The Most Overlooked Conflicts of 2025, Ranked

When 2025 dawned, you could have been forgiven for hoping it would be calmer than the year before. President-elect Donald Trump was promising to end the Russo-Ukrainian War on his first day in office. There were signs of an imminent ceasefire in Gaza. Sudan’s military was on such a roll that there were hopes it might soon expel the Rapid Support Forces from Khartoum and then negotiate peace from a position of strength. Maybe, just maybe, 2025 would be a year of peace.

We all know what happened next. The Gaza War ground on for ten long months. Ukraine and Sudan grew bloodier than ever. Israel and Iran fought a war. Pakistan and India had their worst flare-up in decades. Thailand and Cambodia struck one another. The hopes of a year of peace melted away. Like 2024 before it, 2025 was a year dominated by conflict.

But some conflicts received more attention than others. Away from the headlines, other wars churned on, spreading death and misery even as the rest of the world collectively shrugged. From Latin America to Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, eleven major conflicts received almost no mainstream coverage this year — and the obscurity of the worst of them, this analysis argues, carried a body count all its own.

The Sahel’s Growing Islamist Insurgency

In a feature in early March, the BBC World Service asked whether the Sahel was the most dangerous place on Earth. Global conflict analysts might gently have reminded the BBC that places like Sudan, Haiti, and the drone-saturated front lines of Ukraine still exist. But it is hard to blame the broadcaster for asking. In a year when most Westerners would struggle to place the Sahel on a map, the region was overrun by one of the more powerful insurgencies anywhere on Earth.

That insurgency is Jama’a Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, better known as JNIM, an al-Qaeda-linked terror network. Of any jihadist insurgency active today, it has the greatest chance of building a modern-day caliphate. At the start of 2025, JNIM was still balancing its asymmetric offensive across the three large Sahel states ruled by military regimes: Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. Operating across all three — and especially in the poorly patrolled, porous border zone where they meet — JNIM ran circles around those governments and their Russian-supplied Wagner Group mercenary advisors.

Over the course of the year, JNIM built on that advantage. Partly through its own work, and partly because of the failings of Russia and the regional governments, it is now more powerful than it has ever been. JNIM appears to have benefited greatly from Russia’s decision to replace its ineffective but brutal Wagner mercenaries with a new Africa Corps, a directly state-affiliated paramilitary that is still ineffective and now also avoids front-line engagements whenever possible.

The three military regimes, meanwhile, devolved into greater infighting. They courted different and competing sets of potential international backers, while their demoralized, atrocity-prone militaries broke the trust of rural communities — driving those communities into the arms of the very insurgents the regimes claim to fight. Other overlapping insurgencies on the same territory, like the Islamic State-Sahel Province, contributed to the chaos and made it easier for JNIM to operate.

At the same time, JNIM worked to expand its influence into the northern reaches of Benin, Togo, and Nigeria, exploiting formal borders to hide out, plan operations, train recruits, and sustain its offensives. It concentrated particularly on Mali, and for several months explicitly targeted the energy imports the country needs to keep the lights on. JNIM’s fuel blockades placed immense pressure on Mali’s government. International assessments that JNIM could simply take over the country were premature — but it is clear the group will be able to thrive there for the foreseeable future.

Latin America’s Organized Crime Crisis

In Latin America, 2025 involved no all-out wars, despite the steady drumbeat of US airstrikes closing in on Venezuela. But not all armed conflicts are wars, and the armed conflict the region did face proved tremendously destabilizing. Across Central and South America, nations struggled to cope with an overlapping, transnational assault by organized criminal groups. These groups never tried to outright conquer a country.

Instead, they exploited weak and corrupt governments to build and expand crime networks that they then protected through the overwhelming and brutal use of force.

In some parts of the region, the problem is hardly new. Mexico still deals with the same array of powerful drug cartels. Colombia still battles scattered guerrilla groups that live at the nexus of organized crime and asymmetric insurgency. The smuggling routes that have sustained the United States’ hunger for drugs across decades remain largely intact. But new fronts have opened up, and dormant crises have flared with stunning intensity.

