The 21st Century's Deadliest Conflicts: Ranked. (DEEP DIVE)

Ours is a world war. From the battlefields of Ukraine to the jungle of Marmar, from the deserts of Sudan to the scrublands of Mexico, from the African Horn to the Gaza Strip, to Haiti, the Congo, and Yemen, nations all across the globe are consumed by conflict.

In the 21st century, at a moment when people can live healthier, happier, and more prosperous lives than at any other time throughout history, war goes on, and should be entirely justified in believing that things are only getting worse.

Today, we're going to take a deep dive into the wars, insurgencies, and civil conflicts of the 21st century. We're going to explore the most brutal war zones in recent memory, and the leaders and fighting factions that have brought absolute hell upon the innocent people in their path.

We're going to go continent by continent and decade by decade all around the world, until all the bodies are counted, and we're going to make one thing very clear.

We're not here to do a listicle, we're not here to give a top ten, we're here to take inventory of the sheer, apocalyptic human devastation that people all across the globe living and breathing today have wrought upon each other. But first, a bit of housekeeping.

Before we dive into the wars of the 21st century, we've got to do a little bit of housekeeping, and run through a few basic considerations that are going to be important later.

And yes, we do recommend sticking around for this bid, I'm sure that little skip-ahead button has appeared. Is that a YouTube premium thing still?

It's more interesting than it sounds, and at first, calculating death tolls from any conflict is a messy business, let alone trying to aggregate them all together, and for a few reasons we're about to explain, we've got to be precise in our methodology.

So, we're going to explain the reasons that we'll trust the numbers we're trusting, the way we decide which conflicts to talk about, and how we're accounting for special considerations around both individual conflicts and the way that wars are fought in general. If you truly don't care about any of that, then do skip ahead.

But don't have a go at me in the comments if you missed something.

We'll start with the question of which conflicts we're going to cover, because unfortunately we do need to introduce a few exclusion criteria. For one, we're going to be covering individual conflicts independently, instead of discussing an entire conflict zone where overlapping conflicts might be present.

So for example, we won't be making a single installment out of the violence in Africa-Sahel region when that violence includes a number of distinct conflicts, but each of those conflicts did not rise to the level that they'd be included in our list by themselves.

If an individual nation faces a multidimensional security crisis in which a number of different insurgencies are battling the same government simultaneously, we may discuss that nation's overarching civil conflict.

Take a place like Pakistan or Mexico as an example, but when conflicts operating in parallel to each other, without being interconnected on any deep level, we're not going to group them together simply because they're being fought in the same geographic region.

As for the conflicts we will or won't be discussing, we're going to adopt a single hard threshold for inclusion.

As such, we will not be including conflicts with a cumulative death toll lower than approximately 50,000 during the 21st century alone.

While going through the list of smaller 21st century conflicts across the globe could be a grimly educational exercise in its own right, it would also bring the runtime of this already long episode to at least maybe half a day, and probably even more than that.

In the interest of ensuring that we don't do that, we're going to set that inclusion threshold at 50,000 cumulative deaths, military and civilian combined, from the start of the year 2000 onward.

In line with that threshold, we're not going to cover conflicts that were predominantly fought during the 20th century and wrapped up with lower-grade fighting in the first few years of the 2000s, if that fighting during the 2000s didn't result in a death toll that crosses our threshold.

That includes conflicts like the civil wars in Angola, Algeria, or the Philippines, where more than 50,000 people may have been killed in total, but where a small proportion of those deaths happened after the turn of the century. That, of course, brings up a much hairier question that we absolutely do have to discuss.

How do we count the dead? In reality, most of the conflicts across the globe, both today and across history, do not come with a firm death toll. People who are killed in remote areas, or in long-term conflict zones where it's dangerous to count the dead, or in global environments with high decomposition rates, may never be accounted for.

Fighting forces that wish to control perceptions of a conflict might downplay the number of soldiers they've lost, and exaggerate the number of enemy combatants they've killed, while insisting that enemy soldiers killed more civilians than they really might have, and denying that their own forces killed as many civilians as they actually did.

Civilians might prefer to bury their own dead in private, or may fear the costs of providing accurate information to those who would seek to document fatalities. Some death toll estimates account for any violent deaths directly perpetrated by armed combatants in a conflict, while others account for a much larger number of indirect casualties.

Those counts might include people who died because of famines, or the spread of deadly diseases, or adverse climate conditions that they were exposed to while displaced, all of which they wouldn't have had to deal with if there hadn't been a war underway.

Different independent organizations use different methods to calculate the death toll, and some will bias their metrics to ensure that they don't accidentally include anyone who wasn't definitely a casualty of war, while others will bias their metrics to ensure that they don't fail to count for anyone who was probably a casualty of war.

As such, we're going to manage those discrepancies as best we can, although by nature a portion of that process will come down to our discretion as researchers, where the precise distinctions we're looking for might not be available.

If a death toll is produced by a nation-state or other armed actor that was directly involved in the conflict in question, we're going to treat those numbers as unreliable by default because of the sheer overwhelming range of incentives for an armed actor to skew those numbers in their own favor.

We will make some exceptions if, in the event of very stringent reviews, outside organizations have produced a death toll that broadly lines up.

For the most part, however, we're going to rely on the work of independent commissions and outside organizations whenever possible, with a particular emphasis on commissions and working groups that were able to actually place people on the ground and collect direct, extensive evidence of the death toll after the fact.

Unfortunately, That's not going to give us a single precise death toll in most cases, but it will give us a range due to the discrepancies in what those commissions found and how they calculated their final numbers.

When we do have a range of estimates available, we'll explain what that range is, but when it comes time to actually place these conflicts in order of death toll, we're going to rely on the median estimate within that range.

In order to keep this episode relatively focused, we're not going to get bogged down in extended explanations on where every estimate comes from or how it was calculated, unless there's some outlier circumstance that we really need to address specifically.

We're also not going to attempt our own corrections when we suspect that all available figures might represent an undercount. There are a lot of edge cases here, where conflicts like the war between the Taliban and the Islamic state in Afghanistan probably have true death tolls well above 50,000, but where hard numbers simply are not available.

As such, we're going to avoid indulging in our own conjecture and leave those discussions for another day.

We will, in certain situations, exclude otherwise reliable death toll estimates for one reason. When organizations work to measure the number of indirect war deaths in a conflict, these measurements tend to get a lot less precise in a way that makes any effort to compare these conflicts substantially less reliable.

As a result, we're going to draw a distinction between indirect war deaths as a result of concrete actions taken by an armed fighting force and indirect war deaths as a result of the larger circumstances of a conflict.

If a person dies because, let's say, they're a civilian in a besieged city where humanitarian aid shipments are being actively and deliberately blockaded by an adversary faction, or they live in a rural area where a fighting faction is deliberately poisoning water sources or raising crops, then those are the deaths that we need to see accounted for.

But death tolls that aggregate hundreds of thousands or even millions of people who died under the broader circumstances of unintentional famine, devastation of sanitation infrastructure, or other conditions that were not deliberately engineered by any faction in a conflict, well, they're death tolls that we're not going to rely on for purposes of this

Episode.

We will make a note when those very high indirect death tolls appear, but they won't be factored into our final ranking.

And speaking of our final tally, the one that we'll ultimately produce as a list of the deadliest conflicts of the 21st century, we're going to order the deadliest conflicts based on aggregate death toll, not by proportion of the total population that was killed.

In some cases, it might make sense to measure the true severity of a conflict based on the proportion of a pre-war population that dies. Take the war in Gaza, for example, where according to numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry, around 6% of Gaza's entire pre-war population is now dead.

In other conflicts, however, that percentage figure will be quite low, because a conflict happens in a place with a very large overall population. And what we don't want to do is undersell the sheer human devastation in those war zones.

For example, if we try to rely on percentage rankings, then even the highest casualty counts in Russia's invasion of Ukraine would reflect less than 1% of all Russians and less than half percent of all Ukrainians, even though the aggression of the Gaza- trigger death toll in that conflict is believed to be an order of magnitude greater than the war in gaza

Finally we are going to go strictly by death toll in each conflict rather than accounting for the number of wounded the number of internally displaced and the number of people who ultimately became international refugees again that's an interesting and worthy topic in itself but our focus today is on the 21st century's deadliest conflicts so with that rather

Long bit of housekeeping out of the way hope you thought it was worthwhile let's begin with asia and pacific okay first of all we turn to afghanistan where one of the 21st century's most prominent wars thus far was also one of its longest starting with a fast-paced series of covert operations in 2001 immediately following the 9 11 attacks in the united

States the war in afghanistan escalated rapidly into a us-led full-scale invasion working alongside afghanistan's northern alliance and troops from canada britain france germany australia and elsewhere u.s forces initiated a prolonged occupation of afghan territory in opposition to the armed islamic fundamentalist organization the taliban at the time that

The u.s kicked off its invasion the taliban controlled most of afghanistan's major population centers and worked closely with the terror organization al-qaeda which had of course carried out the 9 11 attacks in the u.s and used taliban-controlled territory in afghanistan to smuggle weapons train an estimated 10 000 or more jihadist fighters and planned

Global terror attacks at first the war in afghanistan burned hot albeit for a relatively short time afghanistan was and still is a relatively sparsely populated nation where battles were typically fought in rural highlands and where asymmetric insurgent-style fighters could rely upon the extensive cave networks that run through a large part of the country

The taliban were well accustomed to guerrilla-style warfare and only minimally equipped for other kinds of combat as such when american and coalition special operators and air power joined forces with a loose collection of autonomous warlords based in the northern part of the country the taliban lost control of most of the nation in short order the proper

Invasion portion of the war continued for only a bit over two months and in that time the balance of casualties overwhelmingly impacted the taliban as well as afghan civilians in areas where the war was fought casualty estimates during that time suggest anywhere from around 8 000 taliban fighters killed to upward of 10 or even 12 000 as well as the number of

Civilians estimated to be above 1500 but below 2500 on the opposing side the united states lost only 12 military troops and one cia officer the true extent of the casualties suffered by their allies in the afghan northern alliance are unknown although the northern alliance was heavily engaged in ground battles from the start of 2002 however the complexion of

The afghanistan war shifted and became the sort of engagement that it would remain until america's withdrawal a long intense asymmetric insurgency by the taliban and grinding air-powered dependent counter-insurgent operations led by the u.s al-qaeda leader some bin laden hadn't been captured during the initial phase of the war the newly installed afghan

Government under hamid karzai was fragile at best and while the united states endorsed and engaged in a nation-building project its efforts were both costly and ultimately ineffective meanwhile the taliban changed the way they fought expanding their reliance on improvised explosive devices scattered ambushes rocket attacks and sympathetic locals who were

Willing to hide them from foreign occupiers as the new afghanistan army faltered the u.s surged its troop deployments and the taliban surged its attacks in what became a repeating cycle in 2006 in 2015 and finally in 2021 when after signing a conditional peace deal and seeing the united states begin a withdrawal the taliban surged forward and shattered the

