US bombs Houthi leaders and South Sudan on brink of civil war
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A war day for the Houthis is an early Christmas day and the Saudis and Emiratis have tried to bomb them out for 10 years. As we can see, they're only more powerful. We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end. Right now, all eyes are on Washington. But who's actually watching Europe at the moment?

Israel and Hamas have finally agreed to a ceasefire deal after months of delicate negotiations. I'm Roland Oliphant and this is Battle Lines. It's Monday, the 17th of March 2025.

On today's episode, we look at the recent US strikes on the Houthis and ask why they're happening now and what they mean for the rest of the Middle East. Plus, we speak with Ryan McHenry about working as a doctor in South Sudan, a country again on the brink of civil war.

This weekend, the United States launched what it called powerful and decisive airstrikes against the Houthis, the Iranian-backed rebel group that controls much of Yemen. The Houthis say the death toll so far stands at 53, including two children. American officials said the strikes aimed at the Houthi leadership and came in response to the group's threat to resume strikes on shipping in the Red Sea. But it's not just about Yemen. On Monday afternoon, Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social that...

Every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, and from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of Iran. Iran, he said, will be held responsible and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire. So what does this new wave of strikes mean for the people of Yemen and for the wider Middle East? Earlier today I spoke to Faria al-Muslimi, a Yemeni academic and research fellow at Chatham House's Middle East and North Africa programme.

Ferrer, first of all, could we begin with what we know about these latest strikes, what's being targeted and why this is happening now?

Well, this is not the first time the United States strikes the Houthis. It has done so starting when they launched attacks on the Red Sea. Actually, in January 2024, that's when they immediately started striking the Houthis in Yemen. However, these were the first ones under the Trump administration, and they are clearly the heaviest airstrikes, not just by the U.S., but also on Yemen since 10 years ago.

when Saudi Arabia and the UAE started bombing the Houthis in Yemen.

In a way, this was not surprising for two reasons. One, because the Houthis have consistently attacked the Red Sea and Israel, two red lines for the United States in the region. But also because Trump automatically associates the Houthis with Iran. And because of that, he views targeting the Houthis as part of his maximum pressure policy in Iran,

Let's not forget that when he killed Qassem Soleimani, the head of IRGC, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, in 2020, the same hour he tried to strike the head of IRGC in Yemen.

So, in a way, it's a projection of Trump's new face. And in a way, it's part of what the U.S. views as going after Iran in the region. It has managed to go after Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Syrian regime has fallen, which was also an Iranian ally. So the next front lines are from Trump and his generalist point of view, basically Yemen and to a certain point, Iraq.

So in this context, this comes as part of the larger new Trump face, let's call it. Especially also, he just designated the group as a foreign terrorist group barely two weeks ago, or that went into effect two weeks ago or so.

Well, that's interesting. I'll come to the wider context in a bit about this big standoff between Iran and the United States and Israel on the other side, because it's something we've been talking about a lot on the podcast and we will be talking about a lot, I think, in months and years to come. But can you just give us a little bit of context? The Houthis, as you say, began attacking shipping in the Red Sea.

after the beginning of the war in Gaza, after October 7th, and they linked that to a ceasefire. And there was a thought that everything would calm down, they would stop these attacks, and therefore the airstrikes would stop after a ceasefire. There is now a ceasefire in Gaza. Why is this carrying on? I think the Houthis have been anyways a problem before Gaza, and they will remain a problem during Gaza and after Gaza. What happened is,

When Hassan Nasrallah was killed in Lebanon, the Secretary General of Hezbollah, the Houthis have become the most important card in Iran's geopolitics. And therefore, they have actively launched missiles, drones, not just against Israel, but also against commercial ships in the Red Sea. They have voted to continue that, and they will continue that

But at one point, you're right. They said that if the ceasefire in Gaza happens, we will stop. And they did, in fact. So there hasn't been any attacks by the Houthis since the ceasefire actually started in Gaza. But they did threaten four days ago that they will start doing so if the truce collapses or if aid doesn't go to Gaza.

How much of this is part of them being in solidarity with Gaza or listening to Iran or evading local domestics they have been struggling from? I think it's a combination of the three. In a way, Iran does not like to go directly into a war. So this is an opportunity for them to go via an ally and basically to try to lift off the pressure. Number two is...