Ecuador has been rocked by a pervasive, persistent internal security crisis, as transnational criminal elements take advantage of its relatively underpowered police and build the nation into a new criminal paradise. Peru, always one stiff breeze away from total collapse, has become so corrupt that political, business, and criminal interests blend together into a single elite cabal that can use state resources as it sees fit. Bolivia has been quickly integrated into this morphing regional network, and Chile now ranks alongside Mexico and Colombia in expert risk evaluations of the role of organized crime. Even Brazil, long familiar with both violent syndicates and a deeply corrupt state, made global news this year with the deadliest police raid in the nation’s history.

It is harder to describe Latin America’s conflict with its criminal syndicates than to describe a war in the traditional sense, but the impression it has left is just as deep. Security and disillusionment with the state have become major public concerns, motivating seismic political shifts from Chile to Guatemala to Peru. Leaders given a mandate to address the problem, but who failed to do so, are being punished all across the Americas, while the syndicates entrench themselves deeper into ordinary society.

Trust in regional governments is creeping toward an all-time low, and fears of organized violence toward an all-time high. The year showed clearly that, without some way to collaborate more effectively, individual Latin American nations will have a very hard time bringing the crisis back under control.

The Failure of Colombia’s ‘Total Peace’

It was always a bold gamble. When Colombian president Gustavo Petro came to power in 2022, he did so with a plan somewhere between ambitious and utterly naive. Where previous Colombian presidents had mostly tried to end the country’s six-decade civil war by pursuing victory over the rebels — or by focusing on big peace deals with one rebel group at a time — Petro tried a wildly different tack.

Known as La Paz Total, or Total Peace, his plan envisaged opening simultaneous negotiations with all major rebel groups, plus the most notorious drug-trafficking cartels. Backed by unilateral government ceasefires, the hope was that it would usher in a new age for Colombia, replacing decades of insurgency and weak state control in the countryside with an era of peace.

If that sounds laughably naive, the initial stages offered some shaky grounds for optimism. When WarFronts first covered it, in 2023, there had been a noticeable reduction in murders, even if that was offset by an increase in kidnappings. If you squinted, you could just about tell yourself it might yet work — not with every armed group, but perhaps with some of the more notable FARC offshoots. But if that had ever been a realistic hope, it had utterly faded by the start of 2025, a year in which renewed violence would wash away the last traces of Total Peace as an attainable goal.

The year began with Colombia’s biggest internal displacement crisis in decades, as the leftwing rebels of the ELN seized swathes of territory near the Venezuelan border. It peaked in summer with dissident FARC groups detonating a truck bomb in the city of Cali and shooting down a police helicopter. And it ended in December with the ELN trying to impose an “armed strike” on parts of the nation — effectively forcing civilians to stay home under threat of violence.

Amidst all this, violence spiked as armed groups battled one another. Old FARC allies EMC and Segunda Marquetalia went to war; the ELN clashed with the Gulf Clan; and armed groups increasingly turned to drones to sow terror. As the New Humanitarian wrote in July, “Colombia is in the midst of a dramatic surge in violence from armed conflict.”

To be clear, things are still far from where they were in the 1980s or 1990s. Violence has drastically increased this year, but we are still talking about hundreds killed rather than thousands. Even so, it has been sad to see the direction the country is heading. Less than a decade ago, in 2016, there was a surge of optimism as Bogotá made peace with FARC, the nation’s oldest and largest leftwing rebel group.

Back then, the promise of total peace by 2025 might even have been believable. The tragedy of the last twelve months is that a final end to Colombia’s sixty-one years of civil war and insurgency now feels further away than ever. It may have gone broadly unnoticed by the wider world, but 2025 was the year Colombia’s low-level conflict lurched decisively in the wrong direction.

Nigeria’s Overlapping Conflicts

2025 was not the best year for Nigeria. In June, a suicide bombing led to the deaths of 12 people — the first such attack in the country since a series of bombings in 2024. In September, the Islamist group Boko Haram killed more than 60 people in an overnight attack in Borno state.

