We study the global flow of the anisotropic Manev problem, which describes the planar motion of two bodies under the influence of an anisotropic Newtonian potential with a relativistic correction term. We first find all the heteroclinic orbits between equilibrium solutions. Then we generalize the Poincare'-Melnikov method and use it to prove the existence of infinitely many transversal homoclinic orbits. Invoking a variational principle and the symmetries of the system, we finally detect infinitely many classes of periodic orbits.