I made the same guess as Giles. So, wrong.
I did not realize the extent and was also unaware of that as the name.
I got it right, but that little factoid is virtually all I know about the war.
Doesn’t factoid mean “something often considered to be a fact, but which is actually not true”? The suffix “-oid” means “similar to, but not really,” right?
It’s come to also mean a short fact that’s given without any particular context, which is the sense I meant it as. Googling, though, apparently that usage is much less correct and slack-jawed types such as myself are ruining the language.
We’re mostly Americans. We’re ahead of the national curve just knowing where Africa is.
Does this have anything to do with abortion?
Add me to the Giles group.
My two guesses were the Iran-Iraq war and the Chinese civil war (if it counted). At least I’m in good company.
Given that what we call the “Vietnam War” included substantial interventions in Laos and Cambodia, and considering that our intervention in Cambodia gave the Cambodians reason to support the Khmer Rouge that they otherwise largely lacked, I have to consider the killing fields of Cambodia to be part of the death toll from our intervention in Vietnam.
Wikipedia gives a death toll range for the Vietnam War proper as 1,102,000-3,886,026. If we add in the 1.7M-2.5M death toll for the Cambodian killing fields, we get 2.802,000 - 6,386,000, while the range given for the Second Congo War is 2,500,000–5,400,000.
So it all depends on how one defines things.
I got it pretty much right. I guessed the Congo Civil War rather than the Second Congo War. But there was only a short period of peace between the first and second wars, so I figured they were really one extended war.
This was actually a minor controversy in current affairs a few years back. Some people were pointing out that this major war was going on and nobody was paying attention to it. So the lack of attention ended up calling attention to the war.
It’s tough to follow all of the factions involved because new ones keep joining in.
Here’s the basics. Mobutu Sese Seko used to be the dictator in charge. He was solidly pro-American so we supported him. But when the Cold War ended he was less needed and our support dried up.
So the first part of the war was when all his opponents, both inside the country and from neighbouring countries, banded together to drive Mobutu out of power. They accomplished this in 1997. But then once Mobutu was gone, the alliance of his opponents fell apart and the various groups each wanted to establish themselves as the new power. This led to the second part of the war, which officially ended in 2003 but is really still going on today.
I’ve always used it as per definition #2 here, but I see now that’s not really good to do. So I shall stop that.
I not only got it wrong, I misread the OP and guessed World War I.
What’s the etiquette here? Oh yes.
I was tired and/or I drank cough medicine for breakfast.
Didn’t know name of war, but knew which continent it was fought on.
I was wrong. I guessed the Chinese Civil War.