In November, a fight between Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) left 200 ISWAP fighters dead, along with an unconfirmed number of Boko Haram insurgents. In December, armed men kidnapped at least 13 people from a church in central Kogi state — the second such attack in as many weeks. And lest we forget, the Nigerian government reportedly foiled a coup in September that led to the arrest of more than a dozen military officers, including a brigadier general and a colonel.

All in all, not a banner year for the Giant of Africa. Yet apart from a brief period in November, when President Donald Trump threatened military strikes against the country to protect its Christian population from what he saw as religiously motivated killings, Nigeria rarely got mentioned in the international press.

One reason is that the conflict with Boko Haram has been dragging on since 2009 — nearly two decades — with no obvious end in sight. Despite the mounting death toll and the ever-expanding humanitarian crisis, it is fundamentally an old conflict that stopped capturing the world’s imagination long ago. Boko Haram’s insurgency peaked in international consciousness around 2014 with the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapping. After that, the 24-hour news cycle moved on to newer conflicts, of which there have been plenty to choose from.

The second reason Nigeria often gets the international equivalent of a shrug is that other nations in West Africa are having it much worse. Mali is fighting JNIM, the al-Qaeda-linked group that has effectively put the capital Bamako under siege. Guinea-Bissau was recently the victim of a coup that ousted the government of President Umaro Sissoco Embaló — who, ironically, had been accused by the country’s opposition of trying to orchestrate a constitutional coup to maintain his grip on power.

Compared with its neighbours, Nigeria is relatively stable and continues to be a regional economic powerhouse. Much of the world believes it can solve its own issues, so why bother paying attention?

The Anglophone Crisis in Cameroon

According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED), a non-profit that monitors conflicts worldwide, this is the single most dangerous conflict for civilians in Africa. It is worth repeating: according to the experts whose primary job is to track conflicts, this is more dangerous for civilians than Sudan, where the RSF committed massacres so large the bloodstains were visible from space, and more dangerous than the Democratic Republic of Congo, where M23 has made it a personal goal to be as violent as possible. And odds are high you have never heard of it.

This is the Anglophone Crisis, an ongoing conflict on the western edge of Cameroon pitting the region’s primarily English-speaking population against the predominantly French-speaking central government in Yaoundé. It began in 2016 with peaceful protests by teachers and lawyers demanding better working conditions and linguistic equality in courts and schools. President Paul Biya’s government responded with arrests, internet shutdowns, and military deployment. By 2017, the situation had escalated into armed conflict when separatist groups declared the independence of Ambazonia and began fighting for a breakaway state.

According to the International Crisis Group, more than 6,500 people have been killed and over 580,000 displaced. Both sides have committed atrocities. Government forces have burned villages, conducted extrajudicial killings, and tortured suspected separatists. Separatist militias have kidnapped students, attacked schools, and killed civilians accused of collaborating with the government. The UN reported that between 2018 and 2019, armed groups abducted more than 300 students and teachers.

How does a conflict that has killed fewer than 7,000 people rank as more dangerous than Sudan’s civil war? The answer is simple. In an exclusive interview with WarFronts, ACLED senior Africa analyst Dr. Ladd Serwat explained that, while the Cameroon crisis is less deadly than many in Africa, more civilians are targeted for violence in Ambazonia than anywhere else, with extremely high levels of kidnapping.

So why has it remained so thoroughly overlooked? First, and perhaps most importantly, Cameroon is not strategically important to Western powers. It does not have massive oil reserves like Nigeria, is not a major regional hub like Kenya, and does not sit on critical trade routes like Somalia.

There is no compelling geopolitical reason for major powers to pay attention, which means the crisis does not generate the diplomatic pressure or media coverage that forces conflicts onto the international agenda. As the Trump administration noted in its National Security Strategy, the international community has only limited bandwidth for which conflicts it can attend to — and Cameroon falls outside it. That is not a justification for ignoring the conflict, only an explanation for how it has fallen through the cracks despite its devastating human cost.

Second, the Biya government has been remarkably successful at controlling the narrative. Cameroon maintains relatively good relations with France — President Emmanuel Macron visited in 2022 — and with other Western nations. Biya, who has ruled since 1982, presents himself as a stabilizing force in a volatile region where coups are the order of the day. His government frames the conflict as terrorism rather than a marginalized population reacting against what it considers legitimate grievances, making it easier for international partners to ignore the root causes and continue supporting Yaoundé.