Resolve of the u.s-backed afghan government for the better part of 20 years despite constant u.s bombings and airstrikes special operations raids and grinding forward offensives the taliban had managed to keep up the pressure and replenish its losses proving that they were utterly impossible to eliminate completely because of the asymmetric nature of the

Fighting during most of the afghanistan conflict the war's true casualty count is still a subject of enduring debate as will be the case many of the conflicts we're going to discuss similarly because many conflict zones were so remote it's especially difficult to firmly establish the number of civilians killed as a direct result of the war versus those who

Died of disease lack of access to food or water or other indirect consequences versus those who died of what would ultimately amount to natural causes on the coalition side of the war the u.s lost 2 420 troops and intelligence operators britain lost 457 and all other coalition members lost a total of 702 while private military contractors accounted for

Another 3 917 deaths among u.s-backed afghan forces estimates of war dead cluster between 65 and 70 000 on the other side of the conflict estimates on the taliban death toll fall into a very wide range as low as a bit over 50 000 according to some estimates and up to 100 000 according to others with median estimates falling into the 80 000 range deaths among

Al-qaeda and the islamic steered khorasan organization are even harder to pin down although at least 5 000 were probably killed between the two groups finally the true number of civilian dead will likely never be known although the figures compiled by the costs of war project at brown university provide a minimum threshold according to their count 46 319

Civilians died during the course of the conflict although in 2015 the project estimated that an additional 360 000 civilians or more might have already died by that time due to indirect causes aggregating those figures we find an approximate death toll of about 202 000 people on all sides during the conflict although it's worth mentioning one more time that

Number is almost certainly an undercount nor does it account for those who've died as a result of their collaboration with the u.s during the war after the taliban took back control in 2021 just next door from afghanistan we turn to pakistan where although the nation's single largest insurgent conflict brushes right up against our casualties threshold of 50

000 in the 21st century the nation Pakistan's internal conflicts, in aggregate, go well past that.

Pakistan's defining internal insurgency involves a range of Islamist military groups, from the Islamic State in Khorasan and Al Qaeda, to the Pakistani Taliban, to an ever-changing array of groups that have come and gone with time.

Pakistan's military operations against those groups have generally been adjacent to the US-led global war on terror, with militant groups leveraging suicide attacks, ambushes, and more sustained insurgent operations in some areas.

Although similar to the United States, Pakistan's modern military and its ability to leverage air power gave it a decisive advantage, Pakistan has fought these battles on its own soil, meaning that its soldiers and civilians were in the crosshairs much more often.

Insurgent groups have proved more than capable of leveraging Pakistan's porous border with Afghanistan, as they still do today, as evidenced by an October 2025 exchange between Pakistan and Afghanistan that left dozens dead at a minimum.

Over the course of its conflict with those insurgent groups, Pakistan has engaged in multiple large-scale military offensives in order to flush out and dismantle military networks across territory, where the Pakistani government has typically been unable to extend very much authority.

Those efforts culminated in a combined operation across Pakistan in 2017, which left the Pakistani Taliban badly weakened and splintered into various disorganized factions.

But even after 2017, Pakistan still had its hands full with a range of other insurgencies most prominently in the region of Balochistan. That powerful separatist movement of ethnic Balochs has been fighting for sovereignty since the 1940s, but in the 21st century, their operations ratcheted up in the year 2000 and never really ratcheted down.

Balochistan is a very poor part of Pakistan, but it's rich in natural resources, and Pakistan has facilitated years of large-scale foreign exploitation of the territory, which local Baloch leaders insist amounts to the robbery of what should be Baloch prosperity.

In Pakistan's conflict with the Pakistani Taliban and the wider array of Islamist insurgencies, Pakistan's troop losses are a matter of a lot of debate.

The South Asia Terrorism Portal, through the Institute for Conflict Management, indicates the deaths of around 6,000 Pakistani troops and law enforcement between 2004 and today, while the Costs of War Project suggest around 9,500 killed between 2004 and just 2021. On the opposing side, the number of militants killed seems to be between 31,000 and 35,000.

The South Asia Terrorism Portal counts 10,000 civilians killed. The Cost of War Project places that number well above 25,000. In Balochistan, Pakistan indicates that 2,052 soldiers were killed from 2000 to 2019, with about 2,400 Baloch insurgents and 4,600 civilians killed during that same time, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal.

Although in more recent years, fatalities on both sides in Balochistan have become the subject of very intense debate. Taken together, those fingers indicate a death toll greater than 60,000 at a minimum across Pakistan since the year 2000, although again, an undercount here is quite likely.

Now, before we move on, we should mention that, similarly to Pakistan, the nation of India also battles internal insurgencies on several fronts.

Those insurgencies, however, do not appear to have resulted in a death toll at our threshold of 50,000 or more in the 21st century, and as such, we're not going to dive into them today. Moving back in time to the 2000s, though, we come across the civil war in Sri Lanka, where conflict raged from 1983 until its conclusion in May of 2009.

Fought between a government-controlled by Sri Lanka's ethnic majority, the Sinhalese, and militant insurgents fighting for sovereignty for their ethnic Tamil minority, the civil war had already claimed untold tens of thousands of lives by the turn of the 21st century.

But from the year 2000 onward, and primarily during the fourth and final phase of the war from 2006 through 2009, the Sri Lankan military launched a devastating campaign to retake a portion of the country that was under Tamil control.

After decades of organized resistance, the nation's Tamil rebels proved just as able to launch full-scale assaults on military targets as the military were against the Tamils, leading to a style of warfighting that was one part guerrilla insurgency and one part large land battles, as well as air and sea skirmishers where the rebels deployed at least a

Limited ability to counter the government.

To be clear, there was a prior phase of the war that wrapped up in 2000 and 2001 that saw major engagements, including one attack that left over a thousand Sri Lankan soldiers dead.

But because civilian casualty estimates from that period aggregate fatalities from that entire phase of the war, which began in 1995, while year-by-year casualty counts are scarce on the Tamil side, will focus the question of the death toll on the war's painful conclusion.

What happened during this phase of the civil war is a very sensitive topic even today in Sri Lanka. According to the nation's own government, it lost 6,261 of its own troops, whereas according to international observers, the Tamil insurgency is estimated to have lost somewhere between 15,000 and 22,000 of their fighters during that same period.

But the fates of Tamil civilians have been far harder to establish. After the war came to a close, the Sri Lankan government consistently refused to provide a firm count of civilian casualties, until international media eventually found out that the nation officially recorded 9,000 civilian deaths during the war's final phase.

However, according to a 2011 report by the United Nations, a collection of credible local reports led the body count to include that of up to 40,000 civilians may have been killed.

In the following year, another UN report, this one for internal circulation, indicated that a civilian death toll of up to 70,000 was a distinct possibility. Again, these are death tolls from just that final three years of war, with some reports suggesting that up to 20,000 people may have died during just the few final weeks.

To this day, the Sri Lankan government has blocked any attempt to launch independent investigations into the end of the war.

Attempts to ascertain a clear number of civilian casualties on the government side, or to firmly establish the number of people that either the government or the rebels worked to covertly disappear have been similarly unsuccessful.

At a minimum, independent analysis of data, from the final stage of the war, would have imply upward of 60,000 dead during just those three years, 2006-2009. Yet again, however, there's ample reason to believe that those figures are an undercount.

Now, jumping ahead to today's world, we move to the ongoing civil war in Myanmar, a multidimensional conflict that's seen the nation divided into a patchwork of government-controlled zones and self-controlled rebel strongholds.

Myanmar is among the most ethnically diverse countries on Earth, with numerous groups that demand autonomy and self-determination for their own people, and the nation has never known a state of total, truly nationwide peace since it gained its independence in 1948.

But after a coup by Myanmar's powerful military, the Tatmadaw put an end to a decade of civilian rule in 2021.

The nation's many ethnic self-protection militias then joined forces with not only each other, but a popular rebellion that sent young people streaming out of cities and into the countryside to take up arms.

In the intervening years, Myanmar's rebel alliance has proved effective in the nation's less populous areas, taking so much territory that by mid-2023, Myanmar's government could exert control over less than half the nation's territory.

Even then, the rebels kept going in a set of major offensives that brought down regional capitals and significant military bases.

Since that time, the conflict has settled down somewhat. The rebels basically captured all they could without heavier munitions or greater coordination. They lost their momentum and have since suffered limited losses in some areas, while most of the conflict settles into an active stalemate.

However, how the war ends, that's now an open question, because neither the rebels nor the military regime have the strength to consolidate control over the entire nation. As a result of the ongoing fighting, the death toll in Myanmar is expected to rise by at least thousands more by the time that this conflict wraps up.

Already, though, it's clear that the impact has been catastrophic with a death toll that far exceeds our threshold for discussion in this episode.

According to the ACLED, the death toll has climbed above 85,000 in total killed as of the time of writing. Although, because the military regime and many of Myanmar's rebel groups don't carefully track and release their casualty counts to the world, those figures may be a fairly substantial undercount.

The United Nations reports similar numbers in aggregate and notes that over three million people have been displaced in Myanmar since the 2021 coup d'etat.

The total number of civilians killed in the fighting is even harder to ascertain, not least because of the impact of a disastrous earthquake this year, in combination with genocidally motivated violence in some parts of the country at the deaths of people imprisoned in modern slavery conditions, in scam centers in other locations.

But at a minimum, well over 6,000 civilians have died as a result of this violence, not accounting for those who've died on the conflict's periphery. For our last stop in Asia before traveling across the Pacific, we've got to take a moment to talk about the conflict in Papua, a region under control of Indonesia that's otherwise known as Western New Guinea.

This is one of those rare conflicts where, although the death toll that we know about is only reported in the dozens or the hundreds each year, experts on the conflict tend to agree that the true figure is much higher.

Their estimates, unreliable as they are, tend to fall anywhere between the high tens of thousands on the low end to upwards of 300,000, perhaps even 400,000 or even higher at the absolute upper limit. According to one estimate by an outside researcher in 2007, the reliable bounds at that time were between 100,000 and 300,000.

The conflict has been ongoing since 1962, and to be clear, there's not nearly enough data to mandate that it should definitely be included in our list using the threshold of 50,000 deaths since the year 2000. But unlike any other conflict that we're going to discuss today, the circumstances are so vague that we simply have to mention it.

As for why the numbers are so hazy, it's a product of several overlapping factors at once.

Papua is a very remote, very thickly forested place where, not to get too graphic, but the combination of heavy humid jungles and an incredible density of bugs and small animals mean that bodies often disappear before they can be counted. Even when they are counted, this is a place with very little access to the outside world, especially in rural zones.

The terrain is exceptionally difficult to navigate, and few outsiders even attempt to try.

For perspective, this is one of the last remaining places on Earth where ecological expeditions can enter with the expectation that by the time they leave, they'll be able to assign their names of choice to multiple new animal and plant species that they've discovered.

Indonesia, the occupying force in this conflict, is very cagey about what it's up to at any given time, and it institutes very strict media controls, not just over what can be reported, but who, if anybody, can travel into the combat zone.

