‘WORLD peace’ it’s a popular adage but will we ever achieve what so many of us are asking for?

The headlines have been dominated of late with tales of death and destruction as terrorism, war and ongoing fighting rages on around the world.

Here are some of the major conflicts that have been and are currently in the spotlight.

LENDING SUPPORT: France to send weapons to Iraq

ISRAEL GAZA: Two brothers living through the same war

IRAQ

The US has been on the brink of deploying troops to the violent middle-eastern hotspot since May, when Islamic State forces began their deadly assault across the country’s north.

In three months, the Al-Qaeda inspired terrorist group has captured large swathes in its quest to form a “caliphate” straddling Syria and Iraq.

As a result of the group’s terror reign, thousands of people have been killed and hundreds of thousands more driven from their homes.

This week, western nations, including Australia, launched a precarious mission, involving aid operations and air strikes, to rescue 80,000 Yazidis trapped on a mountain after desperately trying to flee the fighting.

US President Barack Obama declared the mission “accomplished” yesterday, but the humanitarian crisis is extreme — a “Level 3 Emergency”, according to the United Nations.

The Australian Defence Force is on standby to provide further assistance if required as the brutal IS militants continue to flaunt their atrocities on social media.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott doesn’t envisage the deployment of Australian combat troops, but is continuing to consult with allies about the best way forward.

Meanwhile the conflict has led to the resignation of embattled Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. His successor-to-be is Haider al-Abadi.

As a result the Australian federal government plans to beef up counterterrorism measures to help fight the threat jihadists eturning to Australia after fighting overseas.

SYRIA

CIVIL war has raged in Syria since a popular uprising three years ago escalated into an ongoing insurgency.

Sectarian conflict erupted in March 2011 when government forces violently cracked down on demonstrators who rose up against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

Since joining the conflict in the spring of 2013, The Islamic State has ousted mainstream rebel groups battling Assad’s regime and seized control of almost all of Raqa and Deir Ezzor provinces on the border with Iraq.

At the end of June, IS declared a caliphate in territory it controls in Syria and Iraq.

The Observatory estimates that more than 170,000 people — nearly a third of them civilians — have been killed in Syria since March 2011, the start of a peaceful uprising against Assad’s regime that developed into an armed revolt.

In the fourth year of the civil war in Syria, chaos rules supreme. The country is split between government troops belonging to Assad, moderate opposition groups, Islamists, vigilantes and criminal gangs.

Meanwhile some nine million have fled their homes. The conflict threatens to spill into neighbouring countries, like Turkey and Lebanon.

UKRAINE

THE shooting down of a Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine last month - killing all 298 people on board - brought tensions in east Ukraine into the world’s focus.

What initially emerged as a ragtag, pro-Russian rebellion has also become more deadly as insurgent fighters gain possession of heavy weaponry, such as tanks and multiple rocket launchers and missiles, which they allegedly used to strike the passenger jet on 17 July.

Throughout the conflict, Ukraine and the West have accused Russia of aiding the rebels with arms and expertise, a charge that the Kremlin has denied.

Of the 568 Ukrainian military personnel killed since March, more than 200 have been killed in the past two weeks. There is no reliable count of how many rebels have been killed.

Four months of fierce battles between Ukrainian forces and insurgents have left rebel strongholds in the east without power, running water or fuel, and with dwindling food supplies.

Rebel fighters have been losing ground to government forces, and as the fighting has intensified the UN human rights agency said on Wednesday that the number of dead had doubled in two weeks.

More than 2000 have been killed while about 285,000 people have fled their homes in four months of what the Red Cross has officially deemed a civil war.

Kiev has long accused Moscow of fuelling the pro-Kremlin insurgency.

Moscow denies it is seeking to boost the insurgents, but NATO says it has massed 20,000 troops along the border with its ex-Soviet neighbour.

GAZA

A territorial-dispute is at the heart of the historic and wideranging Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which catastrophically flared up again last month.

The territory dispute has resulted in decades of instability and violence in the region, resulting in a senseless cycle of suffering as massive deaths and destruction in the Gaza strip.

In the past month of Israel-Hamas fighting — the third major round of such hostilities in five years — nearly 1900 Palestinians have been killed, more than 9000 wounded and thousands of homes destroyed, according to Palestinian and UN officials.

Israel says 64 of its soldiers and three civilians have been killed in the war, which began July 8.

There is a long history of conflict in the region including short wars breaking out in 2012 and 2008-2009.

In this current monthlong war, Israel’s military says that Hamas has used mosques to stockpile weapons and rocket launchers, to hide tunnel access shafts and lookout posts, and to hold military strategy sessions.

It says that of the more than 3000 rockets Hamas fired at Israel during the war, 600 were launched from civilian facilities, including 160 from mosques.

Israelis living on the frontier with Gaza have fled in their thousands from fighting that turned rural backwaters into combat zones.

