This is a list of wars that began between 1945 and 1989. Other wars can be found in the historical lists of wars and the list of wars extended by diplomatic irregularity. Major conflicts of this period include the Chinese Civil War in Asia, the Greek Civil War in Europe, the Colombian civil war known as La Violencia in South America, the Vietnam War in Southeast Asia, the Ethiopian Civil War in Africa, and the Guatemalan Civil War in North America.
Abu Sayyaf, officially known by the Islamic State as the Islamic State – East Asia Province, is a Jihadist militant and pirate group that followed the Wahhabi doctrine of Sunni Islam. It was based in and around Jolo and Basilan islands in the southwestern part of the Philippines, where for more than five decades, Moro groups had been engaged in an insurgency seeking to make Moro Province independent. The group was considered violent and was responsible for the Philippines' worst terrorist attack, the bombing of MV Superferry 14 in 2004, which killed 116 people. The name of the group was derived from Arabic abu, and sayyaf. As of April 2023, the group was estimated to have about 20 members, down from 1,250 in 2000. They used mostly improvised explosive devices, mortars and automatic rifles.
Abdur Rahman Khan also known by his epithets, The Iron Amir, was Amir of Afghanistan from 1880 to his death in 1901. He is known for uniting the country after years of internal fighting and negotiation of the Durand Line Agreement with British India.
The Shinwari are an ethnic Pashtun tribe of Afghanistan. Among the greatest poets of the Pashto language in the 20th century was the late Ameer Hamza Shinwari, also known as "Hamza Baba".
The Mohmand or Momand is a prominent tribe of Pashtun people.
Khošāl Khān Khaṭak (Pashto: خوشال خان خټک; Urdu, Persian: خوشحال خان خٹک; 1613 – 20 February 1689), also known as Khushal Baba, was a 17th-century Pashtun poet, chief, and warrior. Khushal Khan served the Mughal Empire protecting them from Pashtun warriors over most of his lifespan. After being expelled from his tribal chiefdom and replaced with his son by his Mughal superiors, Khushal Khan turned against the Mughals. Afterwards, Khushal preached the union of all Pashtuns, and encouraged revolt against the Mughal Empire, promoting Pashtun nationalism in the last years of his life through poetry. Khushal wrote many works in Pashto but also a few in Persian. Khushal is considered the "father of Pashto literature" and the national poet of Afghanistan.
The North-West Frontier was a region of the British Indian Empire. It remains the western frontier of present-day Pakistan, extending from the Pamir Knot in the north to the Koh-i-Malik Siah in the west, and separating the modern Pakistani frontier regions of North-West Frontier Province, Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Balochistan from neighbouring Afghanistan in the west. The borderline between is officially known as the Durand Line and divides Pashtun inhabitants of these provinces from Pashtuns in eastern Afghanistan.
The Moro National Liberation Front is a political organization in the Philippines that was founded in 1972. It started as a splinter group of the Muslim Independence Movement. The MNLF was the leading organization among Moro separatists for about two decades beginning from the 1970s.
The Moro conflict was an insurgency in the Mindanao region of the Philippines which involved multiple armed groups. Peace deals have been signed between the Philippine government and two major armed groups, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), but other smaller armed groups continue to exist. In 2017, the peace council settled around 138 clan conflicts.
The Afghan mujahideen (Pashto: افغان مجاهدين) were Islamist resistance militias that fought the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union during the Soviet–Afghan War and the subsequent First Afghan Civil War.
Sāfī are Pashtun and Dardic people who speak Pashayai in addition to Pashto.
This is a timeline of the background of the history of the Taliban. It details the Taliban movement's origin in Pashtun nationalism, and briefly relates its ideological underpinnings with that of broader Afghan society. It also describes Taliban's consolidation of power, listing persecutions by Taliban officials during both its five years in power in Afghanistan and its war with the Northern Alliance. It further covers Taliban's time in power, its fall following the US invasion and its fight against the subsequent occupation, as well as its eventual return to power.
Ismatullah Muslim, also called Ismatullah Achakzai or just Ismat, was an Afghan militia leader, who in 1979 joined the mujahideen opposed to the communist PDPA and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, before coming over to the side of the government in 1984. Despite his military successes, Ismatullah Muslim was known for the many abuses he committed against civilians, made him a much hated figure throughout Afghanistan, except within his own tribe.
The Afghan conflict refers to the series of events that have kept Afghanistan in a near-continuous state of armed conflict since the 1970s. Early instability followed the collapse of the Kingdom of Afghanistan in the largely non-violent 1973 coup d'état, which deposed Afghan monarch Mohammad Zahir Shah in absentia, ending his 40-year-long reign. With the concurrent establishment of the Republic of Afghanistan, headed by Mohammad Daoud Khan, the country's relatively peaceful and stable period in modern history came to an end. However, all-out fighting did not erupt until after 1978, when the Saur Revolution violently overthrew Khan's government and established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Subsequent unrest over the radical reforms that were being pushed by the then-ruling People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) led to unprecedented violence, prompting a large-scale pro-PDPA military intervention by the Soviet Union in 1979. In the ensuing Soviet–Afghan War, the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahideen received extensive support from Pakistan, the United States, and Saudi Arabia in a joint covert effort that was dubbed Operation Cyclone.
