Situation Room: A Yemen Ground Invasion, al-Shabaab's March on Mogadishu, Haiti's Collapse, and Nigeria's...

Across four theaters on three continents, the same pattern keeps surfacing: established orders are buckling, and the actors who move decisively now will shape what replaces them. In Yemen, a years-long stalemate may be about to break, with reporting that an international invasion to dismantle the Houthi rebel organization could be close at hand. In central Somalia, the jihadist group al-Shabaab is on the warpath, in an offensive that now appears to threaten the capital itself.

In the Caribbean, Haiti has, by most outward indications, passed the point of no return. And in central Nigeria, a long-overlooked conflict has roared back to life, with the world at risk of ignoring what some have labeled an anti-Christian genocide.

None of these crises commands the constant attention that larger wars receive, yet each carries consequences reaching far beyond its borders. A Houthi defeat would reshape security across the Red Sea; the fall of Mogadishu would hand a jihadist insurgency an entire nation; Haiti’s implosion threatens its neighbors and the wider hemisphere; and Nigeria’s Middle Belt killings expose a state unable to protect its own citizens.

Key Takeaways

In Yemen, reporting indicates that the broad anti-Houthi coalition is laying the groundwork for a major offensive, planning to slice northward along the Red Sea coast and potentially cut the Houthis off from the sea, with eighty thousand or more soldiers said to be mobilizing.
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are the two regional powers that could decisively tip a ground war against the Houthis, but both publicly deny involvement, distrust each other, and fear Houthi missile and drone retaliation against their oil and civilian infrastructure.
Al-Shabaab’s Shabelle offensive has fought through what should have been a fighting-pausing rainy season, capturing villages including Aboorey and Beero Yabal and, for the first time since 2022, linking its central-Somalia gains to its southern power base.
Haiti has moved beyond collapse into freefall: the UN recorded roughly 2,660 homicides in the first 90 days of 2025, gangs control an estimated 90 percent of Port-au-Prince, and the gutting of USAID and an underfunded Kenyan-led mission have removed Haiti’s last props.
In central Nigeria’s Middle Belt, three large attacks in Plateau and Benue States over April 2025 pushed the death toll to roughly two hundred in farming villages, in a farmer-herder conflict that Genocide Watch classifies as an active genocide against Christians.
Across all four conflicts, decentralized and adaptive non-state forces are outmaneuvering sluggish state militaries, while international support arrives too little, too late, or too divided to change the trajectory.

This WarFronts analysis works through all four in turn, drawing out the connective tissue between them: weak or distracted governments, decentralized and adaptive non-state forces, and outside powers either unwilling or unable to intervene at the scale required. The thesis is simple and uncomfortable. In every one of these conflicts, the side defending the existing order is losing ground, and the path back is narrowing by the week.

Yemen: Is a Ground Invasion of the Houthis Imminent?

In the midst of a rapidly escalating US air campaign against Yemen’s powerful Houthi rebels, new reporting suggests that the country’s long civil war may be about to become far more intense than it already is. A Wall Street Journal report published on the fourteenth of April 2025, drawing on interviews with both non-Houthi Yemeni officials and US government representatives, indicated that Yemen’s other military factions are gearing up for an offensive—and that they may bring a regional powerhouse, or even two of them, to assist in the fight.

To understand which factions are in play, it helps to zoom out from recent months. The Houthis’ attacks on global shipping in the Red Sea have drawn international headlines, as has a wave of US airstrikes—most recently a massive attack that killed over seventy people at the major Ras Isa oil terminal, and a later strike that killed twelve in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a. But capable as they are of seizing the world’s attention, the Houthis are far from the only armed faction on Yemeni soil. As the label “rebels” implies, they are not even the country’s internationally recognized government.

That government—the Republic of Yemen, led by the Internationally Recognized Government, or IRG—directly or indirectly controls a majority of the nation’s territory, though its more populous west is mostly under Houthi control. Based in the port city of Aden, the IRG shares the city with an organization it currently treats as an ally, the Southern Transitional Council. The STC is a separatist body that ultimately wants to split off from the rest of Yemen, and it is a relatively strong force fighting alongside the battered Yemeni Armed Forces.

A couple of other national resistance groups hold their own territory while maintaining generally stable, if infighting-prone, alliances with the government. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, is also present, antagonistic toward all sides.