Third, the conflict lacks the dramatic, easily digestible narratives that dominate news cycles. There is no clear good guy versus bad guy for the media to latch onto, since both government forces and separatist groups have committed atrocities. The historical grievances date back to colonialism and the awkward merger of British and French Cameroon in the 1960s, which requires context most international audiences lack.

It is messy, complicated, and does not fit neatly into the frameworks Western media uses to cover African conflicts. The result is that one of Africa’s deadliest conflicts continues grinding through its ninth year, heading into its tenth, with minimal international attention, no serious peace process, and civilians paying the price for a stalemate neither side can break.

Cabo Delgado’s Islamic State Insurgency

When most people think of Mozambique, they think of its pristine beaches, the title of one of Bob Dylan’s best songs, or the fact that it is one of only six African nations that speak Portuguese. What most people do not know is that since 2017 the country has been dealing with a major Islamist insurgency in the northwestern province of Cabo Delgado that has quietly dovetailed with the Islamic State’s expansion into Africa.

The humanitarian cost has been astronomical. ACLED researcher Peter Bofin told LUSA, Portugal’s largest news agency, that more than 6,200 deaths have been recorded since the first attack in 2017. According to Sofia Minetto, a communications manager at Médecins Sans Frontières, more than one million people have been displaced since the war started, most of whom still have not returned home, and the violence has escalated sharply in recent months. As she put it, “There are frequent attacks in almost every district, and even in neighbouring provinces.

Brutal assassinations, kidnapping and looting make people flee. Often a rumor is enough to empty entire neighbourhoods.”

The conflict began in October 2017 when Al-Shabaab — no connection to the more famous group of the same name in Somalia — launched coordinated attacks on three police stations in Mocímboa da Praia. The reasons for the insurgency are numerous, but they boil down to two things: religious extremism, and a sense among the youth of Cabo Delgado’s marginalized communities that Maputo had left them behind.

After that first attack, Al-Shabaab went from strength to strength, winning victories, gaining recruits, and building out its weapons caches before launching its most devastating attack in 2021, targeting Palma. The essentials are these. Palma sits near the Afungi peninsula, where TotalEnergies was developing a $20 billion liquefied natural gas project, one of the largest in Africa.

The discovery of massive offshore gas reserves turned Cabo Delgado into a magnet for foreign investment while locals saw zero benefit, fueling resentment the group exploited for recruitment. And before the attack, Al-Shabaab had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and made the oil and gas project one of its main objectives.

The attack succeeded. Al-Shabaab seized Palma, killed dozens including foreign workers, and forced TotalEnergies to suspend operations indefinitely — all at very little cost to the group. The government’s response has been mainly military and largely ineffective at stopping the insurgency, even with help from regional allies in Rwanda and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

Why has this conflict remained invisible? First, despite being the site of a major LNG project, Cabo Delgado does not threaten Western strategic interests the way conflicts in oil-rich regions or major shipping lanes do. Second, the government has barred the media from covering the conflict, detaining journalists who managed to reach the area, with police arresting them on bogus charges according to ReliefWeb.

Third, when compared with other crises worldwide — especially those involving Islamic State offshoots — the death toll has been relatively low. That 6,200 deaths and one million displaced people do not matter is not the argument; rather, the world has had its hands full with conflicts where the risk to life is greater. As the conflict rolls into its ninth year, there is no sign anyone outside Mozambique is paying enough attention to push for the political solutions that might actually end the violence.

Haiti’s Meltdown

Half the population starving. A full tenth of all locals transformed into refugees and forced to flee their homes. This is not Sudan, or Myanmar, or any of the more famous (if still overlooked) conflicts of the year. This is a crisis a mere 800 kilometres from the Florida Keys, almost ignored by America’s media — a meltdown that has been engulfing Haiti since July 2021.

That was the month President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, supercharging a descent into anarchy. By autumn of 2022, the government of acting prime minister Ariel Henry was calling for a UN intervention to stop the violence. By spring of 2024, Henry’s government had collapsed in the face of a coordinated gang uprising that paralysed the capital, Port-au-Prince. From there, believe it or not, things only got worse.

