&gt; Wars between different factions of the same religion are the rule, not the exception<p>Exactly. For example, the US and Saudi supported &quot;rebels&quot; in Syria are Sunnis. Assad is Alawite Shia, Iran too. Now look at who&#x27;s with whom. ISIS are inspired by Wahabi teaching, which was effectively able to grow thanks to Saudi Arabia and Oil, but consider any Muslim who&#x27;s not ready to accept Wahabi view apostate, that is, somebody who is, according to their religious views, to be killed(!)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wahhabism" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Wahhabism</a><p>The chaos in Iraq after US invaded to &quot;bring them democracy&quot; resulted in de-facto war between the Shia who got to the power and Sunnis who lost the influence. Yemen, where Saudi Arabia performs military actions now, has large Shia population.<p>Etc. It sounds complex, but it&#x27;s not, once you understand what&#x27;s going on and see how obviously groups support or fight one another exactly based on the religion, you can&#x27;t even imagine that people can ignore the predominantly religious background for the most of the conflicts.<p>If you don&#x27;t make a difference between Sunni, Shia and Wahabi, it&#x27;s your problem, but people lose lives because of that in the Middle East, in hundreds of thousands.<p>Which is not to say that it&#x27;s not even much worse (proportionally) for minorities like smaller religious Muslim groups and even worse for Christians there.