Sierra Leone Civil War

For almost eleven years, from March 1991 to January 2002, Sierra Leone was torn apart by a war between successive governments and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a rebel movement backed from neighbouring Liberia by Charles Taylor. Fought largely over control of the country's alluvial diamond fields, it became notorious for atrocities against civilians, including mass amputations, rape and the use of child soldiers. Most estimates put the dead at over 50,000, with some putting total casualties as high as 70,000, and around 2.5 million people were displaced.

Sierra Leone became independent from Britain in 1961. Over the following decades corruption, misrule and political violence hollowed out the state, especially under Siaka Stevens, who turned the country into a one-party state before handing power to Joseph Momoh in 1985. By the late 1980s the government could not pay its teachers, the schools had collapsed and many young people had no work. Diamonds, easily dug in the east and south, enriched a narrow elite and were mostly smuggled abroad. Refugees from Liberia's civil war gathered on the border and became a pool of recruits.

On 23 March 1991 the RUF, led by Foday Sankoh and supported by Taylor's National Patriotic Front of Liberia, crossed into the country. Within a year it held much of the diamond-rich east and south. The army's response was brutal and ill-disciplined, and many soldiers began looting alongside the rebels, earning the name "sobels", soldiers by day and rebels by night. Villagers turned instead to local militias such as the Kamajors. On 29 April 1992 junior officers under Captain Valentine Strasser overthrew Momoh. With Nigerian help, the army pushed the RUF back to the border in 1993, but the war dragged on.

By early 1995 the rebels were close to Freetown. The government hired Executive Outcomes, a South African private military company, which drove the RUF back and recaptured the mining districts. Elections in 1996 brought Ahmad Tejan Kabbah to the presidency, and the RUF signed a peace accord at Abidjan on 30 November 1996. Early in 1997, under pressure to cut spending, Kabbah sent the company home before peacekeepers had arrived, and the accord soon collapsed.

On 25 May 1997 army officers seized power, formed the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council under Johnny Paul Koroma and invited the RUF to share it. Kabbah fled to Guinea, and the capital endured a wave of looting and reprisals. West African ECOMOG troops, led by Nigeria, retook Freetown in March 1998, but in January 1999 the rebels stormed back into the city; a Human Rights Watch report put the death toll of that assault at more than 7,000, at least half of them civilians.

The Lomé agreement of July 1999 pardoned Sankoh and made him vice-president with control over the diamond mines, a concession that drew wide protest. A United Nations force, UNAMSIL, arrived from December 1999, but in May 2000 the RUF took over 500 peacekeepers hostage and advanced on Freetown. The United Kingdom then sent troops, who evacuated foreigners and went on to stabilise the capital. With British support, Guinean raids on rebel bases, UN pressure on Liberia and a much larger UN force, the RUF collapsed. Kabbah declared the war over on 18 January 2002.

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission and a UN-backed Special Court began work in 2002. The court indicted Sankoh, who died in custody in 2003, along with commanders from all sides, and also indicted Charles Taylor, who was found guilty of war crimes committed in Sierra Leone and in May 2012 sentenced to 50 years in prison. Disarmament camps received more than 70,000 former fighters. One medical study estimated that between 215,000 and 257,000 people had suffered rape during the conflict. Since 2026 the country has marked a National Day of Remembrance on 18 January.

Our 1985 map shows Sierra Leone in the years before the war, and the 2000 map shows it during the final phase of the fighting.