As a result of decades upon decades in which the conflict has been obscured by the fog of war, most international bureaus don't even bother to assign anybody to monitor it, while Indonesian outlets at this point, they simply know better.

What we do know is that the conflict seems to be heating up again in 2025.

In 2025, Indonesia's new leader, Prabowo Subianto, is eager to engage in counterinsurgent operations, and has experience doing so, while the interests of foreign investors, hungry for Papua's natural resources, incentivize the Indonesian military to start locking down parts of the conflict zone.

Human rights experts indicate that the pace and intensity of the fighting in Papua has increased substantially since Prabowo took office, as the Indonesian military sends thousands more of its troops into the fray, including a high proportion of units that appear quite happy to engage in atrocities against civilians once they've entered the cover of

Darkness.

Without any hard figures to rely upon, we'll be unable to include the conflict in Papua in our final evaluation, but at a minimum, we must acknowledge this crisis playing out in a conflict zone that the world just can't see.

The Americas From Asia, we travel across the Pacific Ocean to the Americas, where there is no clearer place to begin than in the nation of Mexico.

Through the bulk of the 20th century, beginning with the demand for bootleg alcohol during... the prohibition era in the united states mexico has been an ideal venue for organized drug production and trafficking operations there cartels criminal syndicates have spent decades taking advantage of a relatively weak federal government rural zones that are ideal

For drug production and a near complete lack of accountability for corrupt leaders at the local level but although many tens of thousands perished across mexico as a result of the drug trade during the after the 20th century the asymmetric mexican drug war hit the fever pitch that we know today starting with operation micojuan in 2006. ordered by president

Felipe calderon in the central micojuan state the operation represented the largest anti-cartel military offensive in mexico up until that time and by a fairly wide margin from that point forward mexico's drug war has taken on a whole other level of intensity and although different cartels and different bosses rise and fall with time they've all contributed

To a sort of brutality that even most war zones around the world couldn't match of all the conflicts we've discussed thus far the difficulty of counting the death toll in mexico's cartel wars is matched only by the insurgency in papua against indonesia but where in indonesia the challenge is so acute because of a combination of information blackouts natural

Conditions and barriers to access the situation in mexico is compounded by the fact that the cartels want to keep deaths hidden whether it's the deaths of their own soldiers or the deaths of the people they've targeted according to mexico's national registry of disappeared persons more than a hundred and twenty five thousand people have gone missing over the

Course of mexico's civil conflict with the vast majority of those people disappearing since the conflict escalated in 2006. keeping proportion with those disappearances mexican authorities have discovered multiple thousands of mass graves over the last two decades until thousands more of the disappeared have likely been cremated or had their remains handled

In other ways that would make them impossible to find in the future let alone for them to be positively identified as a missing person nor is this trend slowing down since president claudia scheinbaum took power in late 2024 around 15 000 people have disappeared and almost certainly more as at the time of writing meanwhile the fighting in the conflict is

Asymmetric multi-dimensional and highly unpredictable individual cartels don't always operate in alignment with each other and are just as likely to wipe out each other's fighters as they are to attack government soldiers they also go head to head with local militias formally declared or otherwise along with a wide variety of other criminal enterprises that

Operate on mexican soil journalists civil rights activists and the families of the dead or disappeared are all in the crosshairs as are doctors local politicians lawyers teachers and other ordinary civil servants who might risk obstructing cartel business eager to control the narrative and always opposed the idea that they could hand the government to

Victory cartels have gotten very good at collecting their own debt and in turn they've contributed even further to the veil of secrecy that rests over the entire war making matters worse as a result of this conflict it has unfortunately become very easy to kill people in mexico both as part of the drug war and for entirely unrelated reasons and because

Killers aren't exactly leaving notes on the bodies of the dead it can often be very difficult to conclusively determine whether someone was killed as a result of the conflict or just simply on the periphery for a sense of perspective according to the official united nations tally mexico recorded over 460 000 homicides between 2006 and the start of 2025 not

Including the 125 000 people still listed as missing today but who are most likely a part of the death toll even assuming lots of crossover between lists of the missing and the remains of unidentified people who appear to have died violent deaths the total number of people killed in mexico since 2006 is upward of half a million of course for our purposes

Today we can't use that total number of homicides to represent the number of people killed as the result of mexico's drug war but because again it's impossible to get a clear accounting of who in mexico was killed for what reason we've got to look at data in another way at best we can lean on the work of conflict researchers to establish the proportion of

Overall homicides in mexico that occurred as a result of the drug war according to human rights watch writing in late 2025 the best estimate was that about two-thirds of all homicides were a result of organized crime whereas el economista in may of 2023 placed the number at about 54 percent for context and to get a sense of just how difficult this is a 2020

Study by justice in mexico placed the proportion at anywhere between 44 and 80 percent going with the human rights watch figures given their recency and bearing in mind that this will always be an imperfect metric two-thirds of 460 000 confirmed homicides plus the 18 400 from january to september of 2025 is about 319 000 deaths due to the mexican cartel wars

Thus far again that number does not account for the missing a few thousand kilometers south the nation of colombia carries the scars of a somewhat similar history with two key distinctions first the far larger role of ideologically driven guerrilla warfare and second the fact that until recently it seemed as if the conflict might finally be finished like the

Cartel wars in mexico the violence at colombia goes back many decades with the start of the nation's modern conflict usually placed at around 1964. that's when the revolutionary armed forces of colombia the marxist leninist guerrilla group was founded and it would quickly become an accelerant in the conflict along with another organization known as the

National front during the 20th century and into the 21st the conflict between colombia's government and its guerrillas slowly metastasized into different forms with drug traffickers especially pablo escobar's medellin cartel taking advantage of the chaos while more and more hardline ideological groups on both the left and the right worked to violently

Advance their chosen causes the 2000s were a particularly bloody time for the nation although after a few years in which the farc rebel group appeared to be winding down their operations the colombian government managed to strike a critical ceasefire deal with the leaders of the organization by the time that truce was agreed in 2016 colombia had witnessed

You over 50 years of continuous fighting with the columbia truth commission finding its 2022 final report that about 450 000 people have been killed during the conflict in total between the years 1985 and 2018 that didn't account for the earlier years of the conflict when thousands more are believed to have perished according to the truth commission about 40

To 45 percent of all the dead during that time were killed from the year 2000 onward especially between 2000 and 2008 when a u.s led initiative called plan columbia was in its fullest effect in all that would suggest that some 180 000 to 200 000 people were killed in columbia during the 21st century alone unfortunately for columbia the decline of the farc

Organization wasn't actually the end of the nation's armed conflict with farc splinter groups and organized criminal syndicates continuing to fight for control in specific parts of the country that conflict is only heating up as holdout organizations become more proficient in the use of drones to deliver explosive payloads and as they exploit a wider

Breakdown in trust between columbia's government and its ex-rebel factions during that span of time according to updates from a range of colombian and international conflict monitors somewhere between 10 and 12 000 more people have died thus adding those numbers to the median figure offered by columbia's truth commission we reach a figure at or just above

200 000 people killed in columbia's armed conflict since the start of this century fortunately for the american supercontinent those two conflicts make up the entirety of our tour around this part of the world although the crisis in venezuela the breakdown of haiti and other conflicts have each killed thousands of people at the one quarter mark of the 21st

Century they have not hit the death toll of 50 000 that would mark a conflict for inclusion in this list haiti easily the most horrific conflict of the 21st century in the americas besides these other two has left somewhere between 25 and 35 000 people dead since the year 2000 with most of those deaths coming after the assassination of president hovanel

Moise in 2021 africa okay so from the americas we move over to africa where both in terms of our timeline and in terms of the sheer intensity of the conflict there is no other place to start than the second congo war fought from 1998 through to the signing of a peace accord in 2002 the second congo war was fought on the democratic republic of the congo soil

But it involved a total of nine african nations and dozens of asymmetric insurgencies all pouring bullets and blood into the conflict the war broke out only shortly after the end of the first congo war where the soon-to-be leader of the congo laurent desiree kabia had worked in alignment with rwanda angola and uganda to lead thousands of veteran insurgent

Fighters on a march to bring down congo's then dictator mobutu sese seiko kabila's rebel coalition had committed countless atrocities and massacres during their long push to the capital and succeeded in bringing down and exiling mobutu all without that much of a fight but after hardly more than a year with kabila filling the role of Taita, his relationship

With Rwanda and Uganda broke down, and fearing both a new round of potential ethnic violence and a decline of their influence, the Congo's two smaller neighbors backed a rebel insurgency and accused Kabila of trying to start a genocide.

The following five years, we would see the Congo, as well as a number of international backers from elsewhere in Africa, wage a back-and-forth war against Rwandan and Ugandan-backed rebel factions.

After a close call at the start of the war, Kabila was able to stop himself from being deposed outright, and soldiers from Zimbabwe and Angola soon engaged in their own battles in support of the Kabila regime.

As is the case in today's Congo war, mineral mines and other resource deposits became a prime target for both sides, with each faction swapping control over diamonds, gold, cobalt, and other resources that they could use to turn a profit.

Ceasefires were agreed and then broken, the United Nations deployed into the conflict zone and proved highly ineffective, and in 2001, Kabila was assassinated, most likely by one of about 30,000 child soldiers who were used in the conflict with that particular child soldier, working as one of Kabila's personal bodyguards at the time.

Kabila's son, Joseph, took over with the help of Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe, and the war continued from there, with the younger Kabila overseeing a slow but decisive turning of the tides against Rwanda and its rebel faction.

Regime-controlled parts of the Congo slowly began to stabilize, and eventually a ceasefire process led to the creation of a new transitional government in the Congo and the writing of a new constitution.

Despite the transitional government, the younger Kabila would retain his dictatorship through 2019, and today Congolese and Rwanda-backed factions are fighting in the Eastern Congo again. Based on the casualty counts available on the current conflict, however, we won't be discussing today's war in detail in this episode.

As for the death toll of the Second Congo War, we'd like to refer back to the distinction we made at the outset of this episode, explaining that for the sake of consistency and clarity, while we'll do our best to account for non-combat deaths that were caused directly by a warfighting faction, like deliberately engineering a famine, poisoning a water supply,

Etc., we won't be accounting for the excess deaths that often take place on the periphery of war without being engineered directly.

In this case, that's especially important to emphasize because the most widely used estimate for the death toll in the Second Congo War accounts for excess deaths during and after the war years through 2008.

That estimate by the International Rescue Committee places the total death toll at a staggering 5.4 million people, easily placing the Second Congo War at the very top of any list of 21st century conflicts, but the vast majority of those deaths were either caused by widespread famine, disease, or other non-combat means that were not engineered at scale by

Any party to the conflict.

By the International Rescue Committee's own reporting, many of those deaths happened after the war ended, while combat deaths and non-combat killings made up less than 10% of the overall total.

For our purposes, it's also important to note that a large share of those combat deaths would have happened during the late 1990s.

