The annual Global Peace Index, recently released for June 2017, has found that while the world is more peaceful now than last year, violence has increased significantly overall in the past decade.

Although the situation has improved in many countries, the ten lowest-ranking nations – known as the world's "least peaceful" countries – have shown little change in recent years.

However, nine of those ten countries share one commonality in the violence that they've experienced: U.S.-led destabilization efforts and regime change operations.

Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan: Targets for regime change and manufactured sectarianism

Syria, which ranked last in the June 2017 index, has been in the throes of a U.S.-led regime change effort for the better part of six years – a conflict that has ravaged one of the most prosperous nations in the Middle East and turned it into the latest battleground for a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia.