malayan government in a position of real weakness. And it's a very old-fashioned kind of tool, you know? I was saying, I think, to Basel in our in our podcast about Lebanon that the blockade feels very medieval. It's not like we're expecting assaulting of the earth next, but the point here is that these are effective military strategies that are not hyper-technical or really multifaceted. They're basically just like, we will stop you from functioning, and then eventually you'll give in. So, as we were saying, even this weekend, serious of coordinated attacks against the government in Mali. There was, of course, as I mentioned, the Minister for Defense has been killed in a suicide bombing of his home. It's been carried out by a coalition of jihadi groups, which effectively is Jainem. Jainem has been coordinating the siege. Now, another big story about the Sahel is that the Russian Africa Corps, formerly Wagner, mercenaries, were fighting alongside the Malian forces in several locations. And this is important because the Wagner Group, or now Africa Corps, has been brought in to really fortify the governments in the Sahel against these threats and really mixed record, if not a bad record. You know, if you bring in mercenaries to do X and they can't do it, then you know, you're asking yourself, why are we paying an incredible amount of money in order to have these forces? That's a side note. But analysts note that with pressure from the Russian-Ukrainian front, which has also, to your point, Bron, been roiling away, some of those Russian forces from Africa Corps have been pulled out of Mali and the situation has worsened as a result. Now I want to I want to be clear here, Africa Corps is much more connected directly to the Russian government than Wagner Group was, which was kind of through this intermediary who ended up strangely and conveniently dying after leading some sort of a labor strike on the Russian government. Okay, so there's also been a really important development in Chad. And the situation in Chad is quite fascinating because it remains amongst a number of countries that are in really serious conflict. It had not been developing in that way. But it has Sudan, and of course it has Niger, and effectively people were extremely worried about the stability of the Chadanian government. The former president, Idris Debi, debatable, shot in the front, shot in the back, in a northern front several years ago, and his son has taken over. But 42 people were killed in intercommunal fighting in Chad. Intercommunal fighting in Chad is not like, you know, you've stepped into our boundary. It's really a replacement or it's a proxy for the larger political forces within the region. They occurred in the Wadifura province. It's believed to have been sparked over a water well. Now, as you may know, I totally do not believe in any sort of climate/slash environmental reasons for conflict in almost any way, right? A water well is where people meet, and it's about ownership, often of land, often of who has authority, etc. But this region is already under pressure because there's been, of course, thousands of Sydney's refugees, many children. It's one of the most deprived areas of the country. And I think that this really highlights how multiple pressures from these conflicts that are further afield exacerbate already existing local political tensions over normal local political issues, such as who owns what, who's allowed access to what, in which spaces. And when you have often huge numbers of refugees and you have a tense political situation, you will always end up having a trigger of some kind that exacerbates all of them at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 12:41

Yeah, and the the relationships are really interesting there because you mentioned the kind of Russian involvement over there. And then this morning we're reading about the Iran's foreign minister is is due to visit Russia. And so could you fill us in on that relationship as well and why that's adding a kind of another layer of complexity to what's going on between Iran and the states and Israel?

SPEAKER_02 13:01

Yeah, I mean, the situation with Russia is, from what I understand, like a little fluid in the sense that Iran obviously needs as many friends as it can. Russia and China have certainly willingly stood up for they would claim to be, you know, adherence to international law, which is laughable. But the idea that they will stand behind Iran, they have done so in the UN, etc. They're not neutral, is I guess how I would put it. The Russian component is a little bit more difficult because Ukraine now has, you know, a little bit of a role in the region in encouraging some particular strategies, especially with drone warfare. And I think Russia is just trying to make sure that that doesn't get out of hand by either trying to resupply Iran or offer political cover or simply an ally in very shaky waters. So Iran, the Iranian entourage was trying to meet with three countries, and I think that they successfully did so: Pakistan, Russia, and Oman, all of which have been Pakistan would claim it's been quite neutral. And Pakistan has a problem, of course, in that it was increasingly moving towards Saudi Arabia. It has a security arrangement with them. So it cannot come out like, you know, we're behind this 100%. But what Pakistan does not want in any way, shape, or form is the Iranian chaos moving across its border, especially into the Baloch region and Balochistan in particular. And so, you know, the I would say the Pakistani government has proven itself to be quite agile with some of these political relationships. So I think that we should keep an eye on it for sure, because of what it suggests for the for the downstream conflict. But everything's at play at the moment. You see this happen a lot, which is that, you know, a really under pressure government tries to go on a little bit of a a tour to see who's willing to negotiate some alliances. And that's what's happening.

SPEAKER_00 14:49

And I find some of the language around lots of this quite interesting because, you know, that's my thing. And so there was a suggestion that Russia had offered to take custody of the uranium. And it reminded me of the US offering to kind of take custody of Venezuelan oil. And it's like, you know, I don't mind looking after that incredibly valuable thing.