Between 1998 and 2001, an estimated 350,000 people or more are believed to have died a violent death during the conflict, but again, a higher proportion of the people who have died during the conflict are believed to have portion of those people would have died during the intense battles of the late 90s, and fewer would have died once the conflict started to

Wind down in 2002.

As such, we're not going to be able to provide a very precise figure, especially because casualty estimates on the conflict typically examine the war in aggregate instead of year by year, partly due to the sheer difficulty of tracking casualties in this particular war in real time.

A conservative estimate for the number of people killed outright during the Second Congo War in the 21st century would sit somewhere around 150,000, whereas the upper bound sits closer to a quarter million.

Sources

like the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, counting direct violent deaths that could be confirmed after the fact, would imply a count as low as 80,000 or fewer, although the rigors involved with actually getting a death confirmed after the conflict would suggest that those figures are an undercount. So, although it's an imprecise figure, we'll go with the conservative estimate of 150,000.

But we've got to do one more piece of bitter analysis and account for a very tightly related atrocity in the Congo's Ituri province, the Pygmy Genocide, carried out from October 2002 until January 2003.

Perpetrated by a pair of Rwanda-backed rebel groups in the nation's northeast, the Pygmy Genocide is estimated to have wiped out as many as 40% of the eastern Congolese Pygmy population in an incredibly horrific extermination campaign that drew allegations of rampant crimes against humanity, and even reports of widespread cannibalism carried out by the

Perpetrators.

Regarded as subhuman by the rebel factions, and with their flesh prized for its purported magical properties, the Pygmies of Ituri province were targeted at a moment when most international onlookers were focused on establishing and preserving the ceasefire across the rest of the nation.

Between 60,000 and 70,000 Pygmies were estimated to have been killed during the conflict, while many survivors were enslaved and nearly the entire population was displaced.

Adding that death toll to our prior number, we come to a figure of between 210,000 and 220,000 people killed as a direct result of violent means during the 21st century years of the Second Congo War. A higher death toll is likely, but unfortunately the source material on this conflict isn't sufficient to support a higher estimate with any level of precision.

And now look, if the Second Congo War and the Pygmy Genocide made for a horrific discussion, which it did, then we've got to issue an apology in advance, because that's a conflict that sets the tone for the next several that we have to cover.

Because from the Congo, we'll pivot to the Second Liberian Civil War, fought around the same time, from the spring of 1999 until the summer of 2003. Like the war in the Congo, this conflict came on the heels of Liberia's first civil war, a devastating affair fought from 1989 to 1997.

That earlier conflict saw a death toll of roughly 200,000 people, one out of every 17 people among the pre-war population, in battles characterized by stunning levels of human rights abuses.

That first war ended with the ascension of President Charles Taylor, who would let it be. libyan backing and orchestrated the conflict to overthrow his predecessor unfortunately given that taylor and his fighters had made a habit of truly incomprehensible acts of torture and massacre and that taylor had won his presidential campaign with the slogan quote he

Killed my ma he killed my pa but i will vote for him it really shouldn't have been a surprise that the situation in liberia was going to keep being awful but charles taylor wasn't only a despot at home in liberia instead he very quickly made a point of backing insurgencies in neighboring countries and in a response that a more sane leader might have seen

Coming those neighboring countries then backed insurgencies to fight him those insurgents fighting in a coalition led by the aptly named organization of displaced liberians staged an invasion of the country from neighboring guinea which poured money and military hardware into the rebel offensive in response taylor mobilized not only the nation's military but

A wide range of loyal and semi-loyal militia factions and liberia very quickly descended into chaos once again in a slow grinding asymmetric and run offensive liberia's rebels worked their way to the outskirts of the capital after about three years and after their momentum slowed and started to reverse a second insurgency popped up in the liberian south

Backed by the ivory coast under pressure from all sides besieged in a capital city that was shelled relentlessly by the rebels as the country was taken over taylor finally resigned in august of 2003 thus collapsing his government and ceding power to a transitional government the second liberian civil war was known more for its brutality than the sheer death

Toll with child soldiers becoming a fixture of the conflict on both sides and often becoming addicted to cocaine and other drugs in a deliberate effort by their military superiors to establish and keep control partially because of the sheer scale of the devastation already achieved during the country's first civil war its second go around came with a much

Lower death toll estimated at around 50 000 fighters and civilians as opposed to that figure of 200 000 during the prior conflict again like the second congo war this is a conflict that did straddle the 20th and 21st centuries but in this case the vast majority of the fighting including the most intense phases all took place from the year 2000 onward as such

We'll assume that the 21st century death toll from this war is only slightly less than the overall death toll and from liberia we turn to sudan where we're going to have to stay for a while as we discuss three major conflicts in sequence the first is the war in darfur starting in february 2003 and arguably ongoing today depending on how you distinguish the

End of one conflict and the start of another for our purposes though and to distinguish between this conflict and the ongoing war in sudan's darfur region we'll discuss the war in darfur from its start in 2003 until the negotiation of a ceasefire deal starting in 2010 that put a temporary stop to the worst of the fighting during that span of time the war in

Darfur was fought between one side made up of the sudanese military and state alongside sudanese arab nomadic militias known as the Janjaweed and the other side, made up of rebel groups drawing from the area's Black African ethnic groups like the Fur, Zakawa, and Masalat.

First organized to defend against Janjaweed attacks on Black African villagers, these rebel groups grew in strength during the early 2000s and proved able to take advantage of the Sudanese army's over-commitment of its forces to other parts of the country, trying to maintain its hold on territory in the late stages of another conflict, the Second Sudanese

Civil War.

But, although the rebels in Darfur proved able to run circles around the Sudanese army on the ground, their impressive early victories would be their undoing.

Instead of trying to suppress the Darfur resistance themselves, the Sudanese government essentially endorsed the Janjaweed militias to handle the fight themselves, drawing upon government air support whenever possible.

After a major rebel victory, like in the city of Al-Fasha, the Janjaweed were set loose upon the region, and, well, thus the Darfur genocide began.

Over the following years, Janjaweed fighters would carry out unpredictable and overwhelming attacks against not only the rebel opposition, but the civilian communities that those rebels were trying to protect.

Sudan's rural population centers, and specifically the ones inhabited mostly by non-Arab residents, took the worst of it, with villagers razed to the ground, ordinary people killed indiscriminately, and brutal sexual violence leveraged as a weapon of war.

By 2004, Human Rights Watch had issued a report detailing comprehensive allegations of ethnic cleansing, but that report, and others like it, were not enough to prompt an effective intervention in the conflict.

In Darfur, the genocide continued in force for multiple years before slowing down around mid-2005, as tensions ramped up between Sudan and neighboring Chad. The wider Darfur war would continue, cycling through periods of greater or lesser intensity through 2010, and after a long pause, it picked back up again in 2013.

The early phase of the Darfur conflict, and with it the Darfur genocide, is another of those cases where non-combatant deaths on the periphery of the war make up a large share of the overall deaths.

In this case, however, a high proportion of those non-combat deaths were due to starvation, food shortages, and the spread of disease in a way that was almost entirely engineered.

This is why we made our earlier distinction about non-combat deaths, where sometimes starvation and disease are facts of life in a war zone, because alleviating those conditions is very difficult when a war is ongoing, but sometimes starvation and disease are themselves used as weapons of war.

The Darfur genocide was very much the latter, with Janjaweed militias in particular leveraging scorched-earth campaigns to systematically destroy agricultural lands, herds of livestock, sanitation, and clean water infrastructure, and mechanisms through which ordinary people might have received aid.

As such, while taking the full death toll from the Darfur genocide will include some people who typically wouldn't be a part of our inclusion group, those people make up a relatively small share of the total killed as a result of the genocide.

That figure, according to estimates that account for the long tail of ongoing ethnic killings after the worst of the violence have passed, is roughly 330. It's about 327 thousand people, and rice.

It's good to be 139 thousand people. It's about 338 hundred people. I've got 336 hundred people.

I am fascinated by our third class. I've got 347 thousand people. The death, the added death toll from Janjaweed, rebel, and Sudanese military combatants is difficult to place, given that all sides took care to obscure their casualty figures, and many dead among the rebels were counted as victims of the large genocide.

According to a United Nations estimate, around 15,500 people were killed in battles from 2003 to 2007, not including instances where villages or towns were overrun with little or no resistance, and, accounting for the following years of war until 2010, will raise our rough estimate of overall death to 320,000.

We will mention, however, that death toll estimates for the Darfur conflict tend to vary widely. For example, a January 2010 study published in The Lancet established a range for the overall death toll potentially as low as 178,000 or as high as 461,000.

From Darfur, we move to the lands known today as South Sudan, where we've got talk about the South Sudanese Civil War. Starting in December of 2013, less than two and a half years after South Sudan gained its independence, the war was ultimately a battle between two men who remain political giants in South Sudan even today.

The nation's current president, Salva Keir, and the man who was vice president until he was suspended and put on trial in 2005, Rik Machar.

Back in 2013, Keir had accused Machar of trying to stage a coup, an allegation that quickly led to a political split in the country's ruling faction between Keir's loyalists and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement, or SPLM, and Machar's faction, the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement in Opposition, or SPLMIO.

For the sake of clarity, though, we'll refer to Keir's faction as the South Sudanese Government, and Machar's faction as the rebel side of the conflict.

The Civil War in South Sudan was a mess of competing and factional interests on all sides, ceasefires made, broken, and made again, and an especially bitter dimension of ethnic rivalry between the nation's Dinka People, represented by Salva Keir, and the Nuer People, represented by Machar.

Since South Sudan was such a young nation, with its financial and military assets easy to divide between different fighting factions, and with its military arsenal quite lacking, it was a prime location for a nominally government faction and a nominally rebel faction to fight on equal footing.

That fighting was asymmetric, but fought at large scale in battles where lucrative oil fields and other concentrated resources were sought after by both sides.

The war very quickly became a favorite of global arms traffickers, sourcing weapons and conducting deliveries from all over the world, while tens of thousands of child soldiers are thought to have been forced to fight in the conflict across both sides.

Massacres in Juba in 2013, in Bentiu in 2014, and elsewhere during the war made clear that ethnic cleansing was a priority for both sides. For perspective, the events of the 2013 Juba massacre alone, conducted over the span of just four days, were enough, by itself, to ensure that the South Sudanese Civil War was included on this list.

Over that four day span, Dinka soldiers are believed to have slaughtered over 47,000 Nu' civilians with the true death. death toll most likely having crested well past 50,000.

Looking at the Civil War in its entirety, estimates of excess deaths during the conflict placed the death toll well above 400,000, and although, again, a high share of those deaths were due to famine, this was, yet again, a situation where those famines had been deliberately engineered as starvation attacks on targeted civilian populations.

According to a 2018 study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, published at a time when the bulk of fighting had already taken place, a conservative estimate of the death toll at that time stood at 383,000, with 190,000 of those deaths being directly attributable to acts of violence.

