This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
President Francois Bozize had governed the Central African Republic since seizing power in a 2003 coup when, in December 2012, a coalition of mostly Muslim rebel factions from the country's neglected north and northeast, calling itself the Seleka, launched an offensive accusing Bozize of failing to honor an earlier peace agreement. The Seleka advanced largely unopposed by a hollowed-out national army, seized the capital Bangui in March 2013, and installed its leader Michel Djotodia as president, the country's first Muslim head of state, in a Christian-majority country where Muslims make up roughly fifteen percent of the population.
Seleka fighters, drawn heavily from outside the areas they now occupied and only loosely under central command, carried out widespread killing and looting of civilians as they consolidated control, which the United Nations and Human Rights Watch documented in detail. Christian and animist communities responded from mid-2013 by organizing self-defense militias known as anti-balaka, which by the time Djotodia resigned under international pressure in January 2014 had turned to organized reprisal attacks against Muslim civilians and the Seleka alike.
The reprisals that followed displaced most of the Muslim population from western and central Central African Republic within months, and a United Nations peacekeeping mission, MINUSCA, deployed later in 2014 to a country where sporadic fighting between armed groups, now more fragmented than the original two coalitions, continued for years afterward despite repeated peace agreements.