For several years, the internationally recognized government and the various anti-Houthi militias have stayed mostly quiet, defending their territory against intermittent probing attacks but clearly not looking for a fight. The strategy was to wait, in hopes the Houthis might step on a rake enough times with their Red Sea shipping attacks to bring the wrath of the global West thundering down upon them. That has not happened—but the constant deluge of US airstrikes has created a window of opportunity. The broad anti-Houthi coalition is now laying the groundwork for a major offensive, planning to slice northward across the Red Sea coast and, if possible, cut the Houthis off from the sea entirely.

According to an Emirati newspaper, The National, eighty thousand soldiers or more are to be mobilized for that push, potentially alongside a second thrust toward the Houthi presence in the capital. As the Long War Journal explains, there are conflicting reports on exactly what these plans will look like, and little to no clear evidence that the proposed mobilization has actually begun. The one commonality across all the rumors is that an offensive along the western Red Sea coast will be the centerpiece of whatever comes next.

The United States is likely to play some role in the hostilities to come. America may in fact be orchestrating an offensive behind the scenes, as the knowledge of unnamed US sources would suggest. If so, Washington may be more than happy to coordinate its air power with partners on the ground, leveraging immense firepower from above to soften or destroy Houthi defenses that would otherwise be difficult to crack.

American aerial assets in the Indian Ocean—particularly several B-2 Spirit bombers stationed on the militarized island of Diego Garcia—may be able to help. Those bombers have been discussed before as a likely pressure tool against Iran ahead of a possible new nuclear deal, and they can strike the Houthis while presenting a simultaneous threat to Tehran, possibly even making an example out of Sana’a to gain Iranian compliance.

What the United States will almost certainly not do is commit its own troops to a ground offensive—beyond the presence of possible special forces or other small, elite units that may already be deployed secretly to assist. Direct ground support would instead have to come from two very important players in the Middle East: Yemen’s northern neighbor Saudi Arabia, and the nearby Gulf state of the United Arab Emirates.

Yemen: Will Saudi Arabia and the UAE Join the Fight?

According to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, it is the Emirates in particular that brought plans of an offensive to America’s attention, and that may be willing to supply on-the-ground support. Saudi Arabia, for its part, led a coalition that included the UAE during a years-long fight with the Houthis, starting in early 2015 and only ending with a truce in 2022. Both nations are highly ambitious, both have been looking for ways to militarily expand their influence in the Middle East and the wider region, and each commands a level of military power that, brought directly to bear against the Houthis, could be a major problem for the rebel group.

Yet both are now working hard to deny any interest in a Houthi offensive. Saudi sources, speaking anonymously, have dismissed the reports as false, while an incredulous UAE official went further. Speaking to Reuters, assistant minister for political affairs Lana Nusseibeh stated: “Among all the wild unsubstantiated stories going around, that one surely wins the misleading-news-of-the-week award, by a wide margin.”

Forceful as those denials are, there is reason to believe that neither nation is genuinely dead-set against participating. The Emirates have been more than willing to fuel the civil war in Sudan by supplying weapons to the RSF paramilitary force, while Saudi Arabia is looking to broaden its military partnership with the United States and assert itself as a regional player alongside Israel and Iran.

The problems are likely twofold. The first is Riyadh and Abu Dhabi’s unwillingness to work together. Despite their history of fighting side by side in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have increasingly come to see themselves as direct competitors on each other’s doorstep—turning the Sudan war into something of a proxy rivalry, engaging in a quiet economic tug-of-war, and snapping up allies across the region. The relationship is far from that of Cold War-style sworn enemies, but the two are not eager to stand shoulder to shoulder when it can be avoided.

The second challenge is more practical. While the Houthis cannot take on either nation in a head-to-head conflict, they can inflict immense economic damage by using their missiles and drones to attack oil refineries and civilian targets. They have done this successfully before, striking both nations and causing fatalities. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE have substantially upgraded their air defenses over the last several years, but the Houthis still stand a good chance of breaking through—especially if they launch their munitions in high volume and with coordination, as they have proven able to do in their Red Sea operations.

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There are, nonetheless, ways the US and the Yemenis could sweeten the deal. The first step would be for this informal anti-Houthi coalition to pick a lane: lean on the Saudis or the Emiratis. Both are capable of smuggling weapons into Yemen if they prefer to support indirectly, both have evolving militaries that could benefit from on-the-ground experience, both bring modern equipment, both hold pre-existing defense-industrial relationships with the US, Europe, China, and Russia, and both command firepower the Houthis can only dream of.

The second step to win compliance would likely be US security guarantees in exchange for participation—namely, help maintaining air defenses. Washington did exactly that for both nations during their prior fight against the Houthis, and since the undoing of those arrangements was a Biden-era decision, the current Trump administration would likely be happy to restore them. The US has also shown a willingness to station two carrier strike groups in the Middle East at once, something it could conceivably sustain for the long term.