Accounting for the lower levels of violence after 2018, we'll place our total death toll estimate in line with most figures on the conflict, roughly 400,000, although, again, we should bear in mind that specific figure is probably an undercount.

Rounding out our explanation of conflicts in Sudan, we've got to zero in on the civil war that's happening right now fought between the military regime that rules Sudan today, and their former ally, a paramilitary organization known as the Rapid Support Forces.

Quietly backed by the United Arab Emirates and secretly supported by a stunning range of other world governments, the Rapid Support Forces today hold most of the Darfur region, while the Sudanese Armed Forces, or SAF, hold the capital city of Khartoum and most of the country's east.

The current conflict began in 2023, after Sudan's military staged a coup in 2021 with the help of the RSF, but then started to try and reinforce their political position over the RSF, with the resulting power-sharing dispute eventually devolving all the way into full-scale war.

The conflict has seen both the RSF and the SAF carried out major military offensives, using heavy military equipment and modern drone technology, while battles over Sudan's capital city of Khartoum saw it fall under RSF control for months before eventually being recaptured by the SAF.

The SAF has moved its actual seat of power to Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast, while the RSF has focused its energy on consolidating control over the Darfur region.

Critically, the RSF are direct successors to the Janjaweed militias of the Darfur genocide, taking over territory with the clear intent to ethnically cleanse those lands and finish the job that was started by their Janjaweed fathers and uncles.

Today, the RSF has essentially overtaken the Darfur region, the Sudanese armed forces have consolidated their control over a portion of the country's east, and, as of the time of writing, both sides are pivoting into the first phases of what's expected to be a new campaign in the central part of the country.

And after years in which this conflict has been outright ignored by most of the world, and especially the global press, the world has received the wake-up call that experts on the conflict have been warning about for years. That of course is the ethnic cleansing of the city of El Fasha after it fell under RSF control in October 2025.

Calculating a death toll for the Sudanese Civil War is a notoriously tricky business due to a combination of incomplete data collection, international obfuscation of the war by- both the rsf and the saf and a relative lack of outside observers present in the conflict zone that's not to mention the number of people who die in areas where the nation's health

Infrastructure has already been destroyed meaning that there's not even a mechanism in place to keep a basic local tally the estimates we do have however are stunning in late 2024 le mans published a report suggesting that over 150 000 people might have died in under two years of fighting up until that time not even accounting for 2025's battles over

Khartoum al-fasha and the wider darfur region an even more damning report by the london school of hygiene and tropical medicine found in november of 2024 that over 61 000 people may have died just in sudan's khartoum state just from april of 2023 to june of 2024. the context during that span of time things were bad in khartoum state but it wasn't where the

Really intense fighting was taking place implying that elsewhere in sudan at that time and ever since the death toll may have been building into the multiple hundreds of thousands despite that bleak estimate the devastation in and around the city of al-fasha in late 2025 may still represent the most intense bloodletting of the civil war thus far before the

City was captured by the rsf there were an estimated 260 000 people besieged inside the city nearly all of them likely to be targets of the rsf's campaign of ethnic cleansing as of now however the number of people known to have made it to safe territory alive is only in the tens of thousands as researcher nathaniel raymond of the humanitarian research lab at

Yale university explained it after the fact quote more people could have died in 10 days than have died in the past two years of the war in gaza at the time of that statement the death toll in the gaza strip stood at over 68 000. look over the course of this episode we've said it several times already and we will say it again as we move on in so many of

These conflicts we should expect that the death toll we'll work with is an undercount but that problem is worse for sudan's ongoing civil war than it is for any of the other conflicts that we'll discuss due to the sheer lack of reliable information coming out of sudan today we'll work with an approximate death toll somewhere between 175 000 and 450 000 dead

Factoring in the various estimates of the death and destruction that followed the rsf's capture of elf asha erring on the side of caution will settle at a figure of around 250 000 taking the median of expert estimates before the fall of elf asha and adjusting with the median of expert estimates on the additional death toll once elf asha was captured but if

The true death death toll in sudan today would double that or even triple that well considering what we know about how this conflict has gone we certainly wouldn't be surprised now east of sudan we've got to touch on the nation of somalia where a civil war has been ongoing in one form or another since the 1980s in the 21st century however somalia's civil

Conflicts have unfolded in a place already regarded as a failed state by most of the world long after pivotal moments like the Battle of Mogadishu had already played out.

The worst of the modern-day violence has come at a few key inflection points, an invasion by Ethiopia starting in 2006, the rise of the jihadist organization al-Shabaab starting in the late 2000s, and the subsequent resurgence of al-Shabaab over the last couple of years.

All the while, the nation has been the site of lower-grade fighting on numerous fronts, whether it's between the federal government and Somalia's breakaway states, or between Somalia's breakaway states fighting each other, or al-Shabaab fighting local militias, or the Islamic State rearing its head, or battles with organized criminal syndicates and pirate

Gangs.

Even then, we're still leaving elements of the conflict out because, quite frankly, we just don't have the time to do Somalia's internal security nightmare very much justice. When viewed in aggregate, the overlapping conflicts in Somalia come in with a death toll reaching well above 100,000.

According to the ACLED, for example, Somalia has witnessed somewhere around 80,000 verifiable deaths as of late 2025, since the start of the al-Shabaab conflict.

Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia is believed to have resulted in at least around 4,000 deaths on the Ethiopian side, whereas Ethiopia likely killed at least several thousand Somali fighters, with those figures largely undercounted, while a Mogadishu-based NGO estimated in late 2008 that at least 16,200 civilians have been killed.

The Islamic State in Somalia is known to have killed at least several hundred more people while taking hundreds of casualties itself, and the separate but interrelated Lassanod conflict in the Somali north has likely left thousands dead, although precise figures are extremely difficult to come by.

Add all those rough approximations together, and you'll end up someplace north of 110,000 killed in Somalia since the year 2000, without accounting for the many, many, many smaller skirmishers and engagements that have taken place during that same time.

Between an abysmal quality of record-keeping nationwide, and a general disinterest in reporting accurate counts of war dead, we expect the true toll yet again to be higher than the figures we've stated. For reference, the highest range estimates on deaths across the totality of Somalia's modern conflict since 1991 hit a count of one million people or more.

But the final African conflict on our list might have been the most devastating of all.

The Tigray War fought between the nation of Ethiopia and a rebel faction representing Ethiopia's Tigray people, the Tigray People's Liberation Front, or TPLF.

Fought over a span of precisely two years, from 3rd November 2020 till 3rd November 2022, the Tigray War saw the TPLF fight not only the forces of the Ethiopian government, but also the military of its neighbor, Eritrea.

Ethiopia had been walking the path to war since 2012, when a prominent Tigray leader and the founder of the TPLF, Melezenawi, died while serving as the nation's prime minister.

After several years of growing discontent with the success of the Tigray, watched as Ethiopia's current leader, Abiy Ahmed, was elevated to the post. and promptly chose to end a 20-year border conflict with Eritrea, the TPLF's longtime regional rival.

After he gained power, Abiy Ahmed quickly began to consolidate control, trying to strip away influence from the once-powerful Tigray.

After the TPLF attempted to hold their own elections in the Tigray region in September of 2020, the resulting constitutional crisis led Ethiopia and Eritrea to start building up forces for a potential operation to regain control.

The TPLF launched a pre-emptive attack against an Ethiopian military headquarters, and from there, the war was underway. Very soon after the conflict began, both sides made clear precisely what sort of war they intended to wage.

A few days after their initial attack, fighters loyal to the TPLF massacred over 600 civilians, mostly of the Amhara ethnicity in the town of Maikadra, and a few days later, an Amhara militia known as the Farno carried out their own massacre of nearly 100 Tigrayans.

Amhara fighters joined forces with the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments, and before long, the Tigray had unified their many sub-malitias into the Tigray defense forces and launched an asymmetric guerrilla campaign from the mountains of the Tigray region. Forces on all sides continued to carry out massacres.

Eritrea staged a partial invasion of the Tigray region, and with the help of a supportive local population that was outraged by the war crimes perpetrated against their people, Tigrayan forces were able to draw their adversaries into an extended war of attrition.

Another major ethnic group, the Oromo, got in on the fight alongside the Tigray, and eventually enough rebel groups had joined the fray that the Tigray were able to lead the creation of a new rebel coalition.

Ultimately, the tide turned at the end of 2021, and the two sides entered a ceasefire until a three-month span of intense fighting in the latter half of 2022, when Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Farno engaged Tigrayans in a multi-front offensive paired with ruinous aerial bombing campaigns.

According to global sources reporting on the fighting at the time, the death toll in Ethiopia may well have strayed into the tens of thousands every week, with one estimate by a regional specialist based in Oslo suggesting that 100,000 people or more may have been killed over a span of time lasting less than a single month.

By the time the conflict ended, international sources agreed that the war had been one of, if not the deadliest war of the 21st century to that point.

According to a research group working out at the University of Ghent, a combination of massacres, indiscriminate attacks, and engineered starvation in contested areas may have left anywhere from 300,000 to 400,000 civilians dead, along with between 200,000 and 300,000 warfighters from all sides who had perished during the conflict.

Ethiopian officials have attempted to downplay the overall total, although it's really saying something that their downplayed estimates still cluster in the 80,000 to 100,000 range.

Multiple years after the war's end, most experts agree that the figure is somewhere between 350,000 and 600,000 people killed, with the true number probably on the higher end there.

In the aftermath, all sides have been scrutinized for committing what appears to have been an incredible volume of war crimes, including the use of torture, sexual violence, and indiscriminate or extrajudicial executions in every direction at once, and a collective attempt by Ethiopia, Eritrea, Vufano, and their allies of trying to perpetrate a genocide

Against the Tigrayans.

The Tigray's acts of ethnic cleansing towards the Amhara can't be ignored either, and nor can intense, albeit less prevalent, acts of repression used against the Oromo.

Perhaps worst of all, the latest news at the time of writing suggests that this war may begin again soon, with news from Ethiopia's afar region indicating that Tigray forces have seized several villages and have been met with drone strikes by the Ethiopian government.

Europe and the Middle East So, from Africa, we turn to the final phase of our grisly world tour, Europe and the Middle East. We'll kick things off in Europe, where we have two conflicts to consider, and in what should be a surprise to absolutely nobody, they both involve Russia.

The first of those two conflicts was the Second Chechen War, a conflict that split cleanly into two phases, a full-scale invasion of the region of Chechnya by Russia from August of 1999 until April of 2000, and a nearly nine-year-long period of asymmetric insurgency thereafter.

Although some of the most intense fighting of the war took place in those waning months of 1999, the siege of the city of Grozny, the cascade of successive defeats suffered by Chechnya's warlords, and the nearly decade-long campaign by Russia to stamp out the Chechen insurgency all fall within the span of time that we're targeting today.

As should be probably obvious, given that we're calling this conflict the Second Chechen War, there was a first Chechen War after the fall of the Soviet Union, during which time Chechnya attempted to gain its sovereignty rather than becoming a part of Russia.

