To some extent, you can count the Nika Riots in Constantinople as an example of this. At the heart were the two big groups of chariot racing fans, the Blues and the Greens. These two groups were much bigger than just racing though, as they were also street gangs, and in some interpretation, proto political parties. They often rioted among themselves, but during the Nika riots, the two sides sort of found common ground in opposition to the policies of Emperor Justinian I, and the riot turned into a general revolt against the emperor.

We were never technically at war with Libya in the '80s, but we used military response, sanctions etc. against Moammar Qaddafi and his state-sponsored terrorism. Everyone else here can decide if that counts.

At that time, one of the most powerful gangs in the history of Chicago was at their peak: El Rukn (Islamic Arabic for "pillar" or "foundation"). They had gotten powerful enough that they were influencing local politics, campaigning for then-mayor Jane Byrne, contributing to aldermen Ed Vrdolyak and Bobby Rush, and finally planning on running one of their own as an alderman. In 1986, El Rukn leader Jeff Fort and 4 others were convicted of contracting with Libya for the purpose of committing domestic terrorism (Fort's conviction was the first of its kind in the US).

El Rukn was styled by Fort as an orthodox Islamic group but it bore more resemblance to black nationalism or Nation of Islam and was, in the end, a street gang albeit a disproportionately powerful one. This is probably not exactly what OP was looking for but historically when one thinks "gangs" one does not have to necessarily be from the US to draw the correlation with the concept in major US cities, especially Chicago with its historic ties to organized crime.

EDIT removed unnecessary editorializing

In Detroit during the late 1960s until the early 1970s, there was arguably a relative level of insurgency, kicked off by the 1967 Detroit Riots and the spread of the Black Power Movement. A lot of the militants in Detroit that were members of groups like the Revolutionary Action Movement and the Black Panther Party were drawn from local gangs. Substantial income to the social programs pioneered by local militants (especially the BPP) came from robbing heroin houses in the city, which itself was a function of many of the armed militants formerly being stick-up boys who got their day-to-day income through this method in the first place.

Source: Williams, Yohuru. Lazerow, Jama. “Liberated Territories: Untold Local Perspectives on the Black Panther Party.” Duke University Press. 2009.

Not exactly the same but it made me think of when Americans had to fight Panama street gangs during the invasion.