The Houthis themselves have made clear they believe an offensive is coming. They have threatened their usual fire and brimstone against both Saudi Arabia and the UAE should either join, and they have expressed an unsurprising willingness to fight to the last. But in practice, it is not clear they could stand against an efficient coalition of this kind.

The Houthis have failed for nearly a decade to take Yemen’s third-largest city, the highland metropolis of Taiz, keeping it under a siege that earned it the nickname “city of snipers.” The movement has suffered increasing infiltration by foreign intelligence, and its leaders grow more paranoid by the day. Its fighters are known for cunning and battlefield innovation, and they can inflict heavy casualties before being defeated—but it is unlikely they would win if the true power of such a coalition were brought against them.

Somalia: Al-Shabaab’s Offensive Intensifies

In the central regions of Somalia, the jihadist organization al-Shabaab is on the warpath. The offensive it is now carrying out is the same one that kicked off in early February 2025—but it has proven far more potent than the world believed when it began. Known as the Shabelle offensive, it is contested primarily in the Middle Shabelle and Lower Shabelle regions on Somalia’s central seacoast, as well as the inland Hiran region nearby. Its intent, judging by the statements and actions of its leaders and the map of military progress, is ambitious: to recapture lands al-Shabaab held before a 2022 offensive by the Somali government and the African Union, then to go a step further and encircle the capital, Mogadishu.

After a series of coordinated assaults launched the offensive in early February, al-Shabaab claimed a rapid sequence of victories, including in a district capital known as Bal’ad. At the time, the offensive was expected to be both a fight against the Somali federal government and a race against time, with al-Shabaab facing a hard deadline in the rainy season beginning in early April. In Somalia, the rainy season is also the mud season, when movement becomes far more difficult and fighting typically pauses.

This year, however, a combination of a poor rainy season and al-Shabaab’s surprising ability to fight through it efficiently created a massive problem for Mogadishu. The reprieve government forces had hoped for never arrived; by the back half of April, forecasts for Mogadishu suggested the rains would not come through at least the first week of May.

With no easy way to wind down the fighting, Somalia’s federal forces have taken a beating, despite occasional counterattacks and air support from foreign powers. Al-Shabaab is strong in this part of the country, leveraging thousands of fighters in asymmetric, sporadic attacks across the central regions. Like other land-holding jihadist groups, it is known for traveling light, relying on small arms in a guerrilla style of warfare, and using incredible brutality against both government forces and civilians to achieve its objectives.

The Somali military, by contrast, is a sluggish, undertrained, undermotivated organization, with a majority of its regular troops typically unwilling to engage in hard battle unless it is unavoidable. Its light-footed elite operatives—smaller bands of special forces soldiers—are formidable, but they perform best setting the pace and coordinating attacks on offense, and lack the numbers to defend more than a few targets at once.

When al-Shabaab is on the defensive and the Somali military only needs to hold claimed territory, the government can be relatively effective. But when al-Shabaab has the momentum to attack at scale, Somali federal forces tend to be at their worst. Al-Shabaab also knows how to run a complex offensive, interweaving multi-pronged attacks, rapid encirclements, tactical withdrawals and re-engagements, and distracting attacks elsewhere to keep its adversary off balance.

Somalia: Terror Tactics and the Encirclement of Mogadishu

The group’s repertoire of disruptive attacks illustrates the point. In its siege of the Cairo Hotel—a popular destination where the Somali military was coordinating offensives with clan leaders—al-Shabaab used just six attackers and a car bomb to create a twenty-four-hour siege in an area meant to be safe, paralyzing government forces. Days later, in mid-March, a roadside bombing in a heavily patrolled area near the presidential complex killed ten people and nearly claimed the president’s life.

A day after that, al-Shabaab launched mortars at a major international airport and the headquarters of a UN security mission. A week or two later, it shelled the presidential complex directly and, on the same day, assassinated a vital commander of the Somali national army. Each such attack forces Mogadishu to split its attention further and creates an environment of chaos that al-Shabaab is practically made to exploit.

With the insurgency running circles around the military, Somali soldiers have deserted at rising rates as a pervasive culture of fear has sent morale collapsing.

