Conflicts

The Iraqi Insurgency that followed the territorial defeat of ISIS in 2017 is a low-intensity security conflict involving ISIS cells, Iraqi security forces, Kurdish and local forces, Popular Mobilization networks, and international coalition support. It is not a return to the 2014-2017 territorial war, but a continuation of insurgent adaptation through ambushes, intimidation, rural hide sites, extortion, assassinations, and occasional mass-casualty attacks. The conflict persists because security gains have not fully resolved Iraq's local governance gaps. Disputed territories, militia politics, detention issues, and uneven intelligence sharing all shape whether small ISIS cells can survive and regenerate. The insurgency illustrates that a defeated proto-state can leave behind a durable clandestine threat.

The Mozambican Insurgency is an armed conflict centered on Cabo Delgado province in northern Mozambique, where local militants commonly associated with Ansar al-Sunna and Islamic State-linked networks have attacked civilians, state forces, towns, and infrastructure since 2017. The conflict connects local grievances, transnational jihadist branding, coastal and forest terrain, liquefied natural gas projects, regional military intervention, and a major displacement crisis. The insurgency has survived by combining local roots with external branding and cross-border mobility.

The Cameroon Anglophone Crisis is an armed conflict in Cameroon's North West and South West regions that grew out of protests by lawyers, teachers, students, and civil society groups against perceived marginalization of Anglophone legal, educational, and political systems. State repression, arrests, internet shutdowns, diaspora mobilization, and separatist claims transformed the crisis into an armed rebellion involving Ambazonian separatist groups and Cameroonian security forces. The conflict has included attacks on schools, killings, village burnings, kidnappings, displacement, boycotts, and severe pressure on civilians. It is best understood as a transition from grievance to armed fragmentation. The conflict connects colonial language legacies, centralized governance, diaspora politics, unrecognized secession, and civilian protection. The state response and separatist mobilization both reinforced the breakdown of trust. The crisis also shows how fast a political dispute can become an armed conflict when institutions are unresponsive. What began as professional and educational grievance hardened into a security crisis involving competing claims to legitimacy, control, and representation. The conflict serves as a case study in how repression, identity, and armed fragmentation can feed each other. The Anglophone Crisis is both a rebellion and a governance failure. The civilian cost, the school closures, and the fragmented actor map are central to its significance.

The Rohingya Conflict is the long-running security and human-rights crisis involving Myanmar's Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine State, Myanmar security forces, Rakhine Buddhist communities, Rohingya insurgent attacks, and mass displacement to Bangladesh. The conflict involves citizenship denial, communal violence, ARSA attacks, military clearance operations, alleged genocide, refugee camps, cross-border pressure, and Myanmar's wider civil war. The conflict is not only an insurgency; armed attacks by Rohingya militants occurred, but the central humanitarian scale came from state violence, village destruction, flight, statelessness, and the inability of civilians to return safely.

The Philippine Drug War was the intensified anti-drug campaign waged by President Rodrigo Duterte's administration from 2016 to 2022, combining aggressive police operations, extrajudicial and vigilante-style killings, mass arrests, and political intimidation directed at suspected drug users and dealers. The government framed the campaign as crime control, while human rights organizations and international investigators documented thousands of deaths in police operations and vigilante killings and described patterns of unlawful killing and impunity.

The Burkina Faso Insurgency is a Sahel conflict involving jihadist groups, state security forces, civilian auxiliaries, local communities, and a military-led government. Since the mid-2010s, violence has expanded from border areas into a national crisis marked by besieged towns, displacement, massacres, explosive devices, and severe limits on independent reporting. The conflict is now shaped by JNIM, IS Sahel, Burkinabe forces, Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland, and communities caught between jihadist coercion and counterinsurgency reprisals. The conflict demonstrates how jihadist insurgency, coup politics, community self-defense, state abuses, and information control can combine in a rapidly deteriorating security environment.

The Niger Insurgency is a multi-front armed conflict shaped by Sahel jihadist expansion, Lake Chad Basin spillover, military counterinsurgency, border insecurity, and the political shock of Niger's 2023 coup. Armed groups linked to Islamic State, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and ISWAP have attacked civilians, soldiers, villages, roads, aid corridors, markets, and border communities. Niger sits between Mali, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Chad, Libya, and Algeria. The insurgency involves Tillaberi and Diffa regions, IS Sahel, JNIM-linked networks, Boko Haram, regional juntas, foreign military withdrawals, displacement, and civilian-protection failures.