SPEAKER_02 15:10

Can we have more if you need to get this off your hands, you know, I'll take it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

Yeah. So it I don't know, does that raise any, or is that just a kind of ally move? Or are we suspicious about that? I mean, I just think they're total gobshites.

SPEAKER_02 15:26

You know, they're just going to try to benefit from this. This is the most important, I think, way of thinking about Russia in general. It's thinking about how can we benefit from this situation. Even if it hurts Iran, right? No one's under any illusion that it's going to come back as a super strong power that will be able to, through its strength and ideology, be able to control that region. We're either looking at a kind of limping, injured animal, or we're looking at a caged animal. So that's the kind of metaphor for what's going to happen with the government more broadly.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

So the roller coaster that was kind of last week. It was again another game of like ceasefire, no ceasefire, yes, ceasefire, Israel's gonna do what it wants in Lebanon, and you know, I'm not gonna go to this visit if you don't come to my visit, and a very kind of back and forward, cat and mouse. And so that leads us up to now where fighting is continuing in Lebanon. And it's almost as though it's being tried to make made out at this point that that, you know, that's kind of separate to what we're talking about over here, and and lots of people are trying to kind of pull the two together, but of course they're connected, right?

SPEAKER_02 16:32

They're connected, but I would say that Israel probably smiled to itself about the situation on Sunday where Iran basically didn't come through. And the way I think that Israel's approaching this is that, like, welcome to our reality, where ceasefires mean nothing, meetings mean nothing, everybody's just preparing for the next conflict in better or worse ways. But there was, of course, a continued bombardment in southern Lebanon, despite the ceasefire. And what I would say about that is the rhetoric around a strong Lebanese government being able to also handle Hezbollah is optimal. You know, like that is exactly what everybody wants. But whether it is forthcoming in the immediate term is, I think, quite regrettably unlikely. So there is going to be continued fighting. I think Hezbollah is still fighting, and Israel is still fighting over that. Another thing I just wanted to mention is that there's also a series of elections in the West Bank, and it's in Palestinian-controlled or PA-controlled areas. And it's it's interesting. I was reading a piece about it recently, and it uh Hamas is not running candidates, but it is allowing candidates to associate with Hamas, and it's providing, I think, without being asked, military security for the polling areas. And what's interesting about this is that the PA are hoping to get like a little bit of a leg into this Gaza reconstruction, etc., right? And the big question that overhangs everything is how popular or how wanted is Hamas as the political representatives of the Palestinian people? And this election in the West Bank should give some indication of such. But I was reading an excellent piece recently, and it was arguing that for Hamas, this is all the way up, right? Their candidates do really poorly. They can say, well, we didn't, we didn't stand behind anybody. This wasn't our election. If the candidates do really well, they get to say, look at this support for us that is evident. But it's a very low voter turnout, and it will still be interesting. But I think there's a competition there that I think that is really important, just like with the Hezbollah uh situation. There's there's internal competition about how that situation should evolve, even if it isn't through the government.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

It's like what they say about teenage boys taking their GCSEs, isn't it? Oh, like I didn't try, so I because I failed.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

In fact, so much of this, right now that I have almost teenagers, so much of this strategy is like not a thousand percent different than how they organize their social pyramids or the knock-on effect to all of the different kinds of different groups.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

And then as well as you've been talking, we started Game of Thrones again, but just to have on in the background, and then you're talking about this kind of siege and all of these different and it's thinking, it's like, come on, be creative, right?

SPEAKER_02 19:14

Yeah, I mean, like I would say at the moment, you know, minus the nudity in the dragons, uh it's quite game of thronies.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

Yeah. And at this point, I think the only thing that would probably surprise me would be the dragons.

SPEAKER_02 19:26

Yeah, the nudity probably is is expected. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:30

Yeah. Yeah. Oh my god behind closed doors, right? Gratuitous nudity. Yeah, yeah. So with this week then, and this this 60-day mark, it's something it's being spoken a lot about because it's, you know, it means a lot and it's a it's a big deal, and and you know, it's time we get permission and stuff. But like you said at the beginning, there's an interpretation of the rules going on largely in the States. And I wonder if there's a loophole, is he gonna find it, or if whatever happens this week doesn't necessarily go President Trump's way? Is he going to have to just stop everything? I think these are the kind of main questions being asked. Is it really as simple as a yes or no?

