Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo
—
In the heart of Africa, in the mineral-rich eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, new recruits are being trained for battle.
The scores of militia groups that have fought for three decades in one of the most protracted and complex conflicts in the world are still engaging in deadly fighting, and US President Donald Trump’s claimed peace deal for the nation feels like a distant dream.
The deal, portrayed as a “wonderful treaty” by Trump, was signed by the foreign ministers of Rwanda and DR Congo in Washington on June 27.
However, it has yet to end the wider bloodshed that began after the 1994 Rwandan genocide and is estimated to have killed 6 million people.
“Our aim is to go to Kinshasa,” says Corneille Nangaa, a former election-chief-turned-rebel-leader, in an interview with CNN inside the rebel-held city of Goma.
Nangaa’s rebel coalition Alliance Fleuve Congo (AFC), of which M23 is a key member, plans to go to the capital to overthrow his one-time ally President Felix Tshisekedi, whom he considers illegitimate. “We need to liberate our country. We need to take away this corrupted regime, and then we need to build the state,” said Nangaa, who heads AFC-M23’s political wing.
M23, which is allegedly backed by Rwanda, took control of eastern DR Congo’s two largest cities – Goma and Bukavu – in a lightning offensive at the start of this year. According to DR Congo’s government, some 7,000 people have died in fighting in the eastern Congo since January. The ethnic Tutsi-led M23 claims to defend the interest of minority Rwandophone communities there, including the Tutsi.
Crucially, neither the AFC nor M23 is party to the US-brokered peace process.
However, Trump is heralding the US-brokered peace agreement as one of the several conflicts his administration has “settled.” He is expected to host the two country’s presidents soon for a ceremonial signing of the deal.
“We settled the Congo with Rwanda, that was going on, and that was a machete war. That was a gruesome war, many people, close to 10 million people killed. We got that,” Trump told reporters at a press conference in the United Kingdom alongside British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday. Most of the wars “were not thought to be settleable,” he added. Experts say his claims to have “solved seven wars” are debatable.
CNN visited Goma, home to more than 2 million people, in the week the United Nations Human Rights Office (OHCHR) released a fact-finding report on the escalation of hostilities between January and July 2025 in North and South Kivu, the provinces where Goma and Bukavu are located.
The findings “underscore the gravity and widespread nature of violations and abuses committed by all parties to the conflict, including acts that may constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
It said, after capturing territories, “M23 engaged in a campaign of intimidation and violent repression through a pattern of summary executions, torture and other forms of ill-treatment, detention and enforced disappearances against the civilian population, carried out with the stated objective of restoring order, security and stability.”
Eight months on from M23’s violent takeover of Goma, the city’s Birere market is once again bustling with hundreds of stalls packed with fresh produce.
Women dangle live chickens from their hands, and carry spices piled high in plastic buckets on their heads.
The air is thick with the smell of exhaust fumes and the noise of radios, people’s chatter and moto taxis beeping their horns. There is nothing that does not seem available to buy: from tracksuits to handbags to fridge freezers.
But the hectic scenes belie the ever-present threat of violence for civilians living in this contested region.
“Ça va un peu,” or “it’s kind of OK,” says one young man selling brightly colored cloth, when asked how life has been since January.
“We have suffered enough already,” another woman selling fish laid out on a small wooden table says. Like many, she declines to talk about life under the control of an armed militia or to give her name.
Announcing the findings of the fact-finding report in Geneva on September 9, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said: “My team confirmed that the M23 committed widespread torture and other mistreatment, including sexual violence, against detainees. Some people were beaten to death or died from injuries, suffocation or from starvation and dehydration. Accounts indicate that some guards were Rwandans.”
The report also detailed a massacre that took place in Rutshuru territory, in North Kivu, allegedly at the hands of M23 and Rwandan soldiers – just weeks after the draft Rwanda-DR Congo peace agreement was signed in Washington.
“In July, M23 members, together with alleged soldiers of the RDF (Rwandan Defense Force) and civilians armed with machetes, massacred hundreds of people – mainly Hutus – in four villages in Rutshuru. This is one of the deadliest incidents recorded since the M23’s resurgence in 2022,” Turk told the UN Human Rights Council.
Human Rights Watch also previously documented the mass killings in Rutshuru, near Virunga National Park, a crucial gorilla habitat. The organization said the mass killings appeared to be part of a military campaign against the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a mostly Rwandan Hutu armed group that HRW says is formed by participants in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, and other opposing armed groups.
During the genocide, hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutu militias. M23 says that peace deals since have not done enough to protect the Tutsi minority in DR Congo; critics say this is a pretext and that the Rwandan-backed rebels are seeking to exploit the region’s mineral wealth.
“I reject all those reports because they are propaganda from Kinshasa,” Nangaa told CNN when asked about the allegations of severe human rights abuses and war crimes leveled at M23 in the reports by the UN and HRW. He claimed that the findings were invented to raise donor funding, calling them all lies.
He also denied the group is backed by Rwanda. “We have our own soldiers,” he said. “We don’t benefit anything from Rwanda, and we don’t need it.”
Rwanda has also repeatedly denied backing M23, though UN experts and much of the international community believe the country supports the rebels. CNN contacted the Rwandan government for comment on the UN’s fact-finding report, but has not yet received a response.
The Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) “remains a republican army, fully subject to the Constitution, international humanitarian law and international human rights law, and applies a policy of zero tolerance for any serious violations in this regard,” DR Congo government spokesperson Patrick Muyaya said in response to CNN’s questions regarding the UN fact-finding report.
Muyaya said the government considers it “inappropriate” to compare M23 to a national army, describing the rebel group as “a subversive armed group, auxiliary to a neighboring State, whose strategy is based on terror, mass crimes and the illegal exploitation of natural resources.”