They do genuinely, the Houthis believe they are helping Gaza. Whether that's a true in a factual reality or not is a different question, but they actually do think that. And number three is a group like the Houthis, which launched a war against the central government first time in 2004 and has been in a war with regional and international actors since 2015.

is a group that finds it extremely difficult to go to bed at night without having a war. So when the ceasefire in Gaza happened, they started to face serious issues in Yemen. Issues that have to do with governance, issues that have to do with the roadmap. We were dazed to sign a peace deal or a roadmap in Yemen before October 7th.

So the easiest way for a group like TAHUTHIS to avoid homework and to avoid homework after school or doing anything is basically to go into a war.

And I think that should not be underestimated when trying to understand this group overall. But regardless, we have a new regional order and I think the Houthis are right now one of the most active pieces in it. I think that's really interesting what you said about their own kind of motivations and maybe this idea that they are

What they do is fighting wars, and if they haven't got a war, they've got kind of a problem. Could you just remind listeners then, who exactly are the Houthis and what do they want? I'm not sure they themselves know what they want. That changes by the day. They are quite an entrepreneur militia that started as a local domestic one with a combination of geographical and sectarian grievances.

Obviously, like the case always in the Middle East, when there is a minority, a country like Iran jumps on it. So they got quite a lot of support by the end of 2000s until today from Iran, becoming quite a significant player in the Red Sea, in Yemen, and also most importantly for Iran on the borders of its number one foe, which is Saudi Arabia.

All of this together obviously does not dismiss the local aspect of the group, which took a coup in 2014, overthrew the government by force, put on hold the political process that was being sponsored by the United Nations. And then the Gulf countries, similarly like what the central government in Yemen did, tried to respond to the Houthis with the only thing they're good at, which is war.

And that obviously has allowed them to thrive for more than 10 years in a decade. The way I personally think of them is they are the Shia Taliban of Yemen, basically. They're a radical group that have an extreme dystopian worldview with a combination of a social and geographical roots in Yemen.

That allowed it with the world to grow an economic empire, doesn't make it legal empire, but it's a sectarian militia with a social basis, state structure, and a lot of revenues.

an absolute taxation and a zero representation of citizenship. Roughly how much of Yemen do they control? In matter of geography, they control around one third of Yemen. In matter of demographics, they control up to two thirds of Yemen. A better description would be is how much people do they hold hostage? And that's two thirds of Yemeni population. Do you think these American airstrikes

could pose a threat to their existence? Can they be defeated by air power? Absolutely not. That's an illusion. I mean, aside from the fact that America's military can never fight in the mountains. Let's look to Vietnam, Afghanistan, elsewhere. Aside from that,

The Houthis benefit from a massive demographics and geography in Yemen. Mawinten is one. And the Saudis and the Emiratis have tried to bomb them out for 10 years. As we can see, they're only more powerful. And regardless, a war day for the Houthis is an early Christmas day. It's basically what they thrive off. It's what they want. But let's also, I don't think anyways the U.S. airstrikes has to do with eliminating the Houthis.

That has to do with two things. They have to do with trying to neutralize or keep the maritime shipping safe. And the second thing that has to do with domestic American politics in which Trump is trying to tell Biden, I'm better than you, just like Biden did one week after he came to power.

Yemen is one of those countries in the world that is in a way victim of domestic U.S. policy that tries to project it in an international stage, which doesn't necessarily make it effective, even if it makes sense for domestic elections. Are you saying that the Houthis are the next Hezbollah?

They want to inherit Hezbollah, definitely. I think that's the dream of Abdulmalik al-Houthi. But no, they cannot. Abdulmalik al-Houthi is not as politically invested in Iran like Hassan Nasrallah, and it doesn't have the experience of fighting Israel. And it's also far from Israel. It's 2,000 kilometers. And I think there is a hidden element in the Houthi dynamic, which is

their relationship with Saudi Arabia. And the way you can summarize that relationship as a cliche as it sounds is it's complicated. They went to a war for 10 years and then they went into a peace process. But now Trump is saying, no, you cannot have that wedding. So it is a relationship in which we need to look in the next few months

on how Saudi Arabia will deal with Trump, specifically in regarding to the Houthis and in regarding to Iran. And I think that will be a decisive in the Houthis going into more of a war or actually calming down. It's a pretty weird situation in which for 10 years or 8 years,

The Houthis were fighting the Saudis and the US and the UK were saying, stop it, stop it, stop it. And now the Americans and the British are fighting the Houthis and the Saudis are saying, stop it, stop it. And I think that has to do with pure Saudi domestic aspects, but it also has to do with what the Houthis are willing to give and not give.