The Yemeni Civil War is a multi-layered conflict that grew out of state collapse, Houthi expansion, regional rivalry, and the failure of Yemen's post-Arab Spring transition. The war combines insurgency, coalition air power, proxy competition, fragmentation of sovereignty, maritime-security implications, and one of the world's gravest humanitarian crises. It is at once a civil war, a regional proxy struggle, a state-collapse case, a humanitarian disaster, and a security problem for the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The conflict also demonstrates how negotiations can stall when military reality, local fragmentation, and regional interests pull in different directions.

Operation Protective Edge was the major 2014 Gaza war between Israel and Hamas-led armed groups, unfolding after worsening tensions in Jerusalem and the West Bank, renewed rocket fire, and the entrenched political divide between Gaza and the Palestinian Authority. The campaign combined Israeli air strikes and a ground incursion with rocket attacks from Gaza, tunnel warfare, and severe civilian harm in a dense urban battlespace. The conflict demonstrated adaptations in the Gaza arena after earlier wars, including the use of tunnel networks, increased international attention to civilian impact, and the ongoing failure of military escalation to achieve a stable political outcome.

The War in Donbass began in 2014 as armed conflict spread across eastern Ukraine after Ukraine's Euromaidan revolution, Russia's annexation of Crimea, and the collapse of the country's old political order. Pro-Russian separatists, backed by Russian military support, declared independence in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and Ukrainian forces engaged separatist militias and Russian volunteers in what became a hybrid and then increasingly conventional war. Key battles included the siege of Mariupol, Debaltseve, and Donetsk airport, and the fighting involved heavy artillery, tanks, and aircraft, causing significant civilian casualties. Repeated ceasefire efforts, including the Minsk I and II protocols, temporarily reduced hostilities but failed to end the conflict; over 14,000 people died and millions were displaced. The war became the enduring military core of the pre-2022 Russo-Ukrainian confrontation and a key case of deniable intervention evolving into sustained interstate war by proxy and direct support, before escalating into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The Ukrainian Crisis, also known as the Russo-Ukrainian War, was the political-security breakdown that began in February 2014 following the Euromaidan revolution, or Revolution of Dignity, and the collapse of Viktor Yanukovych's rule. Russia seized and annexed Crimea and supported paramilitaries in the Donbas against Ukraine's military, ending the post-Cold War assumption that Europe's borders were largely settled and creating the conflict architecture that later widened into full-scale war. That escalation came in February 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the largest conflict in Europe since the Second World War. It has produced a severe humanitarian and refugee crisis, with millions requiring aid and hundreds of thousands of deaths, and has disrupted global food supplies through blockades of Ukrainian ports. The crisis linked regime change, covert and overt military coercion, territorial seizure, proxy warfare, sanctions, and the long transition from political crisis into interstate and hybrid conflict.

The South Sudanese Civil War was a post-independence conflict that began in 2013 after a political split inside the ruling SPLM and escalated into a multi-sided war marked by ethnic mobilization, mass displacement, famine risk, and repeated peace efforts. It links Salva Kiir, Riek Machar, SPLA/SPLM history, South Sudanese state formation, oil politics, and UN reporting on atrocities. The war was a crisis of liberation-movement rule after independence. Institutions built during wartime struggled to manage factional rivalry, command integration, resource distribution, and civilian protection.

The Central African Republic Civil War began with the Seleka rebellion in 2012 and developed into a fragmented conflict involving former Seleka factions, anti-balaka militias, government forces, UN peacekeepers, foreign troops, Russian-linked security actors, and local armed groups. The war mixed political rebellion, sectarian violence, predatory control of territory, displacement, recurring peace-process failures, and disputes over who can provide security in a weak state. The conflict connects militia fragmentation, civilian protection, international intervention, resource politics, foreign security partnerships, and the limits of disarmament. Temporary reductions in fighting do not guarantee durable political settlement. Peacekeeping can stabilize some spaces without solving the underlying problem of armed fragmentation, local revenue extraction, and weak state reach.

