Since 2011, one topic has consistently dominated headlines in the news: the war in Syria has now been raging for over half a decade and is widely recognized as one of the most shameful and bloody civil conflicts in recent history. Yet, as horrific as it is, Syria is not alone. Since the emergence of nation‑states, humanity has witnessed civil wars of staggering brutality. When we look at post‑World War II history, few internal conflicts have matched the inhumanity of the following. Here is our top 10 shameful civil wars that rival Syria’s carnage.
10 2002
At rush hour on July 25, 1995, a bomb detonated in the Paris subway, killing eight people and wounding 150. Before the Charlie Hebdo and ISIS attacks, it was one of the worst terrorist incidents the French capital had ever seen. The perpetrators were not disgruntled French or European nationals; they were Algerian operatives. The bombing was a direct spill‑over from one of North Africa’s deadliest internal wars.
Much like today’s Syrian conflict, the Algerian war ignited when a government refused to relinquish power. The military canceled an election that seemed poised to hand victory to an Islamist party. That pre‑emptive coup sent protesters onto the streets, quickly evolving into a lethal clash between state forces and out‑of‑control jihadists. In a chilling echo of ISIS, the Islamists first targeted Algerian civilians and later French civilians in Paris with improvised explosives. Under the fanatics’ reign, teachers, artists, journalists, and judges vanished. Even fifteen years later, roughly 8,000 innocents remain missing.
On the opposite side, Algeria’s army was equally ruthless. Just as Assad drops barrel bombs on his own people, the Algerian authorities torched entire villages in a frantic hunt for terrorists who often fled weeks earlier. During the “black decade,” both sides committed war crimes, including the murder of newborn infants. By the time the dust settled in 2002, about 200,000 civilians lay dead. For perspective, the infamous Sri Lankan civil war against the Tamil Tigers claimed about half that number over more than double the time.
9 1996, 1999–2003
Throughout the 1980s, Liberia simmered with ethnic resentment. Indigenous President Samuel Doe finally overthrew the Americo‑Liberian elite who had dominated since the nation’s founding, only to promote his own ethnic group above all others. Into this volatile mix stepped Charles Taylor in 1989.
A former preacher who had fled to Libya after being indicted for embezzlement, Taylor trained a guerrilla army, returned, and toppled his old enemy. Most Liberians initially welcomed him… until a group allied with Taylor executed Doe in 1990. At that point, Taylor turned on his allies, igniting a war that engulfed the entire country.
Over the next decade, Taylor would end one civil war, start another, and exacerbate a neighboring Sierra Leone conflict. He even managed to become Liberia’s president, campaigning under the slogan, “He killed my Ma, he killed my Pa, but I will vote for him.” During the two wars, over 250,000 Liberians died—about 7.5 % of the population—and 25,000 were raped.
What made Taylor’s wars stand out wasn’t merely their brutality but their surreal horror. He ruled through terror, employing units like the infamous Butt‑Naked Battalion to frighten everyone. Despite the bizarre name, the battalion was anything but amusing. Children were fed amphetamines, injected with hallucinogens, handed guns, and ordered to kill anyone crossing their path. They fought either naked or clad in lurid women’s wigs and ball gowns.
8 2002
Sierra Leone shares a long, swampy border with Liberia—an almost 300‑kilometre stretch of wetland. Politically, the two nations were tightly intertwined in the 1990s. Thanks to Charles Taylor’s intervention, an insurgency that could have been quelled erupted into a merciless decade‑long war.
The spark was the astonishingly incompetent reign of President Joseph Momoh, a man so corrupt he’d make Putin look like Lincoln. When his regime stopped paying even the army, ex‑Corporal Foday Sankoh raised a rebellion, seizing towns along the Liberian border. Backed by Taylor, they were initially hailed as heroes—until they weren’t.
Within a year, Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was accused of raping and mutilating civilians. The army was equally reprehensible. Low rations and unpaid salaries drove soldiers to become “sobels”—soldiers by day, rebels by night. In effect, both sides merged into a single terror‑focused force.
