Angolan Civil War

The Angolan Civil War broke out in 1975, immediately after Angola gained independence from Portugal, pitting the Marxist governing party the MPLA against the rival UNITA movement, and initially also the FNLA, in a conflict that quickly became a major Cold War proxy struggle. The Soviet Union and Cuba, which deployed large numbers of troops, backed the MPLA government, while the United States and apartheid South Africa supported UNITA under Jonas Savimbi, and fighting continued through failed peace efforts and a contested 1992 election that UNITA rejected. The war finally ended in 2002, when Savimbi was killed in action by government forces, prompting UNITA to agree to a ceasefire and transition into a purely political party after some twenty-seven years of intermittent warfare.