Most consequentially, al-Shabaab has captured critical areas in central Somalia that, according to the Institute for the Study of War, “set conditions for the group to reestablish support zones there and connect them to its center of gravity in southern Somalia for the first time since 2022.” For the first time in years, in other words, al-Shabaab has established a continuous zone of control from its power base to the areas where it is now fighting. In particular, it captured two important villages, Aboorey and Beero Yabal, and held them despite Somali counterattacks.

Those villages, sites of several prior battles, both allow al-Shabaab to create that continuous zone of control and open the roads leading straight to Mogadishu. In a move reminiscent of the M23 rebel assaults around Goma in the Congo, al-Shabaab may be able to barrel down those highways if it can mass the required force—especially since its control over other nearby villages makes a successful Somali counteroffensive even harder.

At the same time, al-Shabaab fighters have surged into action south of Mogadishu, overrunning Somali defenses across several districts and expanding the group’s zone of control. Those attacks let al-Shabaab threaten the capital from a distance, forcing the government to divide its attention further, and extend a pincer movement wrapping around the wider region. The Somali military still holds out elsewhere in central Somalia, but those forces have been increasingly cut off, as al-Shabaab takes the surrounding villages, encircles the holdouts, and establishes checkpoints to strangle the flow of munitions and reinforcements. As it isolates those pockets, it re-establishes a thick network of support in central Somalia and readies for what appears to be its ultimate target: Mogadishu itself.

International support has fallen short of what is needed. Airstrikes, predominantly from Ethiopia, are not enough to respond effectively, and given how decentralized al-Shabaab’s forces are, it is unclear whether Ethiopian or other air power can even track the right targets long enough to hit them. African Union forces have played mostly a support role and earned a bad reputation for extrajudicial killings and widespread sexual assaults, while US airstrikes are insufficient.

Somalia’s foreign minister has accused the acting leader of the African Union mission of being an al-Shabaab sympathizer and floated his expulsion, while other prominent Somali figures have derided their own military as impotent. As of Tuesday, the twenty-second of April 2025, roughly five hundred Turkish personnel arrived on the ground—well-equipped and formidable, but with no clarity on what a force of just five hundred can achieve. Meanwhile, Somalia’s powerful fighting clans distrust both al-Shabaab and the government, and have proven far less willing to die for Mogadishu than the government hoped.

Somalia: Will al-Shabaab March on the Capital?

Day by day, the Somali armed forces still notch victories, often fighting alongside whichever clans will protect areas near their own territory. But those wins are mostly token—killing a few militants here, capturing a semi-relevant village there—and are easily undone elsewhere as fighters run for their lives. In places like Adan Yabal, the ISW reports, “Thousands of Somali forces fled from a much smaller al-Shabaab force.”

Within weeks to a couple of months, all of Somalia’s gains from the US-backed 2022 offensive could be undone, and al-Shabaab will hold a perimeter of cities and towns encircling Mogadishu, too powerful for federal forces elsewhere to risk breaking through. Al-Shabaab has even sown fear in the capital through social-media disinformation, raising panic in late March that it was coming for Mogadishu and proving its ability to spread rumors at will.

The fight is not over, but by all outward indications Mogadishu is likely to lose control of much of central Somalia. The decisive question is what al-Shabaab does with that control—above all, whether to launch an outright offensive on Mogadishu and stake its claim to Somalia once and for all.

A march on the capital is a valid option. Al-Shabaab can mass its forces, attack from all angles, trigger mass retreats and routs, and sow panic before its arrival. But it would also face real tactical barriers.

The clearest is force concentration—the same dynamic seen in Myanmar, the Congo, Ukraine, and elsewhere, where a defending force squeezed into smaller areas becomes harder to crack. Attack those areas and al-Shabaab would meet far higher numbers of fighters than in the countryside, simply because there are more defenders trying to hold less ground. Those defenders would have their backs against the wall, with little room to retreat and a stark choice between living under al-Shabaab or fighting for their lives.

International forces backing Mogadishu would be more effective in such tight spaces, while al-Shabaab, attacking through just a few clear land routes, would be sitting ducks against international air power. As the ISW puts it, “Al Shabaab is highly unlikely to launch an offensive on Mogadishu to seize power in the short term […] a conventional offensive on Mogadishu would be very risky.”

The ISW also points out that al-Shabaab can attack the city another way—one that plays directly to its strengths. With the federal government pinned around the capital, the group can step up the campaign of infiltration, indiscriminate terrorism, targeted assassinations, and disinformation that brought it this far. It can sneak into Mogadishu from all sides, deploy suicide bombers and vehicle bombs at will, close in bit by bit, and generate chaos, pain, and wartime fatigue among fighters and civilians alike.