Struggle for cash and food
One of the many problems facing the civilian population is that money is hard to come by. The government closed banks in eastern Congo in response to M23’s takeover of Goma and Bukavu, resulting in residents and businesses struggling to access cash to carry out basic transactions.
The closure of Goma’s International Airport – once a busy hub for the region and now in the hands of the rebels – has also hampered deliveries of humanitarian aid.
The World Food Programme (WFP) told CNN that as of mid-2025, 28 million people – nearly a quarter of the population of DR Congo —require urgent food assistance and the escalation of violence following the M23 takeover of Goma and Bukavu has “severely disrupted humanitarian operations.”
“We are staring down a humanitarian catastrophe,” WFP country director Cynthia A. Jones said.
“Without immediate funding and safe access, millions in eastern DRC will be cut off from life-saving assistance. Food is not just aid – it’s survival, it’s dignity, and it’s the foundation of peace.”
The nutritional situation is deteriorating rapidly, the WFP said, with 4.75 million children under five facing or expected to face acute malnutrition, including 1.4 million in severe condition. The spike in malnutrition is being driven – in part – by the mass displacement due to conflict, the WFP said. More than 7.8 million people are now internally displaced in eastern DRC – the highest figure on record, according to UN figures reported in August.
In North Kivu province, “there is fighting going on every day” between M23 and other armed groups and people are still being displaced, one aid worker in the DR Congo, who did not wish to be named for fear of reprisal, told CNN.
“There’s more than a million people who’ve been displaced by the fighting in Masisi,” a town around 50 miles (80km) north of the North Kivu provincial capital Goma, they said. “So that is then creating further humanitarian needs.”
CNN met a mother of four young children from Masisi at the border crossing between Goma and Rwanda. She was one of dozens of women and children who stand accused of being family members of FDLR soldiers by the rebels and are being sent as part of a UN refugee process to live in Rwanda. The M23 calls it “repatriation.”
“I’m coming ‘back home’ to a place I don’t even know because I was born in Congo, but I’m happy to be ‘back home,’” said 25-year-old Muhawenimana Rachel. She did not know where her husband was, she said.
The DR Congo said the return of Rwandan refugees is part of a formal tripartite mechanism between the DRC, Rwanda and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which “enshrines clear principles: the voluntary, safe and dignified return of all refugees to their country of origin.”
It said the “voluntary repatriations” take place under UNHCR’s direct supervision in strict compliance with the tripartite mechanism.
Camps for internally displaced people have been dismantled by M23 in the months since the group seized control, with many of those sheltering there forced to go back to what remains of their homes and villages.
“People were forced to go back to their villages. Some of them were able to go back and find their houses, but the majority found that the houses were either destroyed, there were people living in them, and people had taken their land,” the aid worker said.
Compounding the issues already facing the country of almost 110 million people was the dramatic shutdown in July of the US Agency for International Development, a multibillion-dollar agency that fought poverty and hunger around the world. The United States was by far the largest donor to DR Congo, providing more than $6 billion in humanitarian and development assistance over the past decade, the US Embassy in Kinshasa said in January 2025.
The US covered 70% of the humanitarian response plan last year for DR Congo, according to the UN. Nearly every organization on the ground has been affected by the funding withdrawal, the aid worker in DR Congo explained.
Earlier this year, an order placed for 100,000 post-rape kits, which include medication for preventing infection from HIV and other STDs, that was set to be delivered to multiple organizations treating sexual violence survivors in eastern DR Congo was canceled. “It’s really hard to find them here right now, so that has had a devastating effect,” the aid worker said.
Sexual violence has long plagued DR Congo. In July, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), one humanitarian organization still working with survivors on the ground, said nearly 40,000 women were treated by its teams in North Kivu in 2024 alone.
“Between January and April 2025, more than 7,400 survivors were treated in the Ministry of Public Health facilities supported by MSF in Goma. West of the city, in the town of Saké, more than 2,400 others were treated during the same period,” MSF said in a news release.
While colonial-era border disputes and ethnic tensions have helped to fuel this entrenched conflict, control over DR Congo’s mineral riches is also at its core.
The Central African nation, which is roughly the size of Western Europe, is endowed with the world’s largest reserves of cobalt – used to produce batteries that power cell phones and electric vehicles – and coltan, which is refined into tantalum and has a variety of applications in phones and other devices.
Trump signaled his interests in a US-brokered peace treaty before hosting the signatories in the Oval Office in June, telling reporters that the accord would allow the US to get “a lot of the mineral rights from the Congo.”
However, previous truce agreements have failed to bring lasting peace between M23 and the Congolese armed forces. Parallel peace negotiations are currently ongoing, namely a Qatar-led process, which have yet to bring concrete results.
Nangaa told CNN that Trump has been fooled if he thinks DR Congo’s president can offer him minerals in return for peace.
“All the minerals we are talking about, they are mostly in Katanga and also in Kivu. Those minerals belong to the people, so he has to discuss with those people. Tshisekedi doesn’t have any mining sites,” Nangaa said, referring to two provinces in eastern DRC – far from the capital Kinsasha, in the west of the country.
M23 this year seized areas where mining sites are concentrated, including the so-called “coltan capital” of Rubaya. But Nangaa denied the suggestion that M23’s fight is about minerals, claiming he had not seen any minerals himself.
“The mineral is for you guys, for Chinese, for Americans, for the Europeans who are using that raw materials,” he said. “We are fighting for corns, for cassava, for rice.”
The militias’ fight is about “bad governance, political problems and identity problems,” he added.
“The root causes of the conflict, is not discussed in Washington… I’m afraid that even if they sign, nothing is going to happen here, because we are in Goma, we are Congolese. We are not going to go in exile. We are staying. We are home and we are going to stay.”
