Political theorist Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed that the end of the Cold War marked “the end of history,” a triumph of capitalist, liberal Western democracy over competing ideologies. It was believed that 21st-century humanity would be a globalized postconflict society moving in deterministic concert toward collective peace and prosperity. While Fukuyama’s thesis was profoundly challenged by the September 11, 2001, attacks and the subsequent U.S. “war on terrorism,” open warfare between the armies of nation-states did, in fact, become increasingly rare in the post-Cold War environment. Instead, terrorism, ethnic conflict, civil wars, and hybrid and special operations warfare (techniques used by developed nations to harass or destabilize opponents through nontraditional means) accounted for the bulk of nonstate, intrastate, and interstate violence. Although the 21st century saw a greatly reduced battle death rate when compared with similar time spans in the previous century, these numbers nevertheless represented tens of thousands of lives lost each year.
Second Congo War (1998–2003)
Far and away the deadliest war of the 21st century was a conflict that had its genesis in the 20th. The Rwandan genocide, the toppling and death of Zairean Pres. Mobutu Sese Seko, and ethnic strife between Hutu and Tutsi peoples were direct contributing factors to the Second Congo War (also called the Great War in Africa or Africa’s First World War because of its scope and destructiveness). In May 1997 rebel leader Laurent Kabila deposed Mobutu and renamed Zaire the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), but he soon found himself engaged in a civil war with some of the forces that had elevated him to power. The eastern third of the DRC became a battlefield every bit as bloody and contested as the Western Front in World War I. The armies of nine countries and an assortment of affiliated militias devastated the countryside. Angola, Namibia, Chad, Sudan, and Zimbabwe backed Kabila’s Congolese government forces, while troops from Burundi, Rwanda, and Uganda supported anti-Kabila rebels. Mass rapes were reported in areas of conflict, and large sections of the DRC were stripped of resources as organized combat between professional armies gave way to brigandage and plunder. An estimated three million people—mostly civilians—were killed in the fighting or died of disease or malnutrition as a result of the conflict.
Syrian Civil War
As the Arab Spring swept through the Middle East and North Africa, popular uprisings toppled the authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Yemen. In Syria, however, Pres. Bashar al-Assad responded to protests with a combination of political concessions and escalating violence against his own people. The uprising became a civil war that spread violence into neighboring Iraq and provided a fertile breeding ground for militant groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS). Rebel groups seized huge swathes of territory, and the area under government control was reduced to a small strip of land in western Syria. Assad resorted to increasingly desperate and savage measures to maintain power, dropping crude “barrel bombs” on urban populations and using chemical weapons on rebel-controlled territory. As regional powers and Western countries assumed a greater role in the conflict, it seemed inevitable that Assad would be forced from power. Kurdish militias advanced from the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq, and the U.S. conducted air strikes against ISIL forces in both Syria and Iraq. In 2015 Russia, a longtime supporter of the Assad regime, began a bombing campaign in support of Syrian government forces that reversed the tide of the war. Cease-fire agreements failed to stop the violence, and by 2016 it was estimated that 1 in 10 Syrians had been killed or wounded by the fighting. Four million people fled the country, while millions more were internally displaced. At least 470,000 deaths were caused directly or indirectly by the war, and life expectancy at birth experienced a shocking plunge from over 70 years (preconflict) to just 55 years in 2015.
In early 2003 rebel groups took up arms against the Khartoum-based regime of Sudanese Pres. Omar al-Bashir, igniting long-standing tensions in the Darfur region of western Sudan. That conflict erupted into what the U.S. government later described as the first genocide of the 21st century. After rebel groups scored a string of high-profile victories against the Sudanese military, the Sudanese government equipped and supported Arab militias that came to be known as Janjaweed. The Janjaweed conducted a targeted campaign of terrorism and ethnic cleansing against the civilian population of Darfur, killing at least 300,000 people and displacing nearly three million. It was not until 2008 that a joint United Nations and African Unionpeacekeeping force was able to restore a semblance of order to the region. On March 4, 2009, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Bashir—the first time that the ICC sought the arrest of a sitting head of state—charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity. That investigation was suspended in December 2014 because of a lack of cooperation from the UN Security Council.
Neoconservative officials within the administration of U.S. Pres. George W. Bush had sought to topple the regime of Iraqi Pres. Saddam Hussein prior to the events of September 11, 2001, but the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history would provide (at least in part) the casus belli for the Iraq War. Citing links between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, as well as the presence in Iraq of weapons of mass destruction—both claims that were ultimately proved false—the U.S. assembled a “coalition of the willing” and launched an attack on Iraq on March 20, 2003. The subsequent war unfolded in two distinct phases: a short one-sided conventional war in which coalition forces suffered fewer than 200 fatalities in just over a month of major combat operations, and an insurgency that continued for years and claimed tens of thousands of lives. By the time U.S. combat forces were withdrawn in August 2010, more than 4,700 coalition troops had been killed; at least 85,000 Iraqi civilians were killed, but some estimates place that total much higher. The sectarian violence that had wracked the country in the wake of the overthrow of Hussein’s Baʿthist regime gave rise to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also called ISIS), a Sunni group that sought to establish a caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Between 2013 and the end of 2016, over 50,000 additional civilians were murdered by ISIL or killed in clashes between ISIL and Iraqi government forces.
Within weeks of the September 11, 2001, attacks, the United States began carrying out air strikes against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The Taliban, an ultraconservative Islamist faction that had seized power in the vacuum left after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, had provided safe haven for al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden. The war in Afghanistan became, for a time, the most-obvious manifestation of the U.S.-led “war on terrorism.” By December 2001 the Taliban had been forced from power, but both the Afghan Taliban and its Pakistani counterpart would recover strength in the tribal areas that straddle the border of those two countries. Revising its tactics to reflect those used by insurgents in Iraq, the Taliban began employing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on military and civilian targets, to great effect. The Taliban boosted poppy cultivation in areas under its control, and the international opium trade funded much of its military and terrorist activities. Between 2001 and 2016, an estimated 30,000 Afghan troops and police and 31,000 Afghan civilians were killed. More than 3,500 troops from the NATO-led coalition were killed during that time, and 29 countries were represented among the dead. In addition, some 30,000 Pakistani government forces and civilians were killed by the Pakistani Taliban.
The War Against Boko Haram
The Islamist militant group Boko Haram (a term that means “Westernization Is Sacrilege” in the Hausa language) was founded in 2002 with the goal of imposing Sharīʿah (Islamic law) on Nigeria. The group was relatively obscure until 2009, when it launched a series of raids that killed dozens of police officers. The Nigerian government retaliated with a military operation that left more than 700 Boko Haram members dead. The Nigerian police and military then conducted a campaign of extrajudicial killing that inflamed what remained of Boko Haram. Beginning in 2010, Boko Haram struck back, assassinating police officers, staging jailbreaks, and attacking civilian targets across Nigeria. Schools and Christian churches in the country’s northeast were especially hard-hit, and the kidnapping of nearly 300 schoolgirls in 2014 drew international condemnation. As Boko Haram began to assert control over more territory, the character of the conflict shifted from a terrorist campaign to a full-blown insurgency that recalled the bloody Nigerian civil war. Whole cities were destroyed in Boko Haram attacks, and troops from Cameroon, Chad, Benin, and Niger eventually joined the military response. Although the area under Boko Haram control had been eroded significantly by the end of 2016, the group still retained the ability to carry out deadly suicide attacks. At least 11,000 civilians were killed by Boko Haram, and more than two million people were displaced by the violence.
Yemeni Civil War
The civil war in Yemen had its genesis in the Arab Spring and the uprising that toppled the government of ʿAlī ʿAbd Allāh Ṣāliḥ. As Ṣāliḥ struggled to maintain his grip on the presidency, he recalled the military from outlying areas to Sanaa, the Yemeni capital. Ḥūthī rebels in the country’s north and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) militants in the south were quick to exploit the power vacuum. Fighting between government forces and opposition tribal militias intensified, and on June 3, 2011, Ṣāliḥ was the target of an assassination attempt that left him seriously injured. Ṣāliḥ left Yemen to receive medical treatment, a move that ultimately led to the transfer of power to Ṣāliḥ’s vice president, ʿAbd Rabbuh Manṣūr Hadī. Hadī failed to reassert an effective government presence in regions under Ḥūthī and AQAP control, and his violent response to protests in Sanaa sparked sympathy for the antigovernment cause. In September 2014 Ḥūthī rebels entered Sanaa, and by January 2015 they had occupied the presidential palace. Hadī was placed under house arrest, but he escaped and fled to the southwestern port city of Aden. A force composed of Ḥūthīs and troops loyal to the deposed Ṣāliḥ then laid siege to Aden, and Hadī fled the country in March 2015. That month the conflict was internationalized when a coalition led by Saudi Arabia moved to drive the Ḥūthīs from power and restore the Hadī government. It was widely believed that Iran was providing material support to the Ḥūthīs, and numerous arms shipments from Iran were seized en route to the conflict zone. In August 2016 the United Nations stated that 10,000 people had been killed in the fighting, a total that included nearly 4,000 civilians. The majority of civilian deaths had been the result of coalition air strikes. In addition, more than three million Yemenis had been displaced by the war.
In November 2013 Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, scuttled a long-awaited association agreement with the European Union in favor of closer ties with Russia. Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, erupted in street protests, and demonstrators established a permanent camp in the city’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (“Independence Square”). Clashes between police and protesters became increasingly violent as the crisis intensified, and in February 2014 government security forces opened fire on the protesters, killing scores and wounding hundreds. The ensuing backlash swept Yanukovych from power, and he fled to Russia. Within days of Yanukovych’s departure, gunmen who were later identified as Russian troops began occupying government buildings in the Ukrainian autonomous republic of Crimea. Backed by Russian troops, a pro-Russian party that had previously had minimal representation in the Crimean legislature seized control of the regional government; it voted to secede from Ukraine and seek annexation by Russia. Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin formalized the illegal annexation in March, and weeks later a virtually identical scenario began to play out in the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. The Kremlin insisted that it was not taking a direct hand in eastern Ukraine, claiming that Russian troops that had been killed or captured in Ukrainian territory were “volunteers.” By the early summer of 2014, pro-Russian forces had overrun a sizable swathe of territory, and in July, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over rebel-controlled territory by a Russian-supplied surface-to-air missile. Nearly 300 passengers and crew were killed, and Moscow responded by waging a propaganda offensive in an attempt to shift responsibility for the attack. Ukrainian troops pushed back the separatist lines throughout the summer, but in late August 2014 a new pro-Russian front was opened that threatened the southern city of Mariupol. A cease-fire was signed in February 2015 that slowed but did not stop the bloodshed, and Russian armor and heavy weapons remained a common sight among separatist forces. Eastern Ukraine joined the Moldovan region of Transdniestria and the Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as areas of Kremlin-backed frozen conflict. By early 2017 some 10,000 people—the overwhelming majority of whom were civilians—had been killed since fighting began.