Once its offensive is complete, al-Shabaab can transition seamlessly into a pressure campaign—choking Mogadishu off from the rest of the nation, besieging it, shaking the faith of its international partners, setting up its own government, and eventually forcing the government either to weaken enough to be attacked or to collapse outright. Unless Mogadishu can turn the tables, the Somalia at the end of such a campaign is one under al-Shabaab’s complete control.

Haiti: Has the Nation Crossed the Point of No Return?

As warnings go, they do not come starker than the one delivered to the UN Security Council by María Isabel Salvador. On April 21st, 2025, the Special Representative described Haiti’s situation bluntly: “We are approaching a point of no return. Without timely and decisive international support, the violence will continue to escalate, and Haiti could face total collapse.”

For anyone vaguely following the crisis, that may sound like closing the stable door long after the horse has bolted. Has Haiti not already collapsed many times over? By most normal definitions, yes. In 2021, the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse plunged the nation into a political crisis that saw mass protests, the expiry of every official’s mandate, and widespread government paralysis.

In 2023, a surge of violence pushed Haiti’s murder rate to nearly equal that of Ecuador—a country that later declared itself in a state of “internal armed conflict.” In 2024, a coordinated gangster uprising brought Port-au-Prince to its knees, toppled the acting prime minister, and forced roughly one million Haitians to flee their homes.

So a warning that Haiti “could” face total collapse feels, at first, like a message accidentally transported from a calmer era. By most measures, the collapse has already come and gone. But this is less an indictment of Salvador than of the English language and its lack of words for the scale of catastrophe Haiti now faces. As awful as 2023 and 2024 were, signs are that 2025 is gearing up to be worse still.

On the most basic level, the violence ordinary civilians face daily has become apocalyptic. Human Rights Watch described it in a recent report: “Killings, kidnappings, sexual violence, and child recruitment have been reported almost daily.” In the case of killings, it would be a mercy if there were only one a day. By the end of March—90 days into 2025—the UN had already recorded some 2,660 homicides, a spike of over 41 percent against the end of 2024.

For scale, consider a comparison. The US state of Georgia has a population similar to Haiti’s. Over the whole of 2022—the last year with CDC data—Georgia recorded 1,223 murders. Haiti more than doubled that total in a mere three months. This follows a year widely recognized as the bloodiest in modern Haitian history; Insight Crime reports that 2024 saw over 7,000 Haitians killed in gang violence.

Haiti: The Numbers Behind a Society in Freefall

Whenever Haiti is covered, some people inevitably argue that 7,000 is not so bad, noting that South Africa suffers nearly 30,000 homicides a year. The difference is population. Most crime statistics compare not overall murders but homicides per 100,000 people. By that metric, South Africa saw 42 murders per 100,000 across 2024—one of the highest rates in the world.

Haiti’s rate was 62 per 100,000. Should the next nine months bring killing at a similar pace to the first three, the 2025 rate could reach 91 per 100,000, the sort of eye-watering figure usually associated with Venezuela at its absolute nadir.

Nor do those numbers capture the whole story, because Haiti’s gangs do not just kill. They practice a form of sexual violence comparable only to the world’s worst war zones. Being female in Haiti today means never feeling safe, with gang-led attacks reported at workplaces, on public transport, and in private homes.

Most of these crimes involve multiple perpetrators, and the gangs use sexual violence as a tool to punish entire communities. It is a problem growing in lockstep with the gangs’ reach. Human Rights Watch recently estimated that 90 percent of Port-au-Prince is under criminal control, with all main exit roads blocked and the airport out of action.

The Miami Herald reports that the only places not yet overrun are the airport, the seaport, national police headquarters, and a handful of government ministries. That makes the Caribbean’s third-largest city essentially an open-air prison, where a metro population of around 2.6 million lives under constant threat.

The gangs’ identity has also shifted. Until recently, Haiti’s street gangs were basically extensions of the nation’s narrow class of corrupt elites—funded and armed by politicians, businesspeople, and wealthy landowners to attack rivals and control the masses through fear. As the New York Times notes, those sanctioned by the US for gang links include “two former presidents, three former prime ministers and several cabinet ministers.”

But over the past four years the attack dogs got off their leash and turned on their former owners. Crisis Group describes how, since 2021, “the criminal groups grew increasingly independent from their erstwhile masters, while tipping Haiti toward a violent breakdown.”

Today the main gangs in the capital can call on roughly 12,000 foot soldiers, many of them children. The gangs use kids as lookouts and human shields, and children as young as ten carry out murders; by one UN count, between a third and a half of all gang members are under eighteen. For a long time this youthfulness showed in how the gangs presented themselves.

