Only One Country's Flag Features an AK-47 🏳️⭐🌙

Only One Country's Flag Features an AK-47 🏳️⭐🌙

We sorted the world's national flags by the symbols on them: stars, crosses, crescents and moons, suns, animals, plants, buildings, a map, weapons, or no symbol at all. Mozambique's flag carries an AK-47, Cyprus puts its own map on its flag, Cambodia shows the temple of Angkor Wat, and Nepal's is the only national flag that is not a rectangle. The most common symbol is the star, on 67 flags.

📐 How we counted: the national flags of the 193 UN members and the 2 observer states (Vatican City and Palestine). Afghanistan is left out because two different flags have been in use since 2021, which leaves 194 flags. Dependent territories and disputed regions such as Western Sahara are left neutral. Kosovo's flag also features its own map, but since Kosovo is not a member of the UN, it is not counted. A flag joins the family of every symbol named in the CIA World Factbook's description of that flag. So one flag can belong to several families (Mozambique: star and weapon), and the counts add up to more than 194. On the final map, each country takes the colour of its rarest symbol. Details inside a coat of arms count when the Factbook names them; for Bolivia, Costa Rica, Peru and Venezuela we used the flag with the coat of arms that the Factbook describes. The disks of Laos and Palau are full moons; those of Japan, Bangladesh and Niger are suns. "No symbol" means stripes, bands and plain shapes only (Guyana's arrowhead counts as a shape). Paraguay's lion is on the back of its flag, so it is not counted.

📊 Data: CIA World Factbook flag descriptions, Flags of the World (FOTW); flag drawings from Wikimedia Commons, map by Natural Earth.

🎵 Music: Victory Of Many Flags Motivational - PaBlikMM (licensed)