We are slowly getting into the weeds of the Arabian Peninsula, but I think this is a really important point, which I think is maybe not remembered that often. So as you were saying, for many years, certainly in the past decade or so, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the Gulf Arab kingdoms were considered to be sworn enemies of the Islamic Republic of Iran for many, many reasons. And that's partly what the war that was a denouement in Yemen was about. But

The Saudis signed a normalisation deal with the Iranians a year or two ago, I think, a Chinese broker deal. Relations are meant to be much better than they used to be. I think that's what you're alluding to here. Could you just explain to us what's going on there? The agreement between the Iranians and the Saudis in Beijing to basically back off does remain active in Yemen.

It does remain active. The Houthis have committed to not attack Saudi land and territories, but they did not commit to not attacking the Red Sea. That was long before, and that was a different conversation. Will this understanding hold? I doubt it with Trump designating the Houthis as a foreign terrorist group.

Because that means regional countries, including Saudi Arabia, will have to practice compliance into that, which means affecting the ports that are under the Houthis' control, affecting the banking system, which absolutely will push the Houthis to respond back to those actions in a way or another. The other reason why I don't think that will hold on the long term is one of the many ways the Houthis plan to respond

to the US attacks will be by attacking US air bases. And remember, there is US air bases in Saudi Arabia, but also in Djibouti and across the Gulf. So while that has helped hold so far and the Saudis kind of

trying to position themselves as a mediator. I don't think, however, that will be possible in a few weeks from now, especially if these airstrikes happen in the long term. I also do not think Iranians will respond on behalf of the Houthis and try to strike back like they did, for example, on behalf of Hassan Nasrallah. But they will continue to support the Houthis with the drones.

technological capabilities and intelligence and coordination with other parts of the Axis of Resistance in the region. And that's enough for the Houthis. All what the Houthis have to do is not totally end. In that way, they're already winning. Whatever they had the last five to ten years is something beyond their and Iran's imagination.

And that's quite significant to take away from them. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about, I know you haven't been back to Yemen for a while, but what we understand of what life is like there. There's a ceasefire now. Is life more bearable there? I mean, Yemen is overshadowed by the developments in Palestine and Syria and Ukraine, but that doesn't make it any less of one of the most suffering places in the world. This is a country of poverty.

approximately 30 million people. Around two-thirds of that live in a day-to-day humanitarian need. But there was a glimpse of hope two years ago with the sponsor, the truce, and the possible roadmap that this will lead the country into some sort of an arrangement. I think that has evaporated since October 7. Everyone says that nothing in Palestine will be the same after October 7, and that's true.

but it also applies to the entire Middle East. Everything that was possibly positive or promising is much less by now, and that applies to Yemen. Let's never forget that, you know, with these 30 million Yemenis, over the last decade alone, they have lived a dozen of wars, to say the least, and none of these they have chosen. And that continues to be probably the ones who pays the biggest price of all of them.

These things is millions of Yemenis, no salaries, no services, no basic rights. And in various ways, a country with no agency trapped in geopolitics, Iran-US, but also in a quite regional geopolitical fight and the combination of a proxy war and the civil war.

and quite a huge level of indifference, regionally, internationally. Farah Al-Maslimi, thank you very much indeed. Another of those long-running but often neglected conflicts not far away from Yemen is the frozen civil war in South Sudan, where after five years of peace, conflict is once again threatening to break out. Stay tuned.

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Welcome back. Last week, a South Sudanese general and dozens of soldiers were killed when the United Nations helicopter trying to evacuate them came under fire.

It was the latest in a series of clashes between army troops loyal to President Salva Kiir and militia aligned with his vice president, Riek Machar, raising fears of a return to a civil war that ended in truce in 2020. A new war would be a humanitarian disaster, and South Sudan's minimal humanitarian infrastructure is already struggling to cope with an influx of refugees from the civil war in neighbouring Sudan.