That war had concluded by 1996 with an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 people killed over the course of the conflict, including a likely civilian death toll above 40,000. After that earlier conflict, Chechnya had been divided, in practice, between a number of powerful warlords and the notoriously unstable region had never lost its independence streak.

In the weeks before the Second War broke out, a key Chechen warlord named Shamil Basayev had led a failed invasion into neighboring Dagestan and had been accused of a series of bombings of Russian apartment blocks, although today many experts suggest that those bombings were actually false flag attacks to build justification for a Chechen full-scale war.

In those retellings, the hope in Moscow was that an ongoing war would help the nation's new prime minister, a little-known former spy named Vladimir Putin, ascend to the presidency as his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, had hoped.

After the apartment bombings and the failed invasion of Dagestan, Russia leveraged the full force of its military to address the Chechen threat, first in a heavy bombing campaign that left at least several hundred civilians dead and tens of thousands displaced, and then with a full-scale land invasion.

Starting in October of 1999, Russian troops... crept across the region in a brutal assault, combining aerial bombardment and all-out artillery shelling to level whatever opposition lay ahead of them.

But it was at the start of the year 2000, almost exactly, that the worst of Russia's offensive got underway. At that time, Russia was laying siege to the capital city of Chechnya, Grozny, where, in mid-January, Russia decided that it had softened up the city to the point that a full-scale invasion was justifiable.

After Grozny fell in early February, Russia had the momentum that it needed to smash through the Chechen resistance elsewhere, albeit while still taking heavy casualties.

Russian forces carried out numerous massacres of civilians, and missile or bombing attacks could kill dozens of civilians at a time in areas that Russia hadn't yet captured.

Although Russia then, as now, is widely understood to have underreported its casualties, its offensives across Chechnya during this time were very costly, most likely claiming the lives of several thousand soldiers.

By May of 2000, Russia had wrapped up the main thrust of its offensive and installed a Russia-friendly leader, Ahmad Kadyrov, whose son Ramzan still rules Chechnya with an iron fist to date.

For the following several years, the remaining Chechen resistance turned to asymmetric warfare, launching raids, hit-and-run ambushes, suicide bombings, and hostage-taking attacks, among others, while assassinating every pro-Russian collaborator they could reach, including Ahmad Kadyrov himself.

Russia's counterinsurgent campaign was about as repressive as one might expect from a fighting force that had already been accused of the routine use of torture, extraditial executions, and even organ harvesting.

Before we can discuss known or suspected casualties, we've got to account for the disappearances estimated by Western rights groups to include the disappearances of over 5,000 Chechen civilians since the start of the Second Chechen War, not even accounting for Chechen fighters.

Amnesty International and other rights groups suggest that upward of 25,000 additional civilians died from 1999 onwards, although Chechen sources have, at times, indicated an even higher death toll, sometimes as high as 300,000 civilians between the two wars across Chechnya.

Russia formally acknowledges the killing of up to 6,300 soldiers and 1,072 Russia-friendly Chechen police, while outside estimates tend to cluster in the 9,000 to 15,000 range on the pro-Russia side.

The Union of the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia, an NGO that attempted to keep its own death toll, estimated about 14,000 Russian soldiers killed in Chechnya from 1999 through 2005.

On the insurgent side, Russia claims to have killed about 16,000 Chechen fighters, whereas outside estimates vary widely and are based on such sparse data that even the bounds of a wide range are difficult to establish.

In 2005, that Chechen warlord that we mentioned earlier, Shamil Basayev, claimed in an interview that only 3,500 Chechens have been killed, although that was almost certainly a severe undercount. Finally, over 600 Russians were killed on Russian soil during the war.

In all, counting both the dead and the disappeared, conservative estimates on all sides would suggest a death toll of 40,000 or less, while on the high end, an aggregation of reliable enough estimates would climb well over 60,000.

For that reason, including the Second Chechen War in this discussion at all might be a bit controversial, as it is indeed an edge case, but by our judgment, it merits inclusion nonetheless. The other Russia-involved conflict in this section, however, is about as far from an edge case as we could possibly get.

That, of course, would be Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine, where, between its annexation of Crimea, its low-grade war in the Donbass region, and the full-scale invasion that started in 2022, Russia has over 11 years of fighting to answer for. The death toll from those two earlier phases of war is relatively easy to establish.

A mere six people who were killed during the takeover of Crimea, and roughly 3,400 civilians, 4,400 Ukrainian troops, and 6,500 Russian or pro-Russian fighters during the Donbass conflict, according to numbers from the UN, through to the end of 2021.

With respect to the people who lost their lives during those early exchanges, we're going to move directly into Russia's full-scale invasion, because in comparison, those deaths in Crimea and the Donbass are hardly more than a rounding error.

Now, we'd imagine that any person who's made it this deep into an episode on the death toll of 21st century wars is already familiar with at least a basic outline of the Ukraine conflict, but for posterity's sake, we'll give at least a brief overview, as we've done with the other conflicts in our video today.

After decades of maintaining a rather tenuous balance with Russia in the post-Soviet world, Ukraine was placed on the path to war with Moscow during and after its Euro-made uprising in 2014, when Russia-backed President Viktor Yanukovych was forced to flee the country after trying to withdraw Ukraine from an association agreement with the European Union.

Russia, Anis, the Isthmus of Crimea, very quickly afterward, then sponsored and supported separatist insurgencies in Ukraine's Far Eastern Donbass region, and then spent years building a pretext to march on Kyiv.

That pretext, based mostly on fabrications issued forth from the Kremlin, called on Russia to denazify a purportedly fascist Ukrainian government, which wasn't actually a thing, while integrating Ukraine's, quote, historically Russian lands, and insisting that Russia had to push back against NATO expansion, because by Moscow's logic, NATO adding more members

Is tantamount to NATO being a mortal threat to Russian sovereignty.

And we've been rolling our eyes here at warfronts for almost four years now, and you are more than welcome to join us.

In practice, an invasion that Russia clearly intended to be an open-and-shut affair quickly devolved into a grinding and exceptionally costly offensive.

After Russia's troop columns stalled and met heavy resistance en route to Kyiv, Ukrainian forces got to work destroying vulnerable Russian units where they could, entrenching defensive positions where they had the opportunity, and conceding to the formation of new battle lines when they were forced to do so.

With the benefit of lots of NATO standard armaments streaming across the border as well as a range of innovations in drone technology, Ukraine has been able to hold Russia for nearly four years straight, conceding only minor territorial losses in most areas, launching a counter-invasion into Kursk and striking deep into Russian. territory with missiles and

Drones while denying Russia control of Ukrainian airspace.

Russia, of course, has achieved plenty of its own grim victories, including many that happened in collaboration with non-state mercenary forces, and it's been able to pull Ukraine into a war of sheer attrition, knowing that if Moscow can make the conflict hinge on both sides' relative ability to waste lives and fire artillery shells, then that's a battle

That Russia will eventually win.

In keeping with that style of warfare, Ukrainian invasion has proved to be immensely costly on both sides, but because both Ukraine and Russia are quite diligent about downplaying their losses and exaggerating each other's, outside observers have been forced to rely on less-than-ideal methods for data collection to try and estimate the true cost of the war.

As of late 2025, the most recent, widely accepted estimate on the Russian side comes from America's Center for Strategic and International Studies, or CSIS.

In mid-2025, a CSIS report placed the total number of Russian casualties at more than 950,000, with the number of Russian soldiers killed as high as 250,000. According to that same study, Ukraine appears to have suffered the deaths of anywhere from 60,000 to 100,000 of its own soldiers killed, with casualties up to 400,000 in total.

That discrepancy is partially explained by Russia's reliance on the undertrained, less-than-capable conscripts, or even fighters recruited out of Russian prisons to essentially serve as bullet sponges, while Ukraine's greater ability to leverage drone technology and kill Russian personnel also makes a real difference.

On both the Russian and the Ukrainian sides, other analysis suggests that the death toll could be far higher.

Estimates by the BBC, in collaboration with the independent and anti-Putin Russian outlet MediaZona, placed the Russian death toll as high as 317,000 by October of 2025, by pairing the number of deaths that could be tracked from Russian cemetery additions, obituaries, and other clear indicators of a deceased person, with expert insights on the proportion of

Deaths that could or couldn't be accounted for using those methods.

In late 2025, purportedly leaked Russian data suggested that nearly 87,000 soldiers have been killed from just January through to August of 2025, plus about 34,000 missing.

Subsequent analysis by The Economist produced similar numbers in 2025, suggesting that this year, as many as five Russian soldiers have been killed for every one Ukrainian, and that, as of right now, one of every 100 Russian men under 60 at the start of the invasion in 2022 may have already been killed on the battlefields of Ukraine.

As for Ukraine, the widely accepted figures produced by UA losses documented just a bit under 80,000 Ukrainian fighters dead by the end of October 2025, along with about 82,000 missing in action, so about 162,000 overall, although deserters are suspected to account for a fair proportion of the missing.

As for civilians, the official estimate from the United Nations suggested about 14,400 Ukrainian civilians dead and several hundred more in Russia, although it acknowledges that those figures are almost certainly short of the true total.

In aggregate, combining the CSIS numbers on war dead and the United Nations numbers on civilians, the total number of dead across both sides, counting the war in Donbass, could be close to or just past 400,000 dead at the time of writing.

Of course, if we're going to dig at Russia for its misadventures in Chechnya and Ukraine, then we should at least give a little nod to the mortally offended Putin fanboys who've showed up in the comments section and pivot directly to America's misadventures in Iraq.

By the way, just a quick word to any of those specific viewers who are still watching, the fact that the other guy also does atrocities doesn't make your atrocities any less atrocious.

In any case, America's 2003 invasion of Iraq and its subsequent many years of occupation was a central part of the United States' war on terror in the wake of the 9-11 attacks in 2001.

The United States had already invaded Iraq before, in the early 1990s, pushing back against longtime dictator Saddam Hussein, but declining the opportunity to topple him outright.

Hussein had long had a certain fondness for the idea of weapons of mass destruction, and after Iraq suspended its cooperation with the UN over site inspections in 1998, suspicions began to grow in Washington that Hussein was sitting on a growing stockpile of WMDs.

After 9-11, America's Bush administration drew upon that speculation to justify the use of force against Iraq's regime, although in hindsight, those claims of weapons of mass destruction turned out to be little more than a farce.

By the time that became obvious, however, Saddam Hussein had long since been toppled from power in a shock and awe offensive that brought together dozens of countries from all across the globe. The conflict itself was fought in two phases, similar to America's operations in Afghanistan, or, for that matter, Russia's operations in Chechnya.

An early, one-sided offensive in which US military might was more than able to deal with the resistance that the Iraqi regime offered, and a second, much longer phase of war characterized by asymmetric and constant resistance.

The first phase took hardly six weeks before Saddam Hussein himself had been captured, with Iraq losing an estimated 9,200 combatants alongside roughly 3,750 civilian fatalities, while the United States lost just 139 of its troops, and the United Kingdom lost just 33.

