13 Major Wars Happening Right Now Around the World

The longest-running unresolved conflict predates the creation of Israel nearly 74 years ago with the end of the British Mandate, a move that escalated tensions that had been simmering since the late 19th century. Since then, violence has ebbed and flowed. Despite the 1974 U.N.’s two-state solution and the promising talks between Israel and the Palestinians beginning in the 1990s, the conflict remains unresolved.

This century, flare-ups in the form of terrorist attacks against civilians in Israel or rocket launches from Gaza towards Israeli settlements on one hand, and Israel keeping a military occupying presence in the West Bank and implementing a siege on the densely-populated Gaza strip and responding with air or drone strikes on the other have left many casualties on both sides.

For more than three decades, Somalia has gone through periods of civil war and famine. In the early ’90s, in a period the Somalis call the “burbur” (catastrophe), a drought exacerbated simmering inter-clan conflict that killed 25,000 people and displaced millions others, followed by a period with virtually no central government.

More than 30 years after the burbur, al-Sahbab, a home-grown Islamist armed group, conducts periodic attacks on civilians and government forces and their allied troops from the regional African Union Mission in Somalia.

The ADF was formed in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1995 with an alliance between two rebel groups that had fought in the Ugandan civil war of 1986-94 against the government of President Yoweri Museveni who has held office since 1986. Though the ADF is believed to have colluded with Islamic State group attacks in recent years, it has also reportedly recruited insurgents along secular ethnic lines as part of its fight regarding political and economic issues that encompass Uganda and eastern DRC.

More than 60,000 people have disappeared in Mexico since the beginning of the country’s most recent war on drugs that began in 2006. About 360,000 homicides have been recorded since then in this country of 127 million. Though Mexico has been grappling for decades with drug cartel violence, the most recent 17-year crackdown has been the most violent. The Sinaloa Cartel, led formerly by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who is serving a life sentence at a U.S. supermax prison in Colorado, is one of Mexico’s oldest and largest cartels, with presence in nearly half of Mexico’s 32 states.

The radical Islamic militant organization whose name translates roughly as “Western education [is] forbidden” has been highly active in northern Nigeria and neighboring countries for the past 13 years. Though Boko Haram dates back at least to the early 2000s, it became more violently radical after a government crackdown killed hundreds of its members in 2009, including the death in police custody of its leader Mohammed Yusuf.

In 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped more than 270 school girls, most of whom were Christian, in the northeastern town of Chibok. They were forced to convert to Islam and sold into marriage. As of 2021, only about 100 of the girls have escaped or have been rescued.

What began as a largely secular civil uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2011 has descended into a chaotic combination of civil war with an Islamist militant insurgency. The presence of pro-Kurdish rebels in Syria has pulled Turkey into the conflict. Furthermore, Russia supports Assad.

The war has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians and created 12 million outbound refugees and internally displaced people. In January, three kamikaze drones attacked a U.S. coalition base in Al Tanf, near the border with Jordan and Iraq, injuring two Syrian opposition fighters.

Armed conflict in Mali surged in 2012 after the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, a separatist group composed of ethnic Tuareg people, initiated a rebellion in the north, the same year President Amadou Toumani Toure was deposed in a military coup.

The MNLA was initially partnered with Islamist militants, including al-Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb, but the alliance quickly crumbled after the Islamists imposed their harsh interpretations of Islamic law and destroyed shrines in Timbuktu and Gao. In January, Mali’s military junta that is battling the rebels demanded that French troops who have been helping the government fight the Islamicists leave the country within a month.

The year 2014 was a particularly volatile one in a country known for its instability. It included a rash of sectarian attacks, military operations in the southwestern province of North Waziristan, raging political protests in Islamabad, and floods in Singh and Punjab provinces.

The country of 231 million continues to be ravaged by an economic crisis, exacerbated by the cleanup of the massive flooding last year, and political instability following the ouster of Prime Minister Imran Khan in a parliamentary no-confidence vote. The country entered 2023 with an ongoing struggle against violent attacks on religious minorities, an overwhelmed electrical grid, and Taliban terrorists emboldened by the group’s recent takeover of the Afghanistan government.

For the past eight years, one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world has been the stage for a proxy war between a Saudi Arabian-led military coalition and Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. The Saudis support the internationally recognized government of Rashad al-Alimi, who became the country’s president in 2022, a role claimed by Mahdi al-Mashat, the head of the Houthis Supreme Political Council. The war has displaced millions of people, and led to outbreaks of infectious diseases, a shortage of health services, and famine.

In accordance with the Doha Agreement of 2020 between the U.S. and the Taliban, the U.S. ended its war in Afghanistan officially in August 2021 with the complete withdrawal of its troops that had been fighting there for two decades. Weeks before the pullout, the Taliban swept into the capital city of Kabul, forcing Afghan President Ashrafi Ghani to flee to exile in the United Arab Emirates.

Though the U.S. war in Afghanistan ended, the Taliban’s consolidation of power and the presence of Islamic State in Khorasan have led to a humanitarian crisis.Insurgents attacks targeting civilians and ongoing internal instability continues to wreak the country.

In December 2017, the U.S. announced an end to its combat mission in Iraq, a country severely upended since the U.S. invaded it in 2003 based on the Bush administration false claims of Iraq President’s Saddam Hussein’s involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Since the withdrawal of U.S. troops, the situation in Iraq remains tenuous despite the Iraq government’s claim of victory over Islamic State militants more than five years ago. As in neighboring Syria, Iraq is grappling with ongoing terrorist attacks, most recently in January, in an attack on an Iraq police station in the country’s northeast.

The Myanmar civil war is Asia’s newest major conflict, which erupted shortly after the military seized power and began killing anti-government protesters. The coup inspired civilians to take up arms and form organized rebel groups. Since then, the intensity of attacks and the number of people killed has increased nationwide, with most of the worst fighting occurring in the north of this country of 54 million. In January, pro-democracy fighters targeted military personnel conducting a census because they said it was a set-up for an illegitimate election scheduled to take place later this year.

Since the start of Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, tens of thousands of civilians have been killed and millions have fled their homes. Eleven months into the war, escalation appears to be imminent as Russia is reportedly setting up for a late-winter or spring offensive, while Germany and the U.S. are among nations preparing to send tanks to the Ukrainian army.

In December, Ukraine used drones to attack military bases deep inside Russian territory, and a month later struck a building in Donetsk, killing at least 89 Russian troops. Meanwhile, Russia has escalated attacks on Ukraine infrastructure, leaving millions without utilities, including heat, in the winter.