Sobels later tortured civilians in hideous ways, even forcing victims to commit cannibalism. Taylor’s financing of the rebels and the diamond‑fuelled proxy wars ensured the conflict had no foreseeable end. It wasn’t until the UN deployed 17,000 troops backed by the British army that the endless terror finally subsided. By then, 50,000 people lay dead, and even today, girls sold into sex slavery during the war still await assistance or justice.
7 1996
During the Cold War, the CIA developed a habit of inserting its nose into Latin America, often with disastrous results. They helped install Chile’s monster Augusto Pinochet and encouraged Argentina’s junta to “disappear” 30,000 opponents. Yet perhaps nothing matches the CIA’s involvement in Guatemala.
In 1954, democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz legalized the Communist Party, sparking a CIA‑induced panic. The agency responded by engineering a coup that removed Arbenz, replacing him with Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. Armas was swiftly murdered and succeeded by General Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, an outright psychopath.
When indigenous left‑wing groups rose against Fuentes, he unleashed a terror campaign few nations have ever witnessed. Civilian suspects were murdered in the night, their mutilated bodies dumped on public roads. He also birthed a culture of murder and abuse within the army that persisted long after his ouster.
In 1999, a UN report reviewing the 36‑year war concluded that 93 % of human‑rights violations were perpetrated by the Guatemalan state. The war claimed about 200,000 lives, most of them civilians. The majority of the dead—83 %—were from the Maya minority, leading many to label the conflict a genocide.
6 Present
The most depressing fact about Colombia’s ongoing conflict—often called the longest current civil war in the world—is that it isn’t even the first war Colombians faced in the 20th century. In the 1940s, a riot in Bogotá sparked death squads from conservative and liberal factions, leading to a wave of murders.
Known as La Violencia, this silent war was marked by extreme brutality. Liberals decapitated conservatives and played soccer with their heads. Conservatives slashed liberals’ throats and pulled their tongues out—a mutilation dubbed the “Colombian necktie.” In total, 200,000 Colombians died in atrocious ways. La Violencia also sowed the seeds for the present conflict.
Fast forward to the 1960s: an uneasy truce banned all parties from Colombian politics except the Liberals and Conservatives. The Communist Party, feeling sidelined, urged peasants to form their own armies. One such group, based in Marquetilla, was bombed into oblivion by the Colombian army. Only 48 survivors remained; they would become the founding members of the left‑wing rebel outfit FARC.
Soon after, other rebel groups sprang up. The Catholic ELN emerged a few months later. The war stayed low‑key until the 1980s, when the cocaine trade entered the picture, making everything messier.
FARC and ELN used drug production to amass millions, recruiting more members and eventually seizing control of one‑third of the country. Simultaneously, figures like Pablo Escobar launched deadly criminal enterprises that often clashed with the rebels. Other left‑wing groups such as M19 emerged, only to find right‑wing paramilitaries hunting them. The Colombian army began committing war crimes, and civilians were caught in the crossfire. By the 1990s, the number of factions, alliances, and gangs in the war was essentially uncountable, similar to Syria today.
To date, the Colombian conflict has killed over 250,000 people and displaced seven million—more than any other war on the planet except for Syria. Fortunately, peace talks with FARC and ELN are underway, offering hope that this protracted civil war may finally draw to a close.
5 1992
One of the most remarked‑upon aspects of the Syrian civil war is that it isn’t really a civil war in the usual sense. It’s an extremely complicated proxy war, pitting Saudi Arabia against Iran and Hezbollah, Russia against Turkey and the West, and Islamic extremism against secular governance. It also includes the Kurdish battle for a homeland.
In the 1980s, another nation was embroiled in a similarly complex civil war. While it lacked the religious element of Syria’s, El Salvador’s conflict involved a comparably massive number of outside players, each pushing their own agendas.
The war’s source was a clash between the Marxist rebel group FMLN and the right‑wing government after a 1979 coup that saw the government shooting down protestors. It quickly morphed into a larger ideological battle over land, freedom of expression, and the plight of the poor. Behind the scenes, the conflict became a proxy battleground.