The Khost rebellion, also known as the 1924 Mangal uprising, the Khost revolt or the Mangal Revolt was an uprising against the Westernization and modernizing reforms of Afghanistan’s king, Amanullah Khan. The uprising was launched in Southern Province, Afghanistan, and lasted from March 1924 to January 1925. It was fought by the Mangal Pashtun tribe, later joined by the Sulaiman Khel, Ali Khel, Jaji, Jadran and Ahmadzai tribes. After causing the death of over 14,000 Afghans, the revolt was finally quelled in January 1925.
The Herat uprising, locally known as the Uprising of 24th Hūt was an insurrection that took place in and around the city of Herat in western Afghanistan, across several days in March 1979. It included both a popular uprising and a mutiny of ethnic Tajik Afghan Army troops against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA). The communist regime at first appealed to its Soviet allies for help, but the Soviet leadership declined to intervene. After the insurgents seized and held the city for about a week, the regime was able to retake it with its own forces, and the subsequent aerial bombardment and recapture of Herat left 3,000 to 25,000 of its inhabitants dead. It was the worst outbreak of armed violence in the country in 50 years, and was the deadliest incident in the 1978-1979 period following the Saur Revolution and before the start of the Soviet occupation.
Pakistan's principal intelligence and covert action agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has historically conducted a number of clandestine operations in its western neighbor, Afghanistan. ISI's covert support to militant jihadist insurgent groups in Afghanistan, the Pashtun-dominated former Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Kashmir has earned it a wide reputation as the primary progenitor of many active South Asian jihadist groups.
Jamaat-ul-Ahrar was a terrorist organization that split away from Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan in August 2014. The group came to prominence after it claimed responsibility for the 2014 Wagah border suicide attack. In August 2020, it merged back to TTP.
The Afghan tribal revolts of 1944–1947 or the Khost disturbances were a series of tribal revolts in the Kingdom of Afghanistan by Zadran, Safi and Mangal tribesmen which lasted from February 1944 to January 1947. The causes of the revolts lay in the worsening conditions of farmers, changes in conscription laws, the elimination of the power of Safi tribal leaders, Amanullah loyalism, trading monopolies, government surveillance, taxation, and poverty. The conflict began when government forces clashed with the forces of a tribal leader named Mazrak, who led the Zadran tribe in revolt. The Zadran uprising was followed by additional uprisings by the Safi and Mangal, the former of which elected their own king, Salemai. Faqir Ipi, a tribal leader from Waziristan, also fought for the restoration of former king Amanullah Khan alongside other rebels.
Aimal Khan Mohmand, also known as Aimal Shah, was a prominent 17th century Afghan ruler, military commander, and chief, who proclaimed himself king and declared the holy war (Jihad) against the Mughal empire. He was considered a prominent warrior in the Mughal–Afghan Wars. Khan spent most of his life Against Aurangzeb. He was well known for Greatest Afghan Revolt in 1670s in which numerous Mughal Military commanders including Shujaat Khan were killed. Darya Khan Afridi was a close ally of Khan in the military campaign against Aurangzib Alamgir. After this campaign, Aurangzib Alamgir marched towards Peshawar and restored peace with the help of some Afghan chiefs.
New revolts occurred in 1943 and 1945 and were quelled in blood.
1933: Siege of Matun, the capital of the Afghan province of Khost, by the Mohmands. 1937: Uprising of the Mohmands, the Shinwaris and the Sulayman Khel section of the Ghilzais. 1938: Abortive tribal movement under the Shami Pir to oust King Zahir Shah. 1948-49: Rebellion of the Safi tribes. 1955: Abortive tribal movement on Kabul
In addition, tension between the government and the Bānki Millī group and the Ṣāfī Pashtūn tribal revolt (1947– 9) in Nangarhār Province brought Muḥammad Dāʾūd, who brutally suppressed it, to national attention.
The 'peasant' revolt of Harazajat in 1952 has also been attributed to the abuses of the state administration (Davydov 1967: 162). In this case, the revolt was immediate because the population was still well armed following the civil war, but my hypothesis is that elsewhere the 'imperial' system of oppression and exclusion and the patrimonial system of administration were slowly preparing the ground for future explosions, should the opportunity arise.
The last tribal revolt of the pre-1978 period was easily crushed in 1955.
In the late 1950s Hazaras again organized an armed insurrection in opposition to the imposition of heavy taxes. The state pacified the resistance by repealing taxes levied on the Hazaras and imprisoned the leaders of the rebellion, including Mohammad Ebrahim Beg, known as Bacha-e- Gaw Sawar, Khawja Naeem and Sayed Mohammad Esmail Balkhi. Ebrahim, who compromised his principles, was later released from jail, while Balkhi remained there until 1964.
Yet past efforts to reform, reshape or otherwise revamp Afghan society have only served to unite insular tribal, ethnic and regional-based communities against the imposition of centralised control. Instances of this include the Safi Rebellion (1945–46); the Pashtun revolt in Kandahar against provincial taxes and schools for girls (1959); an Islamist uprising in the Panjshir Valley (1975); and resistance to land reform, education policies and family law in Nuristan and Herat (1978). These rebellions were triggered when Kabul-based modernists attempted to control the social environment of the more conservative rural hinterland.
Cuba also dispatched combat troops to Syria in 1973 during the Yom Kipur War