Congo’s Implosion
Reporting from the fall of Goma.
MARCH 20, 2025
PHOTO: An M23 soldier is on patrol as surrendered Congolese police officers and soldiers are loaded into trucks and taken to a training center to be incorporated into the rebel group’s security forces on February 23. (By Amaury Falt-Brown)
Squeezed into a 7-mile space separating an active volcano and the shores of Lake Kivu, Goma is the largest city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. There are wide avenues with nightclubs and hotels in the center, which lies on the border with neighboring Rwanda. Further out, the city gives way to busy markets and, further still, tin shacks and clinker board houses built on jagged volcanic rock.
For more than 30 years, this city of roughly 2 million people has also found itself at the center of brutal regional conflicts. At least 50 international NGOs use Goma as a base to provide aid to survivors; U.N. peacekeepers from Bangladesh, India, Morocco and other countries serve tours in the city.
When I landed in Goma on January 21, the city was experiencing the worst upsurge in violence in decades. Rebels from the Rwanda-backed M23 group had besieged the city since 2022, occupying unassailable positions in the surrounding volcanic hills. The government now controlled only a pocket of about 150 square miles around Goma. The conflict threatened to turn into a full-blown regional war.
The M23, a militant group led by ethnic Tutsis, emerged in 2012, when it briefly captured Goma. It was pushed back by Congolese forces and U.N. peacekeepers and forced underground in the province of North Kivu. But the group reemerged in late 2021, rapidly seizing territory. Initially, the rebels blamed the government in the capital, Kinshasa, for failing to uphold a peace deal; later they would claim to be protecting minorities such as the Tutsi.
The siege had gone on for so long it had come to be seen as normal. The cost of capturing Goma — both in human lives and diplomatic blowback — was thought to be too high.
According to an independent panel of U.N. experts on Congo, up to 4,000 Rwandan soldiers operate in Congo alongside the M23. Rwanda’s army has also deployed sophisticated weapons such as surface-to-air missiles and Turkish-made attack drones in Congo. Yet despite overwhelming evidence of its involvement, Rwanda has never acknowledged its de-facto invasion of Congo. The M23 conflict has driven about 2 million people to flee their homes. With state control weak or non-existent across large parts of eastern Congo, the number of deaths caused by the conflict is unknown.
When I arrived, the M23 had just captured Sake, a strategic town 12 miles northwest of the city, blocking its last supply route by land. One friend joked darkly that I’d arrived right on time.
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Less than a week after my arrival, M23 and Rwandan forces came down from the hills around Goma and captured the city after days of brutal combat, featuring artillery fire, drone strikes and desperate, but doomed, resistance. The fighting killed at least 900 people, with some estimates putting the death toll in the several thousands.
But this still seemed like fantasy a week earlier, on my first morning in Goma on January 22. The siege had gone on for so long it had come to be seen as normal. The cost of capturing Goma — both in human lives and diplomatic blowback — was thought to be too high. The city was densely populated: Between 650,000-800,000 people displaced from the surrounding countryside by the ongoing conflict lived in sprawling tent cities around the city. The government-controlled pocket was also jam-packed with different military forces.
Congo threw its best elite army units into Goma, alongside substandard regular units. But the military mostly exists on paper: There’s barely a chain of command and officers are notoriously venal. Congo pays soldiers about $100 a month, if at all. The government had come to rely on militia groups hostile to the M23 and Rwanda, which perhaps made up the bulk of Congo’s frontline combat force, to fight back. It also hired about 1,000 European mercenaries, ostensibly as instructors, most of whom came from Romania. Four allied African states also contributed troops to defend Goma: Burundi, South Africa, Tanzania and Malawi.
On January 22, still relatively at ease, I paid a visit to Congo’s military spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Guillaume Ndjike, in his shipping-container office. A large man prone to angry outbursts, fond of whisky and snuff, Ndjike would often threaten to arrest me if I didn’t do as he said. But over years of courtesy calls, he’d softened, and that day he was all smiles.
Ndjike wouldn’t speak to the converging Rwandan and rebel forces, though. The colonel gazed out of the window for a moment when asked to comment. “On est là,” he replied. Meaning “we’re here” in French, the phrase conveys more than its three words; it was an expression of stoicism and defiance — and perhaps resignation — that I would hear again and again over the next week.