After that, however, it was time for an extended occupation where the United States and its allies worked to build a pro-Western government to replace the old one while trying their best to stomp out a never-ending series of insurgencies.

For the first couple of years, those insurgent groups were made up of pro-Saddam loyalists and people disenfranchised by the collapse of the old regime. After that, it was first a group of jihadist extremists, including many former Saddam loyalists who'd found their way to the intersection of extreme religious fundamentalism and non-state violence.

Then, the US and its coalition dealt with an influx of foreign fighters, al-Qaeda operatives, and new jihadist insurgencies and militias that forced battles in places like Fallujah.

After that, Iraq descended into full-scale civil war between Shia and Sunni groups, and on, and on, and on it went until American combat troops finally withdrew from Iraq in 2011.

When it comes to the question of casualty, from the iraq war there are portions of the death toll that are relatively easy to account for and others that have become very sore subjects for coalition nations especially the united states on the coalition side the figures are clear the united states endured the losses of 4 508 troops the british lost 179 and

All other coalition nations lost a cumulative 139 3650 private military contractors were killed along with 17 960 members of iraq's u.s-backed security forces according to statistics from washington u.s-aligned militias lost at least another thousand although those numbers can be really rather hazy we've already mentioned the roughly 9 200 iraqi troops

Believed to have died before the u.s fully dismantled the pre-invasion regime but according to coalition and pro-us iraqi figures another 26 to 28 000 iraqi insurgents were killed after the fall of baghdad 139 journalists lost their lives but where the numbers get a good deal more controversial is in the civilian casualties according to the iraq body count

Project up to 113 728 civilians were killed over the course of the war although about 10 000 of those are in dispute an associated press investigation identified 110 600 iraqis killed in total by april of 2009 although that included the war debt other estimates however strayed far higher the lancet suggested between about 400 000 and 950 000 total deaths

Over the course of the war london-based orb international appalling group released the highest estimate of any outlet somewhere between 946 000 and 1.12 million deaths in total although those figures have been widely dismissed because of the methods used to collect them unfortunately we here at warfronts don't have any additional insight to offer here after

All if we did we probably wouldn't bury it this deep into an episode all we can do is follow the judgment of expert analysis outside iraq and the united states ideally ones with a bit less skin in the game which generally hold that it's best to go with a figure somewhere around what the iraq body count project established with roughly 200 000 civilian deaths

During the conflict plus or minus about 13 000. add these together with all the other reported figures and we come to between 250 and 275 000 dead over the course of the entire war of course as long as we are in iraq it is only a short journey to neighboring syria where the syrian civil war becomes a hellscape all its own across more than a decade of

Continuous fighting although syria wasn't the only civil war to come out of the arab spring it's widely recognized as the most costly of the post-2011 conflicts across the arab world like most middle eastern conflicts of that period the syrian civil war began as a series of protests in this case targeting the assad family dynasty that had ruled syria for the

Prior several decades after the nation's dictator at that time bashar al-assad responded with a series of crackdowns the nation's opposition morphed into an insurgency and before long the conflict had spawned more independent fighting factions than nearly any other in recent memory at various points during the conflict is The Middle East's Kurdish population

Had created and then managed to defend an autonomous Kurdish-led republic that still stands today, the Free Syrian Army.

The Free Syrian Army had first swelled in strength and then splintered into a wide variety of pro-democracy and Islamist factions.

Turkey had staged a ground invasion, Russia, Iran, Europe, and the United States each got involved, and jihadist organizations from al-Qaeda to the Islamic State had made their own meaningful impact on the course of the war.

It wasn't until nearly 14 years after the conflict began in December of 2024 that a rebel coalition led by the man in charge of Syria today, the former jihadist fighter Ahmed al-Sharah, managed to stage a lightning assault and overthrow the regime in Damascus.

Now, whether the Syrians of war is actually over or simply changed its shape in 2025 and beyond is a matter of some controversy, but if we define the Syrians of war as the war to oust Bashar al-Assad, then we can at least look back in retrospect and evaluate the vast majority of the conflict.

Although, as usual, it's very difficult to establish an exact count of the war dead in Syria, it's relatively straightforward in this conflict to at least zero in on an approximate range.

By the year 2021, which is when the war mostly settled into a series of parallel stalemates until the 2024 assault that brought down Assad, the United Nations had catalogued a minimum count of the dead that stood at 580,000.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights established a similar figure by the end of 2024, counting 347,000 combatants and just shy of 200,000 civilians, including corpses that were not positively identified but that were documented as killed.

In that same estimate, the observatory estimated that another 110,000 people had been killed without their deaths being documented, whatever it may be worth, those numbers would be at least partially explained by the Assad government's massive internal repression apparatus, estimated to have disappeared at least several tens of thousands of Syrians without a

Trace.

All told, estimates by the observatory, the UN, and other sources tend to agree that the death toll is somewhere above 500,000 in total, and somewhere below 675,000.

Now, before we move on, we should take a moment to note that even when we combine the casualties of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the Syrian civil war, we still fall short of the total number of dead between those two nations in the 21st century.

That's because, thus far, we haven't accounted for the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, starting when the group began to make waves in Iraq and Syria in 2013 and continuing through to the present day.

Because of the number of dead that we'd have to double count between the Syrian civil war and the war against Islamic State, we won't be speaking about the conflict separately in this episode. Subtract the death toll on Syria, and the additional fighting in Iraq doesn't quite meet the threshold of casualties that we've laid out.

But if you'd like to understand the history of the conflict in Iraq and Syria in the 21st century, it is simply impossible not to at least acknowledge it. Around the same time that the Syrian civil war was at its height, the world paid considerably less anything. attention to another ruinous conflict, this time in the invasion of Yemen.

Like the war in Syria, the Yemeni Civil War was a product of the Arab Spring, where the Yemeni Revolution overthrew the nation's long-time government under Ali Abdullah's lair.

But instead of leading Yemen toward a brighter future, the 2011 uprising set the stage for a much larger showdown. During the 20th century, Yemen had been partitioned in two, in a split that still dictates the way that Yemen works even today.

As one of the many results of that partition and eventual violent reunification, a large religious minority in Yemen, known as the Zaydis, had long since learned to organize and defend themselves.

Led by a group called Ansar Allah, but better known today as the Houthis, Yemen's Zaydi population had been engaged in low-grade fighting with the Yemeni government since the early 2000s.

During that phase of political turmoil that followed the 2011 revolution, the Houthis decided to take up arms against the nation's new government, culminating with their decision to capture the nation's presidential compound in 2015 to prevent the breakup of the country into six federal states. From that point forward, all hell broke loose.

The following decade of warfare would see the Houthi rebels rapidly gain momentum in the country's west, where most Yemenis live today.

Already in control of the capital after a shock offensive in 2014, the Houthis expanded outward, in all directions, while fighting their way south to try and overthrow the nation's internationally recognized leadership in the city of Aden.

An international coalition led by neighboring Saudi Arabia came to Aden's defense, and the Houthis responded by strengthening ties with Iran, accepting financial, military, and technical support in the battles to come.

Known for their creativity and their aptitude for implementing insurgent-style warfare at large scale, the Houthis were able to inflict substantial enough losses on the Saudi-led coalition that had eventually concluded its operations. Unfortunately, life under the Houthis was nowhere near as triumphant as it was for the fighters within the movement.

During the war, Yemen was rocked by famine and suffered the breakdown of a high proportion of its health and sanitation infrastructure.

In this conflict, like others we have discussed, both sides of the conflict, and especially the Houthis, weaponized the decision to withhold necessary food aid from vulnerable populations when it suited them. As a result, the many civilians who died of starvation and disease during the conflict will be included in our final tally.

According to figures from the United Nations, over 377,000 people are estimated to have died in Yemen from the start of the civil war in 2014 through to the end of 2021.

Of those, over 150,000 were killed as a direct result of combat, including both combatants and civilians, while the rest, over 200,000, were killed as a result of famine, a widespread outbreak of cholera, or other indirect consequences of the fighting.

In Yemen, a place with a very young population overall, an outsized proportion of those killed indirectly had been young children, for whom the consequences of acute malnutrition are far more severe than they would be for an adult.

As the United Nations Development Programme put it in that report, quote, In 2021, a Yemeni child under the age of five dies every nine minutes because of this conflict.

Since that time, the complexion of the conflict has changed dramatically, with Yemeni authorities agreeing, at times, to ceasefire arrangements, and with the Houthis drawing global ire after they manufactured the Red Sea Crisis through drone and missile attacks against Red Sea shipping.

While the death toll from that phase of war has been far from zero, a return of humanitarian aid and a shift toward less costly methods of warfighting have seen the death toll dropped dramatically.

So, for our purposes today, we'll keep to that United Nations death toll of 377,000, while bearing in mind that the true number of dead is probably at least a few thousand higher.

After Yemen, we've got to make just one final stop before we conclude what has been a gruesome tour of the globe. Of course, that last stop brings us to Gaza, as well as the larger proxy conflict between the nation of Israel and its backers on one side, and the nation of Iran and its proxies in Hamas, Hezbollah, and elsewhere on the other.

Because we're going to try and account for the totality of the Israel-Iran proxy war in the 21st century, we've got to account for more than just the ongoing war in Gaza.

That includes the 2006 war in Lebanon, earlier conflicts in Gaza in 2008, 2014 and 2021, the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah starting in 2023, and the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in 2025. As for the cause of the overall conflict, well, in a way, it's a tale as old as time.

But after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Iran and Israel have been at each other's throats, with Israel insisting that Iran would wipe Israel off the map if it had the chance, and Iran insisting that Israel is engaged in the systematic repression of Muslims on its territory and beyond.

Israel, the more militarily sophisticated and internationally collected power in the conflict, has sought to fight mostly by keeping a tight grip on its territory and squashing signs of resistance when they appear, whereas Iran, at the butt-end of a financial, technical, and military disparity, has chosen to ally itself with a range of non-state actors it

Can support in order to keep up its end of this long, cold war.

Although we could spend an entire episode going through each confrontation between Israel and Iran, or its proxies, will pay special attention to two. The Israel-Hamas war, starting in 2023, and the short but intense conflict between Iran and Israel in 2025.

The former conflict kicked off on October 7, 2023, when, after years spent trying to lull Israel into a false sense of security, Hamas fighters broke out of Gaza en masse and launched indiscriminate attacks against Israelis, killing nearly 1,200, including 815 slaughtered civilians, and taking 251 people hostage.

Israel has responded with overwhelming force, first by way of aerial bombardment and then a progressive ground invasion, working its way across the Gaza Strip to dismantle the Hamas organization with little regard for the civilians in its path.

During the conflict, Israel has routinely engaged in the restriction of the flow of critical aid and perpetrated what a wide range of global experts have described as a genocide, while Hamas has taken... full advantage of the Gaza Strip civilian population in order to leverage those civilians as human shields.