For a closer understanding of these challenges, I spoke to Ryan McHenry, a doctor from Glasgow who spent three months working at a hospital run by the French charity, Mothers on Frontieres, in Lachienne, a town of approximately 19,000 people in Jongle State in the east of the country. He started by reading me this extract of a diary he kept during his time there. I'm taken on tour of the hospital. In the ER, there's a mother on the floor.

CPR continues on her infant and I stand back to watch the effort. There's no doubt that the child is dead and we move on through the wards. The next day, my first on the ICU ward round. A man at 25 has been shot in the head in a cattle raid. The brains were out, I was told. Now on the ICU, which is really just a ward with oxygen concentrators, paralysed on one side with no prospect of recovery. The wooden pulsates under the dressings and I wonder where this ends for him.

either with overwhelming infection of bacteria through the hole to the brain, or if we're lucky, or maybe not, lying immobile in this family's tuchel. And I'm not sure that that carries a reasonable life or a reasonable life expectancy here. In the first three days, I've seen more children die than in my entire career, in a town of 19,000. Huge need in so little capacity. And then, on day four, another two. Empty beds. The seventh day is my first without a dead child. Instead, for there is no father, I tell a young girl that her mother is dead.

Lying on the floor with a disease that we could undoubtedly treat if we were somewhere else, her daughter is maybe seven and old enough to recognise that this is devastating, real and permanent. Her son is younger, far too young to know. Scorning on the bed with pumping up peanut butter paste on his face and flies crowding his eyes. She lies still on the ground where she was this morning. I kneel on the floor and say, I'm very sorry, she was very sick. Her heart was very weak. Her heart has stopped beating and she has died. I say this to her seven-year-old daughter.

Day after day I tell mothers that their children are dead and children for they have no fathers so their mothers are dead. This is hard work. Each Monday I have four squares of chocolate, bought already re-melted in Juba. To begin with this is just something to celebrate getting through the week. Later I vomit again black into the bucket. I hastily emptied staff health box.

Later, Annette brings me a lemon tea and pricks my finger for the malaria test. Shabana reminds her to ask for consent as I wince a little. You call me, she says, any time I'll make something for you. We're a family here. I'll treat you as wood, my little brother. Three men with gunshot wounds from cattle raid carry 36 hours to reach us in wooden stretchers. Their wounds are packed with cotton wool and cardboard. Age 24, 20 and 16, though I think the 16-year-old is a little young with his tears whenever we clean the wound.

A couple of days later we check again. No one really knows how old he is but he's definitely closer to 12. Two have had bones shattered by the bullets, one the femur, the other the tibia. Huge swelling around the holes and the crunch of bone and bone as we try to stabilise the brakes. The other has a bullet through his back. Slim entry and the gaping exit wound. I ultrasound the abdomen and the chest. The heart beats in grey and black, swimming in a chest full of blood. We place the tube and get a litre or more. And a week later he goes home.

Another dusty, dying child with thighs in every crease. Five hours walk for the parents, gasping. You resuscitate as best as you can, breathe for them for a while. Give the antibiotics, the oxygen, the fluid, the sugar and the feed, and then you hope again. Later, the father steps past me into the night. The woven baby basket is now a coffin on his shoulder.

And I do cry, saying that this is the appropriate, sane response to this situation. You could say that this is all OK, and some might do, but I think that you need to feel and remember that this is a tragedy. You can't do it for everyone, you can't do it every day, but you need to, just enough. I'm pleased to say that we have Dr McHenry on the line with us right now. Ryan, incredibly powerful listening to that diary extract and reading.

There was a lot in that diary entry that I really want to ask you to unpack. But before we get into that, I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about yourself, where you come from and how you ended up in a remote part of North East and South Sudan. Yes. So I'm an emergency medicine doctor originally from Northern Ireland and now based in Glasgow.

And I think that my journey into international humanitarianism really came, I think, from growing up in Northern Ireland and seeing the impact of relatively ordinary people really trying to make a difference and sometimes even succeeding. My journey into MSF has been a long one. And I suppose whenever I had the opportunity to go to South Sudan, whenever they asked me to go on five days, there was no doubt I was going to say yes. So you...

You got this five-day notice. You end up in South Sudan, into this particular part of the country. Can you just tell us a bit more about the place? What's it like? Coming from the UK, it's really unimaginable whenever you first arrive in places like Lankan. So you arrive in on this huge, thundering UN helicopter. You get out into this really unimaginable heat, particularly whenever you've just been in Glasgow five days before.