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The following day, I traveled with colleagues along the road northwest of Goma to try to glimpse the frontline. Military police officers manned barriers on the outskirts of town to stop soldiers from running away. About 10 miles out, Romanian mercenaries and Congolese special forces stopped us at a checkpoint. One friendly Romanian, with a skull patch stitched onto his bulletproof jacket, warned us against going further: “If I were you, I wouldn’t do it.”
Pro-government militia fighters in rubber boots were driving past on motorbikes, occasionally firing their beat-up AK-47s into the air. “Give us guns to fight,” shouted a teenage boy, one of thousands from the camps who had turned up to watch. The crowd cheered as a squadron of Congolese attack helicopters roared over a shimmering Lake Kivu, firing rockets at M23 and Rwandan forces. But the attitude of the Romanian mercenaries — always scanning the road, murmuring into radios — gave it away: Congo’s defenses were crumbling.
North Kivu’s military governor, Peter Cirimwami, was shot a little farther down the road the same day. He later died. That’s when the panic set in. The government shut down the internet. Electricity pylons were hit in the fighting, disabling the water pumps that relied on the electrical grid. Suddenly, there was no water, no electricity, and no way to get in touch with loved ones. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people started to move closer to the city for shelter, while better-off city dwellers fled to Rwanda.
The assault only intensified over the next few days. On Saturday, January 25, the sound of artillery exchanges between the two sides boomed across the city. Congolese army leaders escaped on boats across the lake. On Sunday morning, contingents of Rwandan soldiers infiltrated the border and overran Congolese positions several miles north of Goma, before pushing toward the city center.
Congolese soldiers and pro-government militia fighters in Goma were trapped. When M23 called for surrender, many suspected a ruse. Intense street battles raged across the city. On a hilltop in the center, some soldiers made last stands until they were slaughtered, others threw off their uniforms and tried to hide in civilian homes or U.N. bases. Like almost everyone else, I sheltered indoors as bullets cut through the air outside.
The crowd cheered as a squadron of Congolese attack helicopters roared over a shimmering Lake Kivu, firing rockets at M23 and Rwandan forces. But the attitude of the Romanian mercenaries — always scanning the road, murmuring into radios — gave it away: Congo’s defenses were crumbling.
When the fighting eased, fresh-looking M23 men walked in columns through Goma. On the road were bodies, bullet casings and congealing pools of blood. Soon, looters began to target U.N. and NGO premises across the city, carrying away anything they could: furniture, medicine and crates of a peanut-based paste used to treat malnutrition. The M23 reestablished control brutally. Peeping over a wall, I saw M23 rebels fire at fleeing looters, some of whom fell to the ground. Later, near the city center, masked fighters loaded hundreds of captured soldiers onto cattle trucks, sending them to a fate as yet unknown.
The question of what is fueling the conflict is still unsettled.
Its roots are deep, arguably dating to the pre-colonial feudal system in Rwanda. Tutsis occupied higher social strata but it was also possible for a Hutu to become Tutsi and vice versa. European colonial rule hardened the distinction. Belgium, which ruled over what is now Rwanda from the early 20th century, favored the Tutsi, whom it viewed as racially superior to Hutus.
In the mid-20th century, hundreds of thousands of workers, both Tutsi and Hutu, migrated from Rwanda to eastern Congo, also a Belgian possession at the time, fueling ethnic tensions. Pre-existing Congolese Tutsi populations came to be associated with the new Rwandan arrivals.
Rwanda’s motivations for its latest intervention are not easy to parse. In Kinshasa, Congolese leaders believe that Rwanda’s continued interference in eastern Congo is driven solely by a desire to steal minerals.
But it was the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsi were killed in nearly three months, that triggered the implosion of eastern Congo. Fearing reprisal after Tutsi rebels overthrew the genocidal government, ethnic Hutu extremists implicated in the slaughter fled to Congo, along with millions of Hutu civilians.
The mass exodus triggered two regional wars, which lasted from 1996-1997 and 1998-2003 and in which an estimated several million people died, mostly of hunger and disease. Rwanda played a leading role in both, backing rebel groups and deploying its own troops. Congolese warring factions reached a settlement to the second conflict — known as the Second Congo War — in 2002, but dozens of armed groups, most of them formed along ethnic lines, continued to operate in eastern Congo, ostensibly protecting local communities from other militias or the corrupt Congolese army.
