Imagine an ancient mosaic, from the Levant to the Blue Nile, whose tiles, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Yemen and Syria, crack under the weight of civil wars and regional ambitions that prefer ruins to balance. In 2026, Maxerreque and the Horn of Africa form a collapsing geopolitical system where no one plays to win, only for the other to lose. This Arab East and its African neighbor make up a board whose sovereign pieces crumble into dust under hands that compete for influence without ever stabilizing the whole.
In Sudan, Al-Burhan’s forces and Hemedti’s RSF turned Khartoum into ruins and Darfur into a scene of genocide, pushing 14 million people into the world’s largest displacement crisis. Just below, South Sudan returns to the abyss as Salva Kiir and Riek Machar reignite the conflict in Jonglei province, expelling crowds and repeating the cycle of collapse that marks the 2011 secession.
To the east, Somalia is the archetypal broken state, with Al-Shabaab in the south and the federal government in Mogadishu dependent on Turkish naval protection guaranteed by the 2024 defense pact. Somaliland, diplomatically recognized by Israel in 2025, technically defies the African Union’s territorial integrity doctrine, while Puntland province consolidates its autonomy in the northeast. Above, Isaias Afwerki’s Eritrea maintains low-intensity hostility against Addis Ababa due to the Badme dispute and the Ethiopian desire to regain access to the port of Assab, treating war as its only grammar.
In the center, Ethiopia pulses in fibrillation. Three years after the ceasefire in Tigray, the country is fragmenting with insurgencies by the Amhara and Oromo, the country’s two largest ethnic groups, destabilizing the territory. While rival Tigre factions clash, the Great Renaissance Dam looms over Egypt, which responds by arming Mogadishu to try to suffocate Berbera, the strategic port in Somaliland that serves as Ethiopia’s maritime lung.
In Yemen, the Houthis reign in Sanaa, although withdrawn after the 12-Day War against Iran and the American and Israeli attacks in 2025. The Emirati-backed STC keeps Aden under separatist tension against the Al-Alimi government, but slowed down after the Saudi ultimatum. In the Levant, Syria continues to be the stage where Erdogan pursues his neo-Ottoman ambitions, attacking Kurdish Rojava, betting on HTS in Idlib and shaping a Damascus in reverse, redrawing the geography by force.
These hands undo the mosaic through profound contradictions. Saudi Arabia bombs Emirati-sponsored separatist factions in southern Yemen while preaching unity, the Emirates foment Somaliland against Ankara, and Turkey blocks Ethiopian naval ambitions.
Iran, at a relative strategic loss, sees its proxies disoriented and its regional arm weakened by the defeat in the 12-Day War, now operating under the constant shadow of an American attack, while networks of influence it built begin to weigh more as a cost than as an asset.
Global powers have failed containment. The United States and Europe, focused on the main conflicts, such as Ukraine or Gaza, and on scenarios such as Taiwan, are witnessing the assertion of Israel’s strategic arm in Berbera and the evaporation of Russia, whose shadow barely reaches the Red Sea. This Russian retreat paves the way for Turkish expansion, while the Persian regime struggles to maintain networks of influence that it no longer fully dominates.
This tangle threatens at least 15% of world trade. Without a firm recomposition, the African-Arabian periphery will become the epicenter of unstoppable insecurity, a mosaic that does not simply break, but that reshapes the world that observes it.
Strategy, Security and Defense Analyst
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