Because the war unfolded during the Cold War, the FMLN received official backing from the Soviet Union, though the Russians largely kept their distance. The real supporters were Cuba and Nicaragua, pushing for a socialist revolution akin to their own. Opposing them was the United States, terrified of Central America turning “red.” Costa Rica, Mexico, and even France also stuck their noses in, each pursuing distinct goals.
The result was disastrous. Approximately 75,000 Salvadorans perished over the decade as government death squads looted and raped entire towns, while the FMLN carried out devastating acts of terrorism. It wasn’t until 1992—after the Soviet Union’s collapse, which sapped Russian and U.S. interest—that the war finally ended. Even today, many murky details of this shameful proxy war remain concealed.
4 1970
When Nigeria first achieved independence from Britain, it was less a viable state than a disaster in the making. The North comprised a series of Muslim feudal states, the South and East were Christian, and an animist kingdom persisted in fragmented form. Four major ethnic groups—the Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba, and Ibo—distrusted one another intensely. Adding to the chaos, the country’s oil reserves were concentrated in the East.
The flashpoint arrived when Muslim Hausas launched a rampage, massacring 30,000 Christian Ibos. Up to one million Ibos fled eastward, where Lieutenant Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu declared independence, establishing the Republic of Biafra. Oil went with the secessionist state.
The Nigerian military had other plans. When Biafra’s oil fields were recaptured, the fledgling state lost its entire income. Unable to import food, the Ibo people of Biafra endured an apocalyptic famine. In just two short years, one million people died from malnutrition—roughly four times the death toll in Syria since 2011. Many victims were children too young to understand why they were starving.
Eventually, Biafra was reabsorbed into Nigeria in 1970. Yet Nigeria’s troubled history did not end there. Over the following decades, a succession of coups and counter‑coups paralyzed the nation, culminating in the ongoing Boko Haram insurgency.
3 Present
It would be impossible to do justice to all of Myanmar’s internal conflicts in a single article. When the British left Burma in 1948, they abandoned a patchwork of ethnic and religious groups with little in common. No sooner had the national government formed than fighting erupted, and it has continued more or less uninterrupted to this day.
Unlike most civil wars, there has been no single group the government has fought continuously. Initially, major rebels were communists, later replaced by an ethnic Christian insurgency, which was then eclipsed by a broad uprising among all of the country’s diverse factions. Parts of Myanmar split into de facto autonomous states organized along ethnic lines and have remained that way ever since. Because the military junta refuses to recognize them, fighting along their borders has been essentially constant.
Elsewhere, oppressed groups without a microstate of their own have resorted to guerrilla warfare, using terror to attack the government. Adding another layer of complexity, the Rohingya ethnic group has been targeted in an extermination campaign the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum terms “genocide.”
The outcome is one of the bleakest, hardest‑to‑understand conflicts on the planet. Rohingya Muslims have been forced into slavery by Buddhist oppressors, while ordinary citizens have endured security forces that rape and murder with impunity. Simultaneously, different ethnic statelets have forged alliances and fought one another in an unending war. With around 15 rebel groups currently active, a lasting peace in Myanmar seems distant.
2 1972, 1983–2005, 2003–Present, 2013–Present
It’s saying something when a conflict that has claimed half a million lives is the least nasty civil war a country has endured. The first Sudanese civil war erupted before the British formally declared independence on January 1, 1956.
At that time, Sudan was roughly one‑third the size of the continental United States and contained over 600 ethnic groups speaking 400 languages. A religious divide also existed: the Arab‑dominated Muslim North held power, while the black, primarily Christian South felt exploited. Additionally, tensions brewed between black African farmers and nomadic Arab tribes in the West. A half‑hearted attempt at a federal system failed, making conflict inevitable.