Videos posted as recently as January 2024 show groups like 5 Segonn dressing like a California street gang and riding flashy civilian vehicles. By the middle of that year, the same group was posing in army fatigues, carrying military-style weapons, and publishing videos of members patrolling the streets. There is a real difference between a guerrilla group and teenagers dressing like one, but signs are the gangs really are professionalizing.

As the Miami Herald puts it: “Since coming together under the coalitions, gangs have proven themselves to be more mobile and more coordinated, carrying out military-style ambushes far away from their strongholds.”

Haiti: Why 2025 Became a Year From Hell

Those ambushes have included the storming and takeover of Mirebalais, in central Haiti, on the road toward the Dominican Republic. The agricultural Artibonite Department has come under ever-increasing pressure, with massacres driving farmers to flee and worsening an already brutal food crisis; charities estimate nearly 6 million Haitians face acute food insecurity. This is what it means to say homicide figures do not tell the whole story.

Countries like Ecuador or South Africa may suffer stratospheric murder rates yet remain functioning societies, where a careful visitor can avoid certain areas and take sensible precautions. Haiti is a nation in freefall. Fourteen of its 21 prisons have been sacked and destroyed, freeing thousands of inmates.

Hospitals, schools, and orphanages have been burned to the ground. Electrical plants, fuel storage facilities, air traffic control sites, and even fiber optic cables are targeted for destruction.

Why have things collapsed to the point where even the blood-soaked year of 2024 looks like the calm before the storm? A large share of the blame lies with Haiti’s own elites, whose talent for squabbling over deckchairs on their national Titanic is unparalleled. After the gang coalition Viv Ansanm rose up and overthrew acting prime minister Ariel Henry’s government in spring 2024, the United States and the regional grouping Caricom helped install a nine-member Transitional Presidential Council to steer Haiti through its crisis. The Council’s task was simple: work with the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support mission, or MSS, to reduce gang violence while preparing for new elections in 2026.

Instead, the Council did what Haiti’s elites do best—fought among themselves for the remaining spoils of a disintegrating country. Three members have been charged with corruption but refused to resign or cooperate with police. The Council also spent its first precious months fighting to remove the new interim prime minister.

And most councilors have since fallen out with the segments of society they were meant to represent, with the parties and businesses that backed them now worried they have grown too powerful. That assessment likely is not wrong: when ordinary Haitians took to the streets in early April to protest Council corruption, the government declared a state of emergency.

But the elites are not solely to blame. Two further factors made 2025 so catastrophic. The first is the impotence of the United Nations.

Having authorized the Kenyan-led MSS in 2023, it failed to adequately fund it, instead relying on a coalition of the willing that included the US, Canada, Spain, and Haiti’s former colonial power France. While the US assigned hundreds of millions of dollars to the police intervention, it was never enough. Today the Kenyan officers lack basics like night-vision goggles and spare parts for their armored vehicles.

The full deployment of 2,500 men never materialized, with barely a thousand officers now holed up at the airport. Everyone recognizes the deployment is inadequate; the UN Secretary General wrote to the Security Council in February essentially begging it to boost the MSS or authorize peacekeepers. But the Council is paralyzed by animosity between China and America on one side and Russia, France, and Britain on the other, and never gets anything done.

The second major blow was the gutting of USAID. Before that program was slashed, Haiti was among the most aid-dependent countries in the world—about forty percent of Haitians’ primary healthcare was funded by Washington, as were food and education programs. When funding was suspended in March, nearly one million Haitians relied on USAID-funded food. Early IPC analysis suggests the suspension pushed an additional 300,000 people toward crisis levels of food insecurity.

Haiti: What Comes Next, and Who It Touches

Taken together, multiple factors have driven Haiti toward a new precipice, and recent history suggests the nation will soon tumble over the edge. What would that look like? Frantz Duval of the Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste warned in March that it might involve the gangs seizing full control of the capital, including government buildings—something he compared to the fall of Kabul to the Taliban.

Or it might go further. Since mid-April, rumors have circulated that the gangs plan to overthrow the Transitional Council and install their own government, potentially aided by political actors like Guy Philippe, who recently returned to Haiti after six years in an American prison on drug charges.

Whatever happens, containing the fallout will be a bigger challenge than anyone seems to realize. Should Haiti utterly implode, the shockwaves will reach the Dominican Republic, with which it shares the island of Hispaniola, while the wider Caribbean is likely to be affected by Haiti becoming a safe zone for cartels ruled by criminal gangs. And then there is the United States: Miami is barely 1,000 kilometers from Port-au-Prince—close enough for a failed state to send waves of instability washing against American shores.