Summer 2024 saw some respite following the deployment of the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS), but it quickly became apparent the force was not up to fighting the gangs. Starved of cash and personnel, it failed to fulfil its basic mission of retaking key access points in Port-au-Prince and allowing in humanitarian supplies. Meanwhile the reach of the gangs kept expanding, as did their brutality. December 2024 saw over 200 people massacred in a single night in Cité Soleil.

If 2024 was bad, 2025 was on a whole other level. Over the last twelve months, the Haitian crisis went from a mere Three Mile Island to a geopolitical Chernobyl. After seizing nearly all of the capital, the gangs expanded into the Artibonite region — taking over fifty percent of what was once Haiti’s breadbasket and exacerbating an already brutal food crisis. With the national police all but evaporated, vigilante groups known as Bwa Kale formed to try to protect residents, leading to the lynching of hundreds of suspected gang members.

Then there is the special brand of chaos that Erik Prince, of Blackwater fame, seems to have brought to the conflict. Widely believed to have been the mastermind behind a new drone-strike campaign carried out by the Haitian government, Prince’s mercenaries have overseen a widening series of FPV attacks on suspected gang strongholds. By October, Reuters was reporting that these strikes had killed at least 559 people. While some of the dead were very likely gangsters, others — such as the eight children killed at a birthday party — manifestly were not.

It is unclear exactly how many have been killed in Haiti’s anarchy. UN statistics put the toll at 4,338 killed by gang violence in the first nine months of 2025 alone, but previous studies suggest many murders in Haiti’s slums are missing from official figures, making it hard to say how deadly the violence truly is. In its 2024 roundup, Insight Crime estimated a murder rate in Haiti of 62 per 100,000 — making it far more dangerous than Mexico, Colombia, or South Africa, and more murderous even than Ecuador, a country so wracked by gang violence that its government declared a state of “internal armed conflict.” Given how things have gone this year, 2025 is likely to have been even deadlier than 2024, with no signs of improvement.

And yet Haiti barely seemed to graze the world’s consciousness in 2025. That is not to say no one paid attention — an agreement struck by the UN Security Council in late September will boost the flailing MSS into a Gang Suppression Force of 5,500 soldiers, which will hopefully make a difference where the MSS failed. But in the wider cultural conversation, Haiti was simply missing.

Even as a Caribbean nation less than 500 kilometres from the US territory of Puerto Rico became a North American Somalia, the world did not even shrug — it failed to notice in the first place. Is that reaction inevitable? Perhaps; Haiti has been falling in and out of crises for decades.

But it still seems remarkable that the current US administration appears to care more about matters like censorship in Europe and pardoning convicted drug dealers than about stopping marauding gangs slaughtering civilians in its own backyard. Sadly for the people of Haiti, 2026 is likely to be even worse.

The Congo’s Proxy War

For most of 2025, the ongoing war in the Congo was a back-page issue at best. If you were not watching closely, you would have missed that over the course of the year an internationally supported rebel coalition basically carved out an autonomous region, with no indication the Congo will be able to take it back. On one side is the DRC government plus a wide range of allied militias; on the other is a rebel alliance led by M23, which accepts extensive financial support, supply and logistical aid, and thousands upon thousands of troops from neighbouring Rwanda.

Very much because of Rwanda’s help, M23 captured several key cities in quick succession. Early in 2025, it took Goma, with a pre-invasion population of about 800,000, then swung south to capture Bukavu, with a pre-invasion population close to 1.2 million. Goma and Bukavu are the capitals of North and South Kivu Provinces, on the northern and southern ends of the large Lake Kivu. By taking the capitals and surrounding areas, M23 effectively seized control of both provinces — especially the parts that border Rwanda.

M23 now controls the entire Congo-Rwanda border zone, an arrangement that has brought massive benefits for both the group and its backers in Kigali. The conflict is essentially a resource war, with agricultural lands, energy reserves, and, most importantly, critical minerals all up for grabs. By taking over mineral-rich land and then obscuring the border zone through the fog of war, M23 has been able to extract those minerals and smuggle them into Rwanda at large scale, with Rwanda selling them off at a massive profit.