SPEAKER_02 20:08

Well, I think that there's a bit of a fiction going on that like he's worried about this 60-day mark, right? I'm sure that somebody's like, this is a box we have to tick, but other than that, they don't want to debate it in Congress, you know, go with God. But, you know, he's an incredibly high agency president in that like he does not want the rules or the legislation to limit or present obstacles to what he wishes to do. So I would say that that that's not his biggest issue. His biggest issue is when I think about the likelihood of a re-escalation, which I think is is high. And the reasons that I have somewhat moderate confidence in that is that the US can't leave this as it is for their kind of face-saving position with their alliances. They can't leave both the likely and the subsequent in the future effects on the oil market or the energy market to remain as they are. Three, they have a very, very hyped up military code at the moment, which is that we have it, we might as well use it. And four, I think that they are trying to shape something here, which it may be like a future contest with China, it may be a new war front to weaken Russia, despite the fact that the relief of sanctions won't have done that. It may be a number of different things. It may be really pushing NATO so that they don't feel like they are beholden to them anymore. There are all sorts of indirect potential benefits of this conflict going that I think that you can't underprice, I guess, in the overall market. But the number one thing that I think is important is that that area is full of US allies, important US allies, and they can't be left to deal with the mess that this particular stage to now has created.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

And certainly as we've been going along, we've been Picking up on all sorts of different potential impacts. And one of them has been like the reputation of some of those countries, especially around the Gulf, and how, you know, this kind of haven is maybe not how the world will see them going forward and all sorts of kind of accidental reputational things going along. I think where my head is at, and certainly where lots of people would be kind of going into this week, is a President Trump who feels as though people are kind of rolling their eyes at him because of the deadline ceasefire kind of meaning nothing, like a parent counting down 3, 2, 1. Is that going to create a dangerous response? Or is there something going on the other side of this with all the market conversations? Is he helping his friends make loads of money and therefore he doesn't mind?

SPEAKER_02 22:40

Yeah, I think that there's a corruption story here about poly market and all the rest of it that is in some way separate. Even the overall market manipulation is somewhat separate. But I want to come back to this notion that if Trump thought that another strike would solve this, we would have seen that already. So we're at a stage now where the benefits of the air war have been demonstrated and where they're found lacking, he and and of course the group around him are trying to figure out how to enact warfare by other means. At the moment, it's economic with the blockade. That will result in something. I think they obviously have a range of scenarios that that could potentially result in. To me, it results in a weakening inside Iran about extremely hardline positions, but more of a weakening that's going to create a delay rather than a complete removal of the influence of these more radical elements. So they've got that to deal with, right? So this to me is the second stage, and it's not, it's not the terminal stage by any means. I would be extremely surprised if there were not another round of fighting, as I've mentioned, but it won't likely be an air war. People can really, really disagree about why something was done or whether something had been done. But as an analyst, your job is to look at something without any preconditions or biases about what you wish would have happened and just say what you think is happening. And this war is not over by any stretch of the imagination, even if I think it would be great if it was.

SPEAKER_00 24:06

And to that point, I don't think anybody sat kind of holding their breath for a diplomatic breakthrough in the next couple of days.

SPEAKER_02 24:12

Yeah, exactly. But as you kind of started, I think we should return to this notion that all the other conflicts in the world are still going. And in fact, as predicted many, you know, probably about 60 days ago, these groups are going to take advantage of the distraction. Distraction is a super powerful tool within geopolitics, right? Because if people you thought were going to give you pushback or people who might have helped your enemy, or people who would have coordinated maybe more defense aid are no longer doing so, that is the perfect moment to move. Even if you feel like you're in a weaker position, it's the perfect moment to move. And that's what we're seeing here.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

And so the kind of volume of content that we've got coming out over the next kind of seven days or so is all to do with that. It's things that might have kind of slipped the public kind of consciousness that are still very much going on and as you say, escalating. And some of them are sort of individual instance. So there's a piece that we've put together that touches on Ecuador, the bombing of a dairy farm that was apparently a drug training camp, and then it ended up being a dairy farm. And something like that might have ended up an enormous kind of public scrutiny of intelligence and relations with the states and governments around Latin America, but kind of with a one headline and done and no one's asking any other questions because of what was being overshadowed by.

SPEAKER_02 25:30

Yeah. You can see this with like dominant conflicts. And I mean, this particular conflict with Iran is is super dominant. Even the Iraq war, it fell off of the headlines pretty quickly and it only went back on there even as long as it went on. It only went back on there when there was a really big, very serious attack. But it still goes on and other conflicts kind of climb to the top of people's attention. Or and I think as importantly, people get exhausted by conflict. They get exhausted about hearing about it, they feel a lot of disorder at home. You know, this stuff with the poly market, as I was saying before, that contributes to this sense that like the ho the system is corrupt, people are benefiting from this, they don't want to hear about it. All they all they can kind of deal with is the difficulties with with even their own countries, which they are feeling increasingly are marred by disorder. So I mean, yeah, it's it it was it was coming, right? We're in the beginning stages of it.

SPEAKER_01 26:26

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