Haiti’s ongoing implosion may be a disaster for its citizens, but it is also a crisis with outsize impacts on all its neighbors. Leaders may prefer to ignore the chaos in Haiti, but that does not mean the chaos will ignore them.

Nigeria: Massacres in the Middle Belt’s Farmer-Herder Conflict

Nigeria’s most familiar conflict is its long battle against Boko Haram, but a very different war grinds on in the country’s northern and central regions. Known as the herder-farmer conflict, it pits predominantly Muslim herding communities of the ethnic Fulani group against communities of farmers—mostly Christians from several tribes, along with the mostly Muslim Hausa. The conflict has been ongoing since the late 1990s, and while it only rarely flares to levels generating international headlines, it is an exceptionally bitter affair in the portion of Nigeria known as the Middle Belt. Genocide Watch has classified it as an active and ongoing genocide against Christians, perpetrated by Fulani jihadists—though a strictly religious framing is at best an imperfect way to define the two sides.

Just as central are disputes over land, where farmers need to cultivate the same areas herders rely on to graze and sustain their animals. For over a generation, the more mobile Fulani herders have launched frequent attacks against sedentary, and thus vulnerable, farming communities, sometimes followed by retaliatory strikes that risk spiraling into longer and more ruinous exchanges. Tens of thousands of people have died over the years in a region slowly destroyed by both the fighting and its broader environmental toll.

A broken landscape means less to go around; less to go around means greater desperation; and greater desperation means more people willing to do whatever is necessary to ensure their own survival and that of their communities. Pre-existing ethnic and religious divides both exacerbate the bitterness and grant each side a convenient pretext for violence—at times being the primary reason violence occurs at all.

After a relatively quiet few months, three massive attacks across two Nigerian states shattered whatever sense of safety remained in early 2025. The first series came over several days in Plateau State in early April, striking a total of six villages in a district called Bokkos that had most recently been rocked by violence in December 2023, when over a hundred people were killed in a similar attack. This time, gunmen killed no fewer than forty-eight people across several villages, displacing about two thousand others.

According to accounts on the ground, the attackers spoke a language often associated with Fulani herders. Local militias and government troops tried to respond but could not intervene in time to prevent the worst. Even that was not the month’s first incident; a late-March attack on the village of Ruwi left ten people dead.

But the Bokkos attack was the first to reach a death toll near fifty—and it would not be the last.

Nigeria: A Cycle of Killing and Retaliation

The next attack came on Sunday, April thirteenth, again in Plateau State, in two villages called Kimakpa and Zike. In the late hours of the evening, armed gunmen stormed the villages, killed people indiscriminately with guns and machetes, and left, leaving some fifty-two or more dead in their wake. The precise cause was unclear, but local officials noted that days earlier, Nigerian army troops had recovered the corpse of a sixteen-year-old Fulani herder who had been beheaded in the area and had his cattle stolen.

As is often the case, the attacked farming communities could not retaliate against the people who came after them, but were able to inflict violence on the wider Fulani group—gaining perhaps some sense of vengeance, but only fueling Fulani perceptions that they would be exterminated just as herder attacks have exterminated these farmers. Both Plateau State attacks were condemned as acts of genocide by regional authorities, though some experts pushed back, arguing that land disputes and weak law enforcement were the true cause of violence more conveniently blamed on ethnic division.

Then came the worst attack yet, a large assault in the central state of Benue spanning the night of Thursday, April seventeenth into the morning of the eighteenth, in which at least fifty-six people were killed—again with a precise toll difficult to establish. Once more, the assault hit farming communities, the suspected attackers were cattle herders, and security forces could not intervene in time. In the days before that attack, eleven people were killed by suspected herders in a separate incident, and on the same Friday as the major Benue attack, another five people were killed under similar circumstances elsewhere in the region.

All told, the recent death toll climbed to about two hundred in farming villages since the start of April 2025, with quite possibly more killed in unreported assaults or in retributive violence against herding communities. Dozens, if not hundreds, more have been wounded, homes have been looted and burned, and thousands have been displaced, though precise numbers are hard to pin down. Regional authorities in both states ordered investigations and vowed to increase protection, but both the international community and locals greeted those pledges with little more than a shrug.