In return, M23 gets more military support, more funding, and better diplomatic cover. That resource extraction has come at an acute cost, with tremendous suffering imposed on civilians. Atrocities are common, accountability is exceptionally rare, and the more powerful nations that could have intervened are instead trying to make the conflict disappear from global consciousness.

Over the last several months, Rwanda and the Congo have both engaged the United States, signing peace treaties and resource-extraction deals that will ultimately enrich all governments involved. Officially, under those treaties, Rwanda and the DRC are at peace — and since Rwanda has always denied supporting M23, that illusion works well enough for everyone. On the ground, however, the conflict still rages.

In December, M23 completed the capture of a third major city, Uvira, with a pre-invasion population of about three-quarters of a million people. By taking Uvira, M23 cut off all access to Burundi, an ally of the DRC and a long-time skeptic of Rwanda’s actions in the region.

While it is unlikely M23 could march on the Congolese capital outright, it appears the group will keep expanding into the Congolese east for the foreseeable future, even as a direct Rwanda-Burundi war has become more likely now that Uvira has fallen. But according to the governments in Kinshasa, Kigali, and Washington, the Congo is quite obviously at peace. To borrow a line: there is no war in Ba Sing Se.

The Amhara Insurgency

Operation Arbegna Adem Ali. That is the name of the military campaign launched by insurgents in September this year that, for a brief moment, gave regional observers hope the world would turn its attention to Ethiopia’s Amhara insurgency. Since 2023, the Fano — a collection of ethnonationalist militias from Ethiopia’s Amhara community — has been fighting a brutal war against the Ethiopian federal government that has led to the deaths of thousands and the displacement of hundreds of thousands.

On 23 October, the Fano announced that they had completed the operation, killed more than 3,000 government troops, captured 700, and effectively crippled the government’s military capabilities in the region. It should have been a major milestone in coverage of the conflict. Instead, the news passed like a ship in the night, barely registering on international radars despite representing one of the most significant escalations of the year.

These numbers come from the Fano themselves and have not been verified by an independent third party, so they cannot inherently be trusted. But even allowing for the exaggeration common in military conflicts, the figures would still indicate that the Ethiopian army is struggling to quell the insurgency. Which begs the question: why is the world not paying more attention?

There is one main reason. The world is already paying attention to Ethiopia — just not to Amhara, which is mainly viewed as another internal conflict the army will eventually stamp out. International attention has instead focused on the possibility of a war between Ethiopia and Eritrea over Ethiopia’s continued insistence that it will gain access to the sea.

For regional observers, that most likely means Ethiopia has the Eritrean port city of Assab in its sights. Eritrea’s recent decision to quit the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) has fuelled fears that war could be on the horizon, so for observers it is simply a question of a looming interstate war eclipsing a regional insurgency. The irony, as WarFronts has noted in past coverage, is the risk that all of Ethiopia’s insurgencies coordinate with Eritrea, with the situation morphing into a multi-front crisis the Ethiopian state may not be able to contain.

After all, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Papua: The Deadliest War You’ve Never Heard Of

In Indonesia, the ongoing war on the western half of the island of Papua was hardly discussed at all this year by the global press — a grim but predictable continuation of how the world has handled this conflict for most of the last sixty-three years. For anyone unfamiliar with the Papua conflict, that is no cause for embarrassment; this Indonesian counterinsurgency is the very definition of under-reported. But over the last several decades, Indonesia has waged a major military effort to stamp out resistance from the indigenous Papuan population, primarily the Free Papua Movement.

According to one estimate by an expert on the conflict, anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 people may have been killed just through 2007. In the 2020s, the United Nations and various rights groups have tried to draw attention to the widespread use of forced disappearances, torture, and heinous crimes against noncombatants, including children. Papua barely made the news this year, but under the cover of strict information controls and restrictions on the Indonesian and international press, the slow leak of news suggests 2025 has been an especially deadly year.

