ANALYSIS
Are the world's wars "Muslim"? What the data say, and what the causes are
14 October 2026 — World
In brief
- In 2025 the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) counted 65 armed conflicts between states and organised groups, a record. In 23 the state is fighting jihadist groups; in 21 there is no Muslim party at all.
- Uppsala researchers have shown that conflicts with Islamist claims, absent in 1975, numbered 28 out of 50 in 2015. They last longer and flare up again more often: what explains this is the political programme of the armed groups, not the Muslim identity of the fighters.
- Muslims are 25.6% of humanity, and about 60% live in Asia and the Pacific: most of them in countries such as Indonesia, India, Bangladesh and Malaysia, which are not at war.
- In 2025, 62% of the world's battle deaths were in the war between Russia and Ukraine. The largest massacre of civilians, in Sudan, was committed by Muslims against Muslims.
- The causes lie on four levels: fragile ground (weak states, colonial legacy, oil), a spark (often abuses by the state), a banner (armed Islamism) and an external multiplier (a strategic position that draws in foreign powers).
The question
Anyone who follows news from the world's wars often has the same impression: Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, the Sahel, Somalia, Gaza, Libya. It seems that almost everywhere there is fighting, Muslims are involved. The most common answer in the West is simple: the problem is Islam. The opposite answer is just as simple: it is all the fault of colonialism and of those who steal resources. Let us put both to the test of the numbers.
What the data say
The Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the Swedish university research centre that has been recording armed conflicts since 1989, counted 65 conflicts in 2025 in which a state fights another state or an armed group. It is the highest number since its records began (Journal of Peace Research, 2026). We classified the full list according to who is fighting and what they are claiming:
| Group | Conflicts | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| The state against jihadist groups | 23 | Islamic State in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Mozambique, Congo; JNIM in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Benin, Togo; al-Shabaab in Somalia and Kenya; Pakistani Taliban |
| Islamist movements or governments in wars over territory or power | 8 | Israel against Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis; Iran against Israel; the Afghan Taliban against opponents and Pakistan |
| Muslim parties without religious claims | 13 | Turkey against the Kurdish PKK; Pakistan against Baloch separatists; India against Pakistan over Kashmir; Sudan; Syria against Kurdish forces |
| No Muslim party | 21 | Russia against Ukraine; five conflicts in Myanmar; Congo against M23; Ethiopia; South Sudan; Colombia; Haiti |
The classification is ours and some cases are debatable: in Kashmir, for example, armed groups mix nationalist and jihadist claims. But the picture does not change. The initial impression has a real basis: in just under half of the conflicts there is an Islamist party. Yet one war in three involves no Muslims at all.
The trend is recent. According to the Uppsala researchers themselves, in 1975 no conflict within a state was fought over Islamist claims; in 2015, 28 out of 50 were, as were 73% of the bloodiest civil wars (SIPRI Yearbook 2017). A later study found that these wars are 29% less likely to end and 73% more likely to flare up again. The authors' explanation is not the fighters' religion: it is the Islamist programme, which brings with it transnational networks, foreign fighters and distant financiers. Muslim identity alone, they write, does not explain the effect (Nilsson and Svensson, International Studies Quarterly, 2021).
Two figures complete the picture. Muslims are 25.6% of the world's population, about two billion people, and about 60% live in Asia and the Pacific (Pew Research Center, 2025). The exceptions at war are Pakistan and Afghanistan; but Indonesia, the country with the most Muslims in the world, Bangladesh, Malaysia and the roughly 200 million Muslims of India are not. If faith were enough to produce wars, the wars would be mostly there. And in 2025 the world's bloodiest war, with about 62% of battle deaths, was the one between Russia and Ukraine, two countries of Christian tradition.
Why there
If it is not faith, what is it? Research points to four levels that add up.
The ground. Weak states, borders drawn by colonial powers, economies built to extract rather than to produce. Then oil, the only raw material that studies consistently link to the outbreak of civil wars. The effect, however, is conditional: countries with a great deal of it, such as Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar and Kuwait, buy social peace with the rent. The risk rises where the state depends on oil but has little of it, or where producing regions are excluded from power (European Political Science Review). This ground, however, also exists where Islam plays no part: Congo, whose resources have been plundered from the colonial era to today, has been at war for thirty years without Islam being involved, apart from one militia in the east.
The spark. In 2023 the UN Development Programme interviewed more than a thousand former fighters of extremist groups in eight African countries. The first reason for joining was finding a job (25%); religion came third (17%), and most knew little of the sacred texts. Almost half pointed to a specific event that had pushed them, and in 71% of cases it was an abuse they had suffered, often at the hands of the state's security forces: a relative killed or arrested (UNDP, 2023).
The banner. Armed Islamism has a recent and precise history. It took shape after the failure of secular Arab nationalism, with the defeat of 1967. It exploded in 1979, the year of the Iranian revolution and of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, against which the United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan funded the Islamist guerrillas from which the international jihadist networks were born. It fed on the petrodollars with which the Gulf states spread the Salafi current, the most rigid. It was reborn with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, from which the Islamic State emerged, and spread to the Sahel after the fall of Libya in 2011, which poured weapons across the region. The banner is not the first cause, but it is not neutral: it brings money, fighters and networks, and it makes wars last longer. In the Sahel the JNIM group finances itself with ransoms, stolen cattle, road tolls and gold taxed at artisanal mines (African Security Network).