The initial war (1955‑1972) lasted 17 years, with rebels seizing swathes of Southern territory, the North launching attacks, and around 500,000 people dying. An Ethiopia‑brokered peace agreement halted the carnage in 1972, but peace was short‑lived. A decade later, the Arab government in Khartoum tried to impose Sharia law nationwide, prompting the South to take up arms again.
In 1989, Omar al‑Bashir overthrew the Arab government in a military coup and immediately intensified the war with the South. His forces deployed helicopter gunships to attack civilian villages and dropped bombs so indiscriminately that aid convoys struggled to reach those in need. By 2003, over two million people had perished, and a new front opened in the West.
In Darfur, resentment toward the government boiled over. Black farmers formed rebel groups, while Arab tribes coalesced into deadly, government‑backed militias. The resulting genocide saw 300,000 massacred in brutal assaults, while the Sudanese army engaged in coordinated mass rapes against villagers. Just as the war with the South wound down, this new conflict erupted. Fast forward to 2016, and it remains ongoing.
Worse still, the conflict never truly ended. When the North and South made peace in 2005, it seemed a victory for humanity. The South voted for independence, becoming the world’s newest state—South Sudan—in 2011. Almost immediately, internal rivalries resurfaced. The two main tribes, the Dinka and the Nuer, which had co‑existed under a unified Sudan, now clashed over power.
In 2013, the Dinka leader claimed the Nuer attempted a coup to oust him, while the Nuer argued the coup was a false‑flag operation designed to trigger genocide against them. Most observers believe both sides simply sought an excuse to fight. Their wish was granted. At the time of writing, the new country is locked in a civil war that the UN estimates has killed 50,000.
1 2001
After that mammoth entry on Sudan’s numerous conflicts, it’s difficult to imagine any recent civil conflict being more complex or multifaceted. Yet one civil war surpasses Sudan—and even Syria—in terms of utter messiness: the disintegration of Yugoslavia.
It’s hard to imagine a more fertile ground for conflict than post‑Tito Yugoslavia. The nation was a patchwork of religious and ethnic differences held together more by wishful thinking than anything else. Serbs resented Croats for siding with fascists in World War II (leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Serbs), Kosovars resented Serbs for political domination, and both Croats and Serbs claimed historical rights to Bosnia. When the federation finally began to crumble in 1991, it set the stage for a sectarian conflict almost unparalleled in modern history.
Over the course of five separate wars, the once‑mighty country collapsed into seven new states. The least terrible war was also the first: the Ten‑Day War, a short conflict that saw Slovenia split but resulted in fewer than 70 deaths. If anyone hoped this signaled an easy divorce, they were swiftly disappointed.
When Croatia declared independence in 1991, it triggered a titanic battle. Former comrades from the Yugoslav army found themselves fighting each other in devastated towns that had once been models of ethnic cooperation. Serb forces shelled the ancient city of Dubrovnik and laid siege to Vukovar for 87 days. In response, Croat forces flushed tens of thousands of Serbs out of Eastern Slavonia in an atrocious act of ethnic cleansing. By the war’s conclusion, 20,000 were dead.
But even that paled compared to Bosnia. The three‑way conflict between ethnic Serbs, Croats, and Muslim Bosniaks saw some of the worst war crimes in history. Serb forces laid siege to Sarajevo with snipers, killing nearly 14,000 (including 1,500 children) and committing genocide at Srebrenica, murdering nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys over a handful of days. Bosniak commanders held Serb prisoners in filthy holes filled with feces and embedded their forces among the civilian population. Croat forces conducted mass rapes in the Lasva Valley. All sides committed war crimes.
By the war’s end, over 100,000 were dead, but the Yugoslavian conflict still wasn’t over. The 1998‑99 war in Kosovo saw ethnic cleansing, mass rapes, organ harvesting from corpses, and NATO jets bombing the Serbian capital of Belgrade. Over 13,000 people died, followed by another 200 or so killed during the Macedonian Insurgency of 2001.
All in all, the Yugoslavian breakup killed around 133,000 and traumatized millions more. It was perhaps the messiest civil conflict since World War II. We can only pray that nothing like it ever happens again.