Operation Pillar of Defense was an eight-day Israeli military operation in Gaza in November 2012, launched after escalating rocket fire and Israeli-Palestinian violence and ending with an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire. The operation linked short-duration air power, missile defense, civilian exposure, and ceasefire brokerage in one compressed episode. It also connected airstrikes, rocket warfare, Iron Dome interceptions, urban civilian risk, Hamas-Israel escalation dynamics, the politics of ceasefire mediation, and the difficulty of assessing proportionality in dense conflict zones. It became a template for later arguments about deterrence, proportionality, and the limits of punitive escalation.

The Mali War began in 2012 with a northern rebellion, state collapse after a coup, jihadist expansion, foreign intervention, and a long-running Sahel security crisis involving armed groups, local militias, state forces, and international actors. The conflict links weak governance, desert and border geography, counterterrorism, peacekeeping, civilian displacement, regional spillover, state legitimacy, and the difficulty of ending a conflict that keeps changing form.

The Syrian Civil War began in 2011 after protests against Bashar al-Assad's government escalated into armed conflict. It became a multi-sided war involving regime forces, opposition groups, jihadist organizations, Kurdish-led forces, foreign militaries, regional patrons, and repeated humanitarian crises. It links urban warfare, air power, sieges, chemical weapons allegations, ISIS, Kurdish autonomy, Russian and Iranian intervention, Turkish operations, U.S. counter-ISIS policy, refugees, and post-Assad transition uncertainty.

The Libyan Civil War began in 2011 during the Arab Spring, as protests against Muammar Gaddafi's 42-year rule escalated into armed revolt, state repression, civil war, and international military intervention. Opposition forces, supported by NATO airstrikes, fought government loyalists across the country, and the campaign culminated in Gaddafi's capture and death in October 2011. Victory did not produce a settlement. Militias, tribal groups, and political factions competed for control, the country split between rival governments in Tripoli and Tobruk with international powers backing different sides, and ISIS briefly established territory in the chaos. Fighting continued to 2020 amid multiple foreign interventions, proxy warfare, and humanitarian crises; estimated casualties range from 25,000 to 30,000 deaths, with hundreds of thousands displaced and infrastructure devastated. The war reshaped Libya's institutions and opened the path to fragmentation, encompassing protest escalation, regime coercion, rebel organization, NATO air power, civilian protection debates, and the unstable legacy of postwar state collapse.

The Sinai Insurgency that intensified after 2011 is the long-running militant conflict in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula involving jihadist organizations, Egyptian security forces, and affected local communities in a strategically sensitive border and chokepoint region. It grew in the aftermath of Egypt's 2011 upheaval and later became one of the most persistent insurgent-security crises in the eastern Arab world. The conflict links state-security vacuums, jihadist adaptation, Sinai's geography, Egypt-Israel strategic constraints, and the difficulty of crushing insurgency in a politically and economically marginalized region.

The Nigerian Bandit Conflict is an armed-security crisis centered mainly in northwestern Nigeria, involving loose armed gangs, cattle-rustling networks, kidnapping groups, vigilantes, local communities, and state security forces. What began around rural criminality, pastoralist grievances, and local self-defense has become a wider conflict marked by mass abductions, village raids, extortion, displacement, and occasional overlap with jihadist networks. The conflict demonstrates how criminal violence can become strategically significant, territorial, and politically destabilizing without fitting cleanly into either insurgency or organized crime categories. It is also central to understanding rural insecurity beyond Boko Haram.

The Boko Haram Insurgency began in northeastern Nigeria and expanded into a regional Lake Chad Basin conflict involving Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Cameroon, Boko Haram/JAS factions, ISWAP, local vigilantes, and multinational security forces. The conflict has combined terrorism, guerrilla warfare, mass abduction, displacement, factional jihadist rivalry, and difficult counterinsurgency terrain. Its violence has repeatedly moved across borders, while civilians face coercion from armed groups, suspicion from security forces, and disrupted access to farms, roads, schools, and markets. The insurgency links militant governance, state weakness, borderlands, humanitarian emergency, factional fragmentation, and the limits of military campaigns against mobile armed groups.