Israeli and Palestinian delegations have been in talks in Egypt over a long-term ceasefire but have failed to reach a final peace agreement.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, in a BBC interview, called for a sustained ceasefire but stressed that the crucial wider issues would need to be tackled.

The Palestinians demand an end to the eight-year Israeli blockade of Gaza and the release of Palestinian prisoners.

Israel has demanded that Hamas, which won Palestinian elections in 2006 although designated a terrorist group by the United States and Israel, disarm its militia.

NIGERIA

A TROOP surge has not been enough to stop the brutal insurgency being waged by Nigerian militant group Boko Haram, which infamously made headlines for its capture of school girls earlier this year.

Since its rise in 2009, thousands of people have been killed, as followers move to impose an Islamic state in Nigeria, whose population of more than 170 million people is almost evenly divided between a mainly Muslim north and largely Christian south.

Nigeria’s fight against the extremist group took the international spotlight in mid-April when the militants kidnapped more than 279 schoolgirls, most of who still remain captive.

The insurgents have increased the number and deadliness of their attacks this year, particularly in their stronghold in the northeast. They also have detonated bombs as far away as Lagos, the commercial capital in Nigeria’s southwest.

Amnesty International says the violence against civilians constitutes “war crimes”.

The Islamist movement, which wants to create a hard line Islamic state in northern Nigeria, is blamed for killing more than 10,000 people since 2009 and their extreme tactics have been denounced worldwide.

As the militant group seeks to gain a foothold in the poor, rural north of Cameroon, experts warn that violence may spread beyond border areas to other parts of the central African country.

SOUTH SUDAN

After three years of independence, South Sudan is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe and a protracted internal conflict.

South Sudan is a country dominated by conflict and where two wars are raging.

Fighters loyal to the country’s vice president are fighting with presidential forces. The latter are also fighting on another front.

In neighbouring Sudan, South Sudanese troops are supporting autonomy efforts from two oil-rich provinces.

There is no end in sight to the ethnically targeted violence in South Sudan which broke out last December, forcing more than 1 million people to flee their homes, after President Salva Kiir — an ethnic Dinka — accused former vice president and current rebel leader Riek Machar of trying to oust him in a coup. That sparked months of ethnic attacks and failed ceasefires.

Human Rights Watch has this month released a report documenting the killings of thousands of civilians since the conflict began in what the group called “extraordinary acts of cruelty that amount to war crimes.”

The group called on the U.N. to impose an arms embargo on South Sudan, the most “food-insecure” nation in the world, and place targeted sanctions on individuals “responsible for serious violations of international law.”

A top U.N. official told the Security Council this month that a fresh wave of violence in South Sudan is dragging the world’s youngest country closer to a “humanitarian catastrophe.”

But despite international pressure to end the bloodshed, the likelihood of that happening looks low.

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

A fresh wave of interethnic tensions broke out in the Democratic Republic Of Congo in May 2013 when Bakata Katanga rebels launched bloody attacks on Pygmy areas, provoking clashes between the two communities which have worried humanitarian workers.

Pygmies are a hunter-gatherer people who are found in the DRC, Central Africa, Congo, Cameroon and Gabon. Their way of life is threatened by deforestation, mining and increasing pressure on agricultural land.

They face discrimination and contempt from other ethnic groups in the area, who often exploit them, paying them in cigarettes or alcohol.

The US group Refugees International last week appealed for more UN peacekeepers in the region to protect civilians “more efficiently”.

The commander of the UN mission, General Carlos Alberto dos Santos Cruz, told a press conference on Wednesday that “political work was also needed to stop the violence in Katanga”.

The country’s interior minister Richard Muyej took part in meetings in the mineral-rich southern region on Tuesday, which broke away from Kinshasa for three years in the early 1960s, to discuss interethnic tensions.

“We have to work to lower tensions ... and to lay the basis for reconciliation,” he told national television.

SOUTH CHINA SEA

Simmering tensions in the South China Sea have resulted in several tense encounters in the area over recent months.

China claims almost all of the South China Sea, putting it at odds with countries including the Philippines and Vietnam.

Indonesia does not have any disputes with China over the South China Sea, and has traditionally held a mediating role in rows over the waters.

Indonesia’s president-elect Joko Widodo said his country was ready to act as an intermediary to calm rising tensions over territorial disputes in the South China Sea, according to an interview published Tuesday (August 12).

The Jakarta governor, who won a resounding electoral victory last month, told Japan’s Asahi newspaper that he would work toward finding diplomatic — not military — solutions to the simmering conflicts.

Widodo also said he would help speed up the drafting of a code of conduct between China and the 10 member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

His comments come as Beijing accused Washington of deliberately stoking tensions in the South China Sea, and rejected Washington’s proposal for a freeze on provocative actions in the region.