Then in Israel and Iran's 2025 encounter, the first direct, full-scale war in their shared history, Israel launched an intense campaign of airstrikes and assassinations targeting Iran's military and nuclear program, while Iran attempted to retaliate, mostly unsuccessfully with hundreds of ballistic missiles and over a thousand kamikaze drones.

The engagement culminated with a short sequence of US airstrikes dropping gargantuan burrowing bombs in an attempt to destroy deeply buried Iranian nuclear facilities, although the true impact of those strikes is still disputed today.

The death toll of the war in Gaza is a matter of intense dispute, as of the time of writing with estimates released by the Gaza Health Ministry, consistently dismissed by Israel and its allies on the basis that the Gaza Health Ministry operates under the control of the Hamas organization.

Internationally, however, those figures are generally taken to be relatively reliable, and although it's impossible to conduct a comprehensive review of all of the Gaza Health Ministry's numbers under the current circumstances, more limited attempts to replicate their numbers tend to validate the figures they provide.

In fact, other studies suggest that the Gaza Health Ministry's figures might even be an undercount since they don't include bodies that haven't yet been recovered from underneath rubble. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, as of late October 2025, over 69,000 Gazans have been killed over the course of the conflict.

While the proportion of civilians to combatants within that figure is difficult to verify conclusively, independent, non-Israeli sources tend to estimate that 60 to 80 percent of the dead were civilians.

Israeli claims tend to be closer to 50 percent of the reduced number of people Israel acknowledge as killing, while some reports suggest a proportion of dead civilians as high as 90 percent. Assuming that a median estimate of around 70 percent is correct, that would place the number of civilians killed in Gaza thus far at about 48,000.

On the opposite side, Israel has sustained 2,092 losses to date, including 1,195 killed during the course of the October 7 attacks. During 2025's Israel-Iran War, Israel acknowledged the deaths of 33 people, while human rights groups estimate that around 1,200 Iranians were killed.

We've also got to factor in Israel's operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, where 87 Israeli troops and 46 civilians have been killed against roughly 5,000 Hezbollah fighters, around 4,000 additional civilian casualties, and over 550 dead in Syria.

The death toll from other encounters between Israel and Hamas, other Palestinian militant groups, and other Iran-backed fighting forces since the year 2000 includes several thousand more people across all sides in the conflict.

In total, the Middle East's long proxy war is responsible for approximately 85,000 to 95,000 deaths, without counting the everyday smaller scale violence that's become a fact of life in the places touched by this conflict. So at long last, with our tour of the world complete, we come to it.

A final accounting of the 21st century's deadliest conflicts thus far, and a list of the 10 worst conflicts of all. As we do this.

We've got to emphasize a lesson that's probably become obvious as this episode has gone on, that tabulating a death toll in any conflict is an immensely difficult task that almost never results in a precise figure for wars on the scale that we've discussed today.

As such, we've got to issue one final caveat, that if we were somehow able to see the true precise figures on each of these conflicts as yet undiscovered by independent experts and almost certainly lost to history, then the final order might be different to the one we're about to present.

Ultimately, we or any other outside observer can only be as precise as the data we can access, and that data falls far short of what we wish were possible.

Not only that, but we are fully aware that the way we've chosen to count deaths in these conflicts, distinguishing between indirect deaths from disease or starvation that were engineered and those that were peripheral, introduces its own level of uncertainty.

Based on the way that we here at Warfronts have chosen to build this list, we're going to present the list that we've ended up with. That does not mean that our way of calculating a death toll is more or less right than any other way of doing it.

Only that, by our estimation, this was the clearest way to answer the question we were trying to answer and find not just the numbers of people killed during a conflict, but the number of people killed willfully by fighting factions during a conflict.

A list that uses different criteria or that accounts for those factors differently will produce a different result, and that result can also be accurate. So, with a final nod to that important distinction, let's present the 10 deadliest and most devastating conflicts of the 21st century to date.

A tenth place, coming in a bit above the US invasion of Afghanistan and the long-running insurgency in Colombia, is the Second Congo War, with an estimated direct death toll of between 210,000 and 220,000.

As we mentioned during our discussion of the conflict, this is a war that carried on from 1998 to 2003, and came with an incredibly high indirect death toll, estimated at 5.4 million excess deaths or more.

Accounting for only deaths during the 21st century, however, and only deaths that were a direct result of deliberate action by fighting factions, it places at number 10 on our list. At number 9, based on the data available at this time, we have the current conflict in Sudan, estimated to have seen the deaths of around a quarter million people.

That figure is almost certainly a severe undercount, and sadly there is no telling how extreme that undercount might be. In eighth place, we have the US invasion of Iraq, where we've got to account for some of the most massive discrepancies and civilian death tolls of any conflict we've discussed.

As you probably know, the legacy of the Iraq War is an exceptionally thorny issue in both the Western world and the Middle East to this day.

But, using generally accepted figures that seem to be among the most reliable out there, we come to a total death toll, civilians and combatants combined are between a quarter million and 275,000. Coming in seventh, we have the cartel wars in Mexico, where from the year 2000 onward, and especially from the time that the conflict intensified in 2006.

We estimate that a total of 319,000 people have lost their lives as a result of the conflict.

The high numbers of missing and the overlap between homicides related to the cartel wars and homicides that have taken place for other reasons are key reasons that the figure of 319,000 should not be taken as gospel, but ideally, it comes at least somewhat close to the truth.

At number six, we move back to Sudan to account for the war in Darfur and the accompanying Darfur genocide. Accounting for all sides of the conflict through what we can loosely interpret as the end of that phase of Sudan's civil conflict in around 2010, we reach an overall estimated death toll of roughly 320,000.

Moving into our exceptionally grim top five, we find the war in Yemen, with an estimated death toll of 377,000, in keeping with United Nations estimates on the conflict's costs through 2021.

Although there has been some fighting in Yemen since then, including an airstrike campaign by Israel, the United States, and other allied nations, we do not estimate that the additional and very hard to establish death toll during this time would move Yemen's overall death toll high enough that it would pass the next two entries on our list.

Sitting side by side and sharing third and fourth place, we have the civil war in South Sudan and the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

In each of these conflicts, despite the obvious difficulty in coming to firm numbers and what's almost certainly an undercount of civilian deaths in both cases, we settle on an overall death toll of between 400,000 between Ukraine and Russia and 400,000 for South Sudan.

If as a viewer you'd like one of those conflicts in a clear third place and the other in a clear fourth, you could certainly justify moving Ukraine into number three, given that the conflict is still ongoing and the death toll is guaranteed to rise higher.

For our part, however, the conflict's respective spots on our list matter a bit less than the broader point that each of them has claimed around 400,000 lives and probably more.

At number two, we come to the nation of Syria, where, conservatively, external estimates would place the number of dead at above 500,000.

Frankly, there is an argument for Syria to top the list, given the staggering number of people still missing in this conflict, which we could combine with the higher estimates of the dead to reach a potential death toll at or above 675,000.

But, following the judgment of global experts on the conflict, we'll settle closer to the median estimate of known war deaths.

And because of the sheer multidimensionality of the conflict, where people could have disappeared for lots of reasons and because of lots of perpetrators besides the Assad regime's internal machinery of death, while well over 600 million people have fled the country, we're going to avoid making the assumption that the people counted as the war missing are a

One-to-one match for the uncounted dead.

Finally, the utterly apocalyptic conflict that we would now define as the deadliest of the 21st century thus far is Ethiopia's Tigray War.

Estimated at a death toll of 600,000 killed either violently or through the deliberate engineering of famine and destruction of the life-saccessing. saving infrastructure that would have prevented disease outbreaks, the Tigray War is impossible to overlook as likely the deadliest conflict of our time.

Looking at all of these conflicts in aggregate, in which we would estimate that a cumulative 3.7 million people were killed in war this century even before accounting for other wars on our list, or the smaller conflicts around the globe, you'd be well within your right to ask whether the situation is getting worse.

On the optimistic side, if we can call it that, we can look back across time to a conflict like the Second World War, where over 10 million people died in some of the individual war years, and we can remember that as bad as things may be today, we're not living through that. But we can also recognize that's only a small comfort, if it's a comfort at all.

According to the Global Peace Index, 2022 was the first year in which over 200,000 people were recorded killed in battle since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. 2023 and 2024 have kept up those numbers, with the ACLED counting 233,597 people killed in global conflicts last year.

If every year, from 2000 to 2025, had been as violent as 2024, then the cumulative death toll of the 21st century thus far wouldn't be 3.7 million, it would be nearly 6.1 million. And we'd be remiss not to mention, as we wind this episode up, that the conflicts listed as our final 10 have not yet been condemned to history.

Three of those wars in Ukraine, Sudan, and Mexico are still raging today. Two more in Yemen and Syria only transitioned into a new phase very recently, and in both cases you could credibly argue that those civil wars aren't really over.

Two others, including the fourth worst war of our time in South Sudan and the single worst war of the 21st century in Ethiopia, each show clear signs that they could begin again very soon.

Buried inside that reality, discouraging as it might be, we have to consider something even darker. This list is not yet fixed into history, and it is entirely possible that the wars on this list that are still raging today, or that seem as if they might restart soon, could keep climbing.

There is no guarantee that the war in Ukraine will claim fewer lives than the war in degraded by the time it's over.

However, there's no guarantee that if South Sudan went back to war, it wouldn't suffer another 400,000 deaths, and bring the nation's cumulative death toll above three quarters of a million.

If there's anything we've learned here at war fronts during our time studying and analyzing conflicts like these, it's that as horrible as a conflict might be, we would be wise to continually remind ourselves of the ways that those conflicts could get worse.

And right now, at the one-quarter mark of the 21st century, we can see the specter of far larger wars that, if they were to come to pass, could quickly ascend to the top spot on the list.

Take a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan, perhaps in parallel with a North Korean offensive against South Korea that would quickly draw in the United States, Japan, Australia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and other nations around the Indo-Pacific. We'll take the prospect of a Russian confrontation with NATO.

NATO, where the brutal, attritional style of the Ukraine conflict is forced upon a combined set of adversaries from across Europe and North America.

A full-scale war between Pakistan and the world's most populous nation, India, is never far off on the horizon, while in the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia's internal conflicts, its hunger for access to the sea, its control over the Nile River, and the array of unstable nations in its immediate vicinity make for a brewing regional war that could cost incredible

Numbers of lives.

It's during discussions like this, at the end of a long, exhaustive exploration of the worst conflicts of our time, that our team here at Warfronts is reminded of why knowledge is so important. Discuss a list of wars that's this horrible, and it's understandable to wish for peace.

But peace doesn't just happen by itself. Peace is earned. It's not a resting phase, but an active, ongoing, and vitally important process.

It is important, not because it's a high ideal, but because the alternative is apocalyptic. Conflicts like these become far more likely anywhere across the globe when the importance of peace is underestimated and the price of war is forgotten.

The list that we've discussed today can be just another top 10, or it can be a chronicle of 3.7 million and untold millions more.

Lives that should never have been cut short, and deaths that the world failed to understand, anticipate, and prevent before they ever happened.