The war's opening act was swift. In late 2012, a coalition of rebel groups calling itself Seleka - meaning "union" in the Sango language - accused President Francois Bozize's government of failing to honor earlier peace agreements. By December, Seleka fighters had seized N'Dele, Bria, and Bambari, the country's third-largest city. They took Kaga-Bandoro on Christmas Day. A ceasefire signed in Libreville on January 11, 2013, collapsed within twelve days. By March 23, Seleka forces had entered Bangui itself. The Presidential Palace fell on March 24. Bozize fled to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Seleka leader Michel Djotodia declared himself president - the first Muslim to hold the office in the majority-Christian country. He suspended the constitution and dissolved the National Assembly. The speed of the takeover masked the complexity of what would follow.

Seleka's seizure of power did not bring control. The coalition fractured almost immediately, its fighters - many of them foreign-born, from Chad and Sudan - engaging in looting, killings, and abuses against civilian populations. In response, self-defense groups that had previously organized to fight local crime reconstituted themselves as the Anti-balaka militias. On December 5, 2013, called "A Day That Will Define Central African Republic," Anti-balaka forces coordinated an attack on Bangui's Muslim population, killing more than 1,000 civilians in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Djotodia. The conflict split along religious lines: Muslim Seleka against Christian Anti-balaka. But it also split along ethnic and economic lines - agriculturalists versus nomadic herders, rival factions within Seleka turning on each other over territory and resources. By 2014, the country was de facto partitioned, with Anti-balaka controlling the south and west, from which most Muslims had been driven, and ex-Seleka factions holding the north and east.

The international response grew in stages, always a step behind the violence. The regional Economic Community of Central African States had maintained a peacekeeping force called MICOPAX since 2008. In December 2013, the UN Security Council authorized a transition to the African Union-led MISCA, expanding troop numbers from 2,000 to 6,000, and simultaneously authorized France's Operation Sangaris. When MISCA proved insufficient, the Security Council created MINUSCA in April 2014, a UN mission authorized at 10,000 troops. France withdrew from Operation Sangaris in October 2016, calling it a success. Meanwhile, beginning around 2017, Russia began filling the vacuum, providing military instructors and private contractors from the Wagner Group who became central to government offensives. Rwandan troops arrived in December 2020. The peacekeeping mission became a geopolitical chessboard, with France and Russia conducting competing influence campaigns.

The statistics are staggering. The Muslim population of Bangui dropped 99 percent, from 138,000 to 900. Amnesty International documented a "Muslim exodus of historic proportions" driven by Anti-balaka attacks. The Seleka factions committed their own atrocities - massacres at churches, summary executions, widespread sexual violence. Russian mercenaries killed at least 65 civilians in two villages in January 2022, and hundreds more, mostly artisanal miners, during a northern offensive in March 2022. Using statistical methods that construct counterfactual scenarios, researchers estimate the conflict reduced GDP per capita by 45 to 48 percent over the decade from 2013 to 2022 - a cumulative loss of $30 to $32 billion in purchasing power parity terms. That economic devastation exceeds even the estimated impact of the Rwandan genocide on that country's economy.

Peace has been declared many times. A ceasefire was signed in Brazzaville in July 2014. The Bangui National Forum produced a Republican Pact in May 2015. An African Union-led accord in February 2019, brokered with Russian and Sudanese involvement, was the eighth such agreement since 2012. President Faustin-Archange Touadera, elected in 2016, won reelection in December 2020 - an election that triggered six rebel groups controlling two-thirds of the country to form the Coalition of Patriots for Change and march on Bangui. They were repelled by Rwandan and Russian forces in January 2021. In July 2025, a peace agreement was reached in which the two largest remaining rebel groups, 3R and UPC, disarmed and dissolved in a public ceremony. Whether this agreement holds where eight predecessors failed remains the defining question for a country that has known little else but war for more than a decade.