The external multiplier. Geography is a resource too. Yemen sits on the Bab el-Mandeb strait, through which about 12% of world maritime trade passes; Somalia on the Gulf of Aden. That is why their internal crises have become contests between powers: Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Iran in Yemen, as we reported here; Ethiopia, which is seeking access to the sea, and Israel, which in December 2025 recognised separatist Somaliland, around Somalia (Al Jazeera, 3/10/2026). But a strategic position is not a sentence. Djibouti sits on the same strait as Yemen and rents its territory to bases of the United States, China, France, Japan and Italy: "our geography is our oil", a government official said (Al Jazeera, 8/4/2026). Oman sits on Hormuz and is one of the most stable countries in the region. Geography does not explain why people fight; it explains why a local war becomes international, and why it then does not end.
Who dies
If Muslims often appear among those who fight, they appear even more often among those who die.
- The victims of terrorism. In 2025 terrorism killed 5,582 people. Seven of the ten worst-affected countries are Muslim-majority or have large Muslim communities: Pakistan, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Syria, Somalia. The Sahel alone accounts for more than half of the deaths (Global Terrorism Index 2026). Jihadists mostly kill other Muslims. But not only: in eastern Congo, the local Islamic State affiliate disproportionately targets Christians.
- Muslims against Muslims. In 2025 the world recorded the highest number of civilians deliberately killed since the Rwandan genocide, mainly because of the massacres in Sudan: at least 60,000 dead by mid-December according to Uppsala, mostly at the hands of the Rapid Support Forces. In Sudan perpetrators and victims are overwhelmingly Muslim.
- Muslims struck by others. The Rohingya in Myanmar, on whose case the International Court of Justice is due to rule on the charge of genocide. The Uyghurs in China, for whom the UN Human Rights Office in 2022 spoke of violations that may constitute crimes against humanity; Beijing rejects the accusations (OHCHR). The Palestinians of Gaza, for whom the UN commission of inquiry led by Navi Pillay concluded in 2025 that Israeli forces and leaders committed four of the five acts of genocide listed in the Convention; Israel rejects the conclusion, as we reconstructed here.
Legal commentary
International law already has an answer to the question "is a religion to blame?", and the answer is no, in two senses.
On the one hand, it protects religious groups as potential victims. The 1948 Genocide Convention lists religious groups among those that may not be destroyed (art. II). The UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights protects freedom of religion (art. 18) and obliges states to prohibit by law incitement to religious hatred (art. 20).
On the other, it punishes people, never faiths. The principle was written at Nuremberg: crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities. Today it is in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (art. 25). The Court has convicted Al Hassan, former head of the Islamic police imposed by jihadists in Timbuktu, to 10 years, and Ali Kushayb, commander of the Janjaweed militias in Darfur, to 20 years (AllAfrica, 10/12/2025); its prosecutor has requested an arrest warrant for the head of Myanmar's junta. People are judged, not Islam or Buddhism. Any collective accusation against a religion overturns this principle.
Symmetry test
- Armed religious extremism is not only Islamic. Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar accompanied the persecution of the Rohingya; in the Central African Republic both the Muslim Séléka militias and the Christian anti-balaka killed; in India Hindu nationalism fuels violence against Muslims; in the West Bank some settlers act in the name of a religious claim to the land.
- But today it weighs less in the numbers, and that must be said. None of these forms of violence today has the scale of the jihadist insurgencies in the Sahel, Somalia or Nigeria. Denying the role of armed Islamism would be the same shortcut, reversed, as accusing Islam.
- The West has also played a part, and not only as a colonial power: through support for the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, the invasion of Iraq and the intervention in Libya. The same goes for the Gulf states that funded the most rigid Islam, for Iran with its militias and for Russia in the Sahel.
Our assessment
This section expresses the site's position. It is separate from the facts set out above.
The question "perpetrators or victims?" presupposes that "Muslims" are a subject that acts. They are not: they are two billion people, from Indonesia to Senegal, who mostly live in peace. Among those who fight, however, a real share do so under an Islamist banner, and that banner makes wars longer and crueller. Among those who die, Muslims are the majority in many of today's conflicts.
The causes do not lie in the Quran, nor only in colonialism. They lie in states that do not protect their citizens and indeed strike them, in economies that live off a single rent, in geographical positions that attract foreign powers, and in an armed ideology that offers those who have nothing a job, revenge and an enemy. Removing just one of these elements is rarely enough; ignoring one, as both those who accuse Islam and those who absolve it wholesale do, leads to the wrong solutions.
That is why the yardstick of law is the only one that holds: look at the facts, name those responsible, protect the victims, whatever their faith and that of those who kill them.
What to watch
- UCDP's next annual report (June 2027), to see whether the share of jihadist conflicts rises or falls.
- The International Court of Justice's ruling on the Rohingya case.
- The evolution of JNIM in the Sahel and its expansion towards the coastal states of the Gulf of Guinea.
- The foreign military presence around Bab el-Mandeb and in Somaliland.
Sources: Journal of Peace Research, 2026 · SIPRI Yearbook 2017 · Nilsson and Svensson, International Studies Quarterly, 2021 · Pew Research Center, 2025 · European Political Science Review · UNDP, 2023 · African Security Network · Al Jazeera, 3/10/2026 · Al Jazeera, 8/4/2026 · Global Terrorism Index 2026 · OHCHR · AllAfrica, 10/12/2025
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