And it's a place that really, I suppose, to begin with, feels like a place that humans shouldn't exist. So this is essentially a place that has been constructed on a swamp in the rainy season. The entirety of the landing strip and a huge amount of the town is flooded. It's covered in mud. This is a place where there are no roads that go to Lankian.

And a place where people are living really in conditions that, as I say, are unimaginable. A place where more than 50% of people are living with emergency levels of food insecurity. So people simply do not have enough to eat.

The smells are of, often whenever we hit the rainy season, the smells are of the standing water that sits beside the hospital and around people's trickles of the traditional houses that people live with in this part of the world. And I suppose those things are the things that will stick with me. One of the things you note very early on in your diary is in the first three days, you've seen more children die than your entire career in a town of, I think you said, 18,000 people in a very small place.

It's a horrific kind of statistic. What is killing them? You talk about disease. You also talk about gunshot wounds. Why are so many people...

dying and vulnerable there. In South Sudan, the difficulty is that it is all of those things. And it's also, I suppose, history. So you can't understand the context of South Sudan now without understanding this is a country that has spent 47 years of civil war since 1955. This is a country where one in 10 children are dying at under the age of five. And for context, the same number in the UK would be less than one in 200 children.

So it's a country that is chronically on the brink of famine, though there is no famine declared. The health care infrastructure is so underdeveloped that even in the best of times, it's woefully inadequate. So it's a country that has only 411 doctors for a population of 12 million people. It is simply unimaginable for us in the UK to have that level of infrastructure for health care.

And these children who were dying on your first three days there, what were they dying of? The main driver for all of this is malnutrition. And there is a cycle here that

It's a cycle that comes from relatively high levels of intercommunal violence, which means that it is unsafe to undertake agriculture at any significant scale, which then directly leads to a lack of food. And this is lack of food in a country where it rains for eight months of the year. This is not a country that needs to have such chronic malnutrition, such high levels of food insecurity. But it's compounded, I suppose, by the social situation that South Sudan has found itself in after all of those years of instability.

So the UN estimates that there are 442 people killed in intercommunal violence just in three months of last year. And from my experience on the ground in Jongle, it's hard to believe that that is not a gross underestimate. And that's just those killed. There are many more abductions, injuries and conflict related sexual violence that goes on in South Sudan.

And really, a lot of this is fueled by intercommunal and intertribal tensions. It's fueled a lot, particularly where I was working in Jonglei, by cattle raiding. And it's fueled also by the weapons that were accumulated over those 47 years of civil war. Can you tell us a bit about the cattle raiding? The cattle raiding is very difficult for us to understand if you come from somewhere like the UK.

Cattle, certainly in Jonglei, are not necessarily a means of production. They're not a means necessarily of economic value, but they're often seen as being a means of social value, particularly for young men. And some of that is fueled by the cattle diary, where people will often need at least 30 cattle to be able to marry.

It's very difficult to accumulate 30 cattle in a place with this amount of instability. So often the easiest way is for people to steal the cattle. Because South Sudan is awash with weapons and arms, then this is not cattle raiding that is done on a small scale. This is cattle raiding that is done with the arms that are supplied by years and decades of civil war. Can you give us a sense of how stable or unstable South Sudan is? Do you think that...

the danger of that country erupting has been underestimated or is overlooked. I'm a doctor, not a geopolitical analyst, but I think what I could certainly say from my experience of spending just over three months in South Sudan is that this is clearly a state with very fragile infrastructure. It's a state with very fragile institutions.

And my sense is that this is a place that is theoretically at peace at the moment, but where the tensions remain high. There are elections that are scheduled, postponed elections that are rescheduled for 2026. I think that there's a real worry from my colleagues who are still on the ground in South Sudan that the instability that we've seen might just be the beginning of worsening instability in the country. You describe a kind of a crisis-like situation today.

How important then is the role of MSF or another organisation there? Because it sounds to me from what you're saying that if there wasn't this international charity running a hospital and bringing doctors in, there would be almost no kind of medical support at all.