Rwanda’s motivations for its latest intervention are not easy to parse. In Kinshasa, Congolese leaders believe that Rwanda’s continued interference in eastern Congo is driven solely by a desire to steal minerals. Gold is abundant in the region, which also has rich deposits of rare metals such as coltan, used to make capacitors, and niobium, used to make superalloys for jet engines and hypersonic missiles. The country already has well-established smuggling networks: It traded about $885 million worth of gold, its top export, in 2023; most of it is thought to be trafficked from eastern Congo.
Rwandan leader Paul Kagame is also thought to be wary of Congo’s new alliances in the region: Kinshasa has been strengthening economic and military ties with Rwanda’s rivals, Uganda and Burundi, and Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi allowed both countries to send troops to eastern Congo to counter armed groups.
Rwanda and M23, for their part, both cite discrimination against Congolese Tutsi, as well as the survival of militias such as the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR), which was founded by Rwandan genocide perpetrators, as the main reasons for the conflict.
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On January 30, after seizing Goma, M23 commanders held a press conference in the city’s five-star Serena Hotel, yards from a U.N. base where panicked Congolese soldiers had taken refuge days before.
Speaking in French, Swahili and Kinyarwanda — the language of Rwanda and of many Congolese Hutu and Tutsi — the leaders vowed to march on Kinshasa. For now, this is an unlikely prospect. The capital is nearly 1,000 miles to the west of Goma, with vast tracts of jungle in between.
Vigilante justice spread through the displacement camps — suspected thieves were lynched and burned, their charred bodies abandoned on the road.
After the conference, I spoke to the M23’s political figurehead, Corneille Nangaa, in his suite. English-speaking fighters searched my bag before I was allowed inside, where several attending officials wore surgical masks to hide their identity.
Nangaa was confident and voluble. “We are Congolese, and our demands are Congolese,” he said, citing anti-Tutsi discrimination, pervasive government corruption and a crackdown on political dissent as reasons for violence. M23 fighters would advance “until the last drop of blood,” he added.
Beyond the hotel’s guarded perimeter, Goma was becoming more dangerous. Few M23 fighters patrolled the streets and pro-government militia fighters in hiding came out at night to conduct armed robberies. Vigilante justice spread through the displacement camps — suspected thieves were lynched and burned, their charred bodies abandoned on the road.
The bulk of Rwandan and M23 forces were pushing into the neighboring province of South Kivu, beyond Goma, pursuing the remnants of the Congolese army. By phone, I reached a senior commander of a pro-government militia in the province. He once led thousands around Goma but fled the city after kamikaze drones struck his hilltop outpost on January 27. The commander was frank. “I’m preparing to die,” he said. “The Rwandans are in Congo and they’re fighting us. I don’t know why.”
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On February 9, I traveled out of Goma again. There were hardly any armed forces outside the city. But the signs of destruction were everywhere. Tank shells lay beside fallen electricity pylons and belts of 50-millimeter bullets were pressed into the dirt.
The rebels are now administering their captured territories, establishing a parallel government and even conducting a census in Goma.
Farther on, the town of Sake was almost deserted. Shops were shuttered and pockmarked with bullet holes. Only a few elderly people were walking around. A few miles farther northwest, the town gave way to lush countryside and tall grasses. There, the detritus in abandoned Congolese positions was still fresh. Wooden huts contained empty bottles of whisky, discarded flak-jackets and conical rocket-propelled grenades.
A few days later, I crossed into Rwanda as M23 began ordering the displaced people around Goma back to their villages. The group seized South Kivu’s main airport, severing the Congolese army's final resupply route. By February 15, M23 fighters walked unopposed into Bukavu, eastern Congo’s second-largest city, 60 miles south of Goma on Lake Kivu’s southern shore. The rebels are now administering their captured territories, establishing a parallel government and even conducting a census in Goma.
Congo’s army and its allies have scattered. The defeat is total and bewildering. In Kinshasa, the government is paralyzed. Tshisekedi’s rule now hangs in the balance after losing control of the east.
Western nations have imposed new sanctions on Rwanda. The U.S. targeted former Rwandan general and M23 liaison James Kabarebe, and the European Union sanctioned Rwandan special-forces commanders and Rwandan government officials involved in the minerals trade.
On the ground, there are alarming parallels to the Second Congo War. