Definition

An insurgent is a person who rises in opposition or rebellion against an established government or authority.

Pronunciation

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Excerpts from News Articles

The fall of Hussein’s regime in April 2003 produced a nominally more democratic Iraq. But after fighting a series of sectarian insurgencies in Iraq over an eight-year period, the U.S. ultimately left behind a weak and deeply divided government.

Logo 2023-03-18 The Conversation

The Iraqi military and paramilitary forces were rapidly defeated and Hussein was eventually captured and hanged in 2006. But when evidence of WMDs was proven to be misleading, a violent insurgency arose and resulted in a protracted war that lasted until 2011.

Logo 2023-03-20 CGTN

A colossal police hunt for a Sikh separatist who has revived calls for an independent homeland in India’s Punjab state has stoked fears of violence and revived painful memories of a bloody insurgency that killed thousands.

Logo 2023-03-22 CNN News

Those who dared oppose the eight-year US occupation in Iraq were labelled as insurgents . Many were infamously tortured and sexually abused by US troops at the now notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

Logo 2023-03-28 Al Jazeera

(The federal government shuts down on Christmas, for instance, and on no other religious holiday; even in New York, there are special restrictions on the sale of alcohol on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath.) An allegedly insurgent demand is, in a way, a description of the status quo.

Logo 2023-04-03 The New Yorker

Most of those killed by US strikes in the rebel-held Idlib province over the past years were members of al-Qaida offshoot Horas al-Din, which is Arabic for “Guardians of Religion.” The group includes hardcore al-Qaida members who broke away from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the strongest insurgent group in Idlib province.

Logo 2023-04-04 EURO News

But such arguments are over the best way to do capitalism. It’s all about as far from interest in a neo-Marxist insurgency as can be imagined. Debating the best way to produce shareholder value has nothing to do with wanting a “revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” and to see private property abolished – key features of Marxism.

Logo 2023-04-05 The Conversation

Burkina Faso, which experienced two military coups last year, lurched further away from France and America, which have been helping it fight a jihadist insurgency . It expelled two French journalists, one of whom had investigated a video in which Burkinabè soldiers appear to have filmed themselves murdering teenage boys. Burkina Faso also said it wants to buy weapons from North Korea.

Logo 2023-04-05 The Economist

Things began to change in 2015, when Mr Erdogan washed his hands of the peace talks and the PKK , emboldened by the success of its American-backed offshoot in Syria, launched an urban insurgency across the south-east. Mr Erdogan’s government responded with deadly force, then with a blanket crackdown against Kurdish nationalists, including the HDP , which most Turks consider the PKK ’s political wing.

Logo 2023-04-05 The Economist

The Marine Corps investigation — known as a JAG Manual investigation, or JAGMAN investigation — concluded that the bungled mortar mission was caused by two mistakes. The first was the failure of an officer to specify "danger close" when requesting the mission, meant to take out a barricade of tires set up by Iraqi insurgents . Those two words would have alerted those in the command center to pay extra-close attention because friendly troops were close to the target and in danger of being killed or wounded.

Logo 2023-04-07 NPR

For 15 years, the IRA had been waging an insurgency to end British rule in Northern Ireland and to unite the region with the Republic of Ireland. It was the latest iteration of a centuries-old conflict between Irish rebels and their dominant neighbor.

Logo 2023-04-07 Literary Hub

In the months after McLaughlin returned home from Iraq, the war morphed into a grinding insurgency , and the images of his flag atop the statue in Firdos Square lived on as a reminder of America’s rush to war and the hubris of its leaders.

Logo 2023-04-09 The Washington Post

Abiy finally signed a peace deal with rebellious forces from the northern region of Tigray in November, after a two-year civil war there claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. He is also struggling to contain a spreading insurgency in the southern region of Oromiya, where Amhara civilians have frequently been the target of mass killings.

Logo 2023-04-10 The Washington Post

Quetta has been dealing with a separatist ethnic insurgency , at the same time as Pakistan is dealing with unrelated violence carried out by Islamist militants.

Logo 2023-04-10 Reuters

The Philippine Army, a ground-based force traditionally focused on fighting insurgency , recently wrapped up the first phase of the “Salaknib” exercise with its US counterpart, which focused on the “defense of the archipelago from potential foreign aggressors” by applying lessons learned from the Russia-Ukraine war.

Logo 2023-04-10 Asia News Network

Majli swears he never took part in the insurgency against the U.S. or committed any other crime. When he was eventually released, a year and four months later, he says the American officer handling his case was confused about why he'd been held because there were no charges in his file.

Logo 2023-04-11 NPR

An airstrike in the Sagaing region of northwestern Myanmar killed dozens of people Tuesday, according to eyewitnesses and leaders of insurgent groups that have been fighting the country’s military junta. Entire buildings were reported leveled in the attack on Kanbalu Township, about 130 miles northwest of Mandalay, in what might have been one of the deadliest such strikes since Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup two years ago.