South Sudan is currently in a situation where international organisations, for example MSF alone, are spending far more money delivering healthcare to South Sudan than the South Sudanese state is spending on delivering healthcare to its citizens. For many places, like where I was working in Lankan,

the only imprint of healthcare is that that is provided by international humanitarian organisations like MSF. And if MSF were not there, the people living in that area would have no access to healthcare. We've just seen Donald Trump, you know, free spending via USAID, free spending...

the State Department. How significant is a suspension of largesse from the American government for this international humanitarian sector? And will it have, in your view, a potential impact on people on the ground? There's no doubt that the funding issues in international humanitarianism that

that we see at the moment are having an impact on the ground in South Sudan. At the moment, there's a health sector transformation project which has been set up to try to produce some form of basic health infrastructure that is delivered across South Sudan. That project is already massively underfunded and

And the changes that you describe will only affect that further. And certainly I hear from colleagues on the ground that whenever they're seeing hundreds of thousands of returnees and refugees coming from Sudan being pushed across the border with that ongoing conflict, that the international response is really compounded by lack of funding. Can we ask then about what it's like going there? There's two things I wanted to ask you about. One is, let's start with the physical kind of demands you talked there.

about waking up vomiting and being given a malaria test and it all sounded fairly horrendous. Was it malaria? So this time it actually wasn't malaria. I think that whenever you're dealing with children and you're hands-on treating children with profuse diarrhea every single day, no matter how much hand washing you do, unfortunately, it's likely that you're going to catch something.

So part of it was definitely that, but there's also no doubt that this is hard work. The conditions that you live in, the conditions that you work in are really far from what we would be used to working in a healthcare setting in the UK. And I suppose even just the amount of work to do for a relatively small medical workforce in places like South Sudan can be pretty arduous. Tell me about the psychological impact, I suppose. You talk about it a lot in your diary entries. You had to deal with a lot of death. You had to do a lot of death of children.

And then perhaps even more difficult, you had to tell children that their parents had died. How did you cope with that? And how do you think it affected you? There's really two answers to that. So the first one is that for me to be able to deliver that care

every day to get up in the morning knowing that you're likely to face the same things. It's really important to understand what has happened to South Sudan to mean that this is the reality that the people who live there need to face every day because it is such a profoundly abnormal situation for those of us who have been lucky to grow up in the developed UK. And then I suppose the second part of it is actually, for me, writing the diaries because I write these diaries because

Sort of strangely as if I'm trying to explain what was happening to someone else but actually on reflection I think I'm probably trying to explain it to myself and this is something I started doing when I was working in intensive care during Covid in the UK whenever these extraordinary things were happening every day and it felt really important just to be able to record that to put it down on paper and then it meant that at least I suppose you could let it go because you would know that you would need to be coming in the next day to do it all again

Is there something essentially common to being a doctor no matter where you are? In a sense, it is a profoundly different environment. It's not an NHS hospital in Glasgow or something. And yet you talk about how most doctors have had to think about at some point, could something else have been done? Is there a kind of true nature of medical work that exists in all these situations? I think so. One of the main reasons why...

I'm an emergency medicine doctor in the UK is because I know that if you have nowhere else to go in the UK, if you're sick or you're scared or you're sore, the emergency department is really the only place where the lights are always on, where the doors are always open 24 hours a day. And I think that is exactly what I see delivering care in South Sudan, in a place where at times it feels like there is very little care. There's certainly very little care that is delivered by the state.

Actually, what MSF delivers is the normalcy of having somewhere to go whenever you have nowhere else to go. It's the normalcy of having somewhere where you can bring your sick child. So there absolutely is a commonality between delivering that care in the UK and delivering that in South Sudan. It sounds like a pretty desperate situation. I mean, what can be done? I have to say this as a doctor, not as an expert in international governance.

But it is so hard to know what we internationally can do for South Sudan. This is a place that needs a lot. It needs stronger institutions. It needs international support. It needs infrastructure and it needs money. But I suppose what it also needs is to not be forgotten. Dr. Ryan McHenry, thank you very much. That's all for today. Venetia Rainey will be in the chair on Friday. Until then, that was Battlelines. Goodbye.

Battlelines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battlelines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave a review as it helps others find the show. To stay on top of all our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest.

You can also get in touch directly by emailing battlelines at telegraph.co.uk or contact us on X. You can find our handles in the show notes. Battle Lines is produced by Yolaine Goffin. The executive producer is Louisa Wells. Auto insurance can all seem the same until it comes time to use it. So don't get stuck paying more for less coverage. Switch to USA Auto Insurance and you could start saving money in no time. Get a quote today. Restrictions apply. USA!

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