As of 2025. Cumulative totals rest on government and IDMC annual displacement reporting through 2025 and continue to rise with each new emergency.
Since the Moro National Liberation Front launched its armed independence struggle in the early 1970s, followed by decades of further conflict involving successor groups (MILF, ASG, and others) and, more recently, ISIS-aligned factions, Mindanao in the southern Philippines has experienced recurrent cycles of displacement. Humanitarian trackers record roughly 5 to 6 million displacement incidents since the early 2000s, as many families are forced to flee repeatedly with each new outbreak of fighting; the 2017 siege of Marawi City by ISIS-aligned militants alone displaced 360,000-400,000 people for months. A series of peace agreements, culminating in the 2014 Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro and the 2019 creation of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, have reduced large-scale conflict but not eliminated displacement from clan feuds ("rido"), residual insurgent activity, and military operations.
Decades of conflict between the Philippine state and Moro separatist/insurgent groups (and later extremist factions) in Mindanao repeatedly displaced civilians
The 1970 census counted 7,963,932 people in Mindanao; the same islands held 26,252,442 at the 2020 census. Moro Muslims were a minority of the whole island group but the majority in the central and western provinces where most displacement occurred.
The International Crisis Group states the four-decade Moro separatist conflict 'has killed more than 120,000 people and displaced millions'; higher aggregates of around 150,000 are commonly cited by Philippine officials and commentators. Neither end is an incident-verified count — event-based datasets such as UCDP record far fewer confirmed battle deaths — and the figure is a long-standing round estimate rather than a survey result.
The International Crisis Group documented the destruction of Marawi's city centre and the displacement of some 200,000 civilians in the 2017 siege, which NPR reported still left over 120,000 displaced three years later.
Philippines