Logo 2023-04-11 The Washington Post

New Delhi has long accused Pakistan of stoking a decades-long separatist insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority region in India.

Logo 2023-04-11 Reuters

We also found, surprisingly, that states that engage in some form of rivalry with other countries are more likely to prevent the escalation of a terror campaign into a long-running insurgency .

Logo 2023-04-11 The Conversation

Myanmar’s military said on Wednesday it carried out the deadly attack on a village gathering organised by its insurgent opponents this week, and if civilians were also killed it was because they were being forced to help the “terrorists”.

Logo 2023-04-12 Asia News Network

The junta said it carried out the attack on a gathering organised by its insurgent opponents, and if civilians were also killed, it was because they were being forced to help the "terrorists".

Logo 2023-04-12 Channel NewsAsia

The Myanmar military has admitted to carrying out airstrikes on a village gathering organised by its insurgent opponents where about 100 people, including children, were killed.

Logo 2023-04-12 The Independent

Myanmar's military said it carried out a deadly attack on a village gathering organised by its insurgent opponents this week and if civilians were also killed it was because they were being forced to help the "terrorists".

Logo 2023-04-12 Reuters

Finally, Castillo is associated with the “ronderos” – peasant patrollers. Peasant patrols, or “rondas,” were established in Cajamarca in the 1970s to defend against cattle-rustling and by the 1980s most rural areas of Peru had them to protect communities from the Shining Path’s Marxist insurgency .


Clearly, they just weren’t that interested. It now seems that the US and NATO counter insurgency mission served in part as cover for safeguarding and protecting the opium fields from destruction – which the Taliban had already gone about doing before the 2001 US invasion. Propping up Western proxies doesn’t come cheap, and some things simply aren’t fit for the accounting books back home.

Logo 2023-04-12 RT News

There is an obvious response to that – which Labour people know by heart – and that is, given the calamity of the 2019 result, everything is going better than anyone could have reasonably expected. But does Starmer seem insurgent ? To what extent do his arguments and ideas cut through to voters? How far is he from that point when would-be prime ministers so dominate the political conversation that the move from opposition to government seems almost inevitable?

Logo 2023-04-16 The Guardian

Senior security officials say they have seen increasing turmoil in Punjab over the past five years, with renewed calls by some members of the Sikh religion for an independent state called Khalistan. The recent events bring back memories of a Sikh insurgency in the 1980s, triggered by the Indian army raid on the religion’s holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, in which the Sikh militant leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was killed.

Logo 2023-04-16 The Washington Post

Papua was incorporated into Indonesia in 1969, after a U.N.-sponsored ballot that was widely seen as a sham. Since then, a low-level insurgency has simmered in the region, which is divided into two provinces, Papua and West Papua.

Logo 2023-04-17 MSNBC News

He was abducted in Dubai and flown to face trial in Kigali on charges of supporting insurgents . The Rwandan court eventually sentenced him to 25 years in prison.

Logo 2023-04-17 The Conversation

Papua was incorporated into Indonesia in 1969 after a UN-sponsored ballot that was widely seen as a sham. Since then a low-level insurgency has simmered in the region, which is divided into Papua and West Papua.

Logo 2023-04-17 The Guardian

Warlords in a country long-riven by militias and insurgencies , the two are now locked in a classic internecine conflict. “Both sides have bases across the country,” said Alan Boswell, head analyst for the Horn of Africa at the International Crisis Group think tank, to the Financial Times. “Both see this fight in existential terms. This is a pure power struggle for who will control Sudan.”

Logo 2023-04-18 The Washington Post

The only public certainty seemed to be a stubborn denial by Freddie Scappaticci that he had ever been a double agent with the code name Stakeknife — the British Army’s highest-ranking mole in the insurgent Irish Republican Army during the Northern Ireland sectarian conflict known as the Troubles.

Logo 2023-04-18 The New York Times

The Taliban insurgents continue their deadly war to seize control of Afghanistan after the departure of United States and NATO forces. As they close in on major cities that were once government strongholds, like Badakhshan and Kandahar, many Afghans – and the world – fear a total takeover.


Four years of fighting on small strips of land with little to show for it. Modern conventional war is expected to be fast-paced, such as Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and the second US invasion of Iraq in 2003 (if we conveniently ignore the years of insurgency that followed), or like the fighter pilots in the film Top Gun: Maverick, to provide another cinematic reference. And while we have seen drones and other hi-tech tools of war on the news, we haven´t seen much progress on pushing back the frontline.

Logo 2023-04-18 The Conversation

Dominion sued Trump adviser and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell , MyPillow founder Mike Lindell and others who helped spread the false theory. Dominion also sued the right-leaning news networks that repeatedly featured the theory in their coverage — two insurgent , pro-Trump channels, Newsmax and One America News Network, and the nation’s most-watched cable news network, Fox.

Logo 2023-04-19 Associated Press