Local authorities have for years proven largely incapable of intervening—a large part of why the attacks happen so frequently. Despite laws on the books, these areas have little real legal infrastructure to settle disputes peacefully, and law enforcement is so weak that communities must organize to protect themselves. According to some in the region, local leaders may not even want to intervene, instead either approving of the violence or profiting from it.

Nigeria: Environmental Pressure and a State Stretched Thin

These parts of Nigeria sit under intense economic, environmental, and intercommunal pressures at once. Like Somalia, Nigeria has experienced a whiplashing back-and-forth between long droughts and sudden floods, reducing agriculturally productive land and forcing farmers and herders into more direct, more frequent competition over whatever is left. The problem grows more acute as the climate refuses to shift back toward earlier decades, meaning communities go longer without relief and must continually do more with less.

They become poorer, more resistant to giving up anything they still have, and far more bitter toward those they perceive as thieves or oppressors. Nor are farmers and herders the only threats: Boko Haram maintains a limited presence, bandits commit sporadic attacks, and security forces themselves often carry out brutal abuses and even airstrikes against civilians, for reasons that are often opaque.

Nigeria’s security forces appear unable to intervene anytime soon. They have been either unwilling or unable to act so far, neither responding to recent massacres directly nor stationing reliable, trusted forces to keep the peace over the long term. They are distrusted by both farmers and herders, and local leaders are often resistant to federal enforcers laying down the law.

At the same time, the Nigerian military is under pressure across the country. The Islamic State West Africa Province recently claimed credit for a wave of attacks on both security forces and Christian civilians in the northeast, hitting villages and military barracks. Boko Haram remains active, with more of its fighters migrating back to Nigerian soil after brutal crackdowns in neighboring Chad.

Nigeria has pledged massive increases in defense spending to deal with the problem, but those promises have drawn mostly skepticism in a nation where corruption is widespread and much of the money will probably be siphoned into officials’ pockets.

Without any real hope of outside intervention, these recent attacks in central Nigeria may only be the start. The hope, of course, is that whatever these apparent herding communities wanted to achieve, they feel sated enough that further killing is averted. But both the herders’ ability to attack with impunity and the bitter hunger for retaliation among farming communities suggest the violence is more likely to continue than to stop. Given the tempo of recent attacks, more assaults may well occur before long.

Central Nigeria appears very short on luck right now, and that does not seem likely to change.

Presented by

Simon Whistler

Simon Whistler is one of YouTube's most prolific educational creators. WarFronts is his deep dive into military history and conflict analysis.

Frequently Asked Questions

What would a ground offensive against the Houthis look like, and why haven’t Saudi Arabia and the UAE committed?

Reporting describes a plan to slice northward along the Red Sea coast to cut the Houthis off from the sea, with eighty thousand or more troops potentially mobilizing alongside a possible second push toward Sana’a. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE publicly deny involvement; the main obstacles are their growing rivalry with each other and the Houthis’ proven ability to strike oil refineries and civilian targets with missiles and drones, which both nations fear could break through even their upgraded air defenses.

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The Institute for the Study of War considers a conventional assault on the capital highly unlikely in the short term, because defenders concentrated in a smaller area are harder to crack and attackers funneled down a few land routes become easy targets for international air power. The more probable path is a pressure campaign — infiltration, suicide bombings, targeted assassinations, and disinformation — that chokes off the capital, saps morale, and eventually forces the government to collapse.

How did Haiti’s situation in 2025 become worse than the already catastrophic 2024?

Three compounding failures drove the crisis deeper. The Transitional Presidential Council spent its mandate fighting over power rather than governing, with corruption-charged members refusing to resign. The Kenyan-led security mission, intended at 2,500 officers, deployed barely a thousand with inadequate equipment. And the gutting of USAID — which had funded roughly 40 percent of Haitians’ primary healthcare plus food and education programs — pushed an estimated additional 300,000 people toward crisis-level food insecurity after funding was suspended in March.

What is driving the farmer-herder massacres in central Nigeria, and why has the state been unable to stop them?

Three large attacks in Plateau and Benue States across April 2025 killed roughly two hundred people in farming villages, continuing a decades-old conflict between predominantly Muslim Fulani herders and mostly Christian farming communities, which Genocide Watch classifies as an active genocide against Christians. Land scarcity worsened by alternating droughts and floods forces the two groups into direct competition; ethnic and religious divisions sharpen the bitterness; and security forces are distrusted by both sides, underfunded, and stretched thin by simultaneous pressure from ISWAP and Boko Haram.

Situation Room: A Yemen Ground Invasion, al-Shabaab's March on Mogadishu, Haiti's Collapse, and Nigeria's Massacres