In June 2025, the conflict tracker ACLED reported there had been 29 known clashes between Papuan rebels and Indonesian forces in just the month of May — far higher than usual rates. Papuan rebel forces are known to have slaughtered gold miners on multiple occasions, high-profile Papuans are known to have been gunned down, and village skirmishes with death tolls in the low dozens do intermittently make international news, even if they are buried at the very bottom of online feeds.

Papua is one of those conflicts where most analysts agree much more is probably happening beneath the surface, even if the vast majority will never be reported. The conflict takes place mostly in rugged, remote, or isolated stretches of land, with limited or no internet connectivity, practically zero outsiders of any kind, and environmental conditions that ensure evidence of past skirmishes disappears very quickly. Neither the Indonesian government nor the Papuan rebels tend to report confrontations when they can be hidden, especially when their own side has taken casualties.

So, like most years, we know very little about what went down in Papua across 2025. But what we do know is that it seems to have been Papua’s most violent year in quite a while — and the fact that so little information escapes the combat zone should be deeply concerning.

Sudan Suffers in Silence

Be honest: did you really expect anything else to take the top spot? Unlike previous years, Sudan’s catastrophic civil war was not completely overlooked in 2025. When the North Darfur capital of El Fasher fell to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in October, the sheer level of violence the group unleashed briefly punctured the bubble of indifference that has long surrounded the world’s worst war. You may even remember some of the most gruesome details: the bloodstains visible from space, and the estimate from Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab that more people may have been killed in ten days in El Fasher than in the entire Gaza War.

At the time of writing, the city remains off-limits to outside organizations, so it is impossible to report the exact numbers killed, and a great deal of debate remains over the toll. To give some idea of the spread, ACLED notes that the RSF “reportedly killed over 1,300 civilians in the first week” after the city fell, while Darfur’s governor, Minni Minnawi, has put the total at 27,000. At the higher end, a recent briefing to British parliamentarians described how “at least 60,000 have been murdered in El Fasher.” ACLED is clear that its own figure is an extremely conservative estimate.

Still, it conveys the uncertainty surrounding these numbers — and that is before accounting for the 150,000 residents who remain unaccounted for. Were they taken hostage by the RSF? Killed? Right now, we simply do not know.

What we can say is that the slaughter in El Fasher seemed to finally punch through into wider public consciousness. For the first time since fighting broke out in April 2023, Sudan was all over the headlines and trending on social media. The shift was even visible in viewing figures: normally, a Sudan video on WarFronts attracts an audience of perhaps 200,000, but the coverage of the El Fasher atrocity blew past one million.

So can Sudan’s conflict really still be called overlooked? Is it not now broadly famous as the big underreported conflict, with far more awareness than the fighting in, say, Myanmar? The answer is simple. Sudan’s war may today be better known than Myanmar, or the conflict in Cabo Delgado, or the fighting in eastern DRC. But compared with the sheer scale of the combat, of the refugee crisis, of the wholesale murder of civilians, it remains woefully ignored by the wider world. And this ignorance has consequences.

Back in April, RSF forces overran the Zamzam refugee camp on the outskirts of El Fasher. At the time it was one of the worst atrocities of the war; thousands were killed. Project Syndicate called it “Sudan’s Srebrenica Moment,” a reference to the 1995 slaughter of over 8,000 civilians in Bosnia that finally triggered NATO intervention. Yet in Sudan’s case, intervention never came.

The destruction of Zamzam and the massacres that followed barely dented public consciousness, which meant the world was still looking the other way as the RSF tightened its siege around El Fasher and prepared to storm the city.

Counterfactuals are always hard, and there is no way of saying for certain how history would have unfolded had things been different. But there is a chance that a Sudan War that was not so overlooked would have seen the siege of El Fasher rocket to the top of the international agenda — that either diplomatic pressure on the RSF and its main backer, the United Arab Emirates, or even kinetic action against RSF positions around the city, could have averted the mass killings of October. Instead, the blind spot of global leadership over Sudan granted the paramilitaries free rein to carry out what may be the single worst war crime committed this century.

For this reason alone, WarFronts is comfortable calling Sudan the most overlooked conflict of 2025. Only time will tell whether the world gets its act together regarding this war in 2026 — before yet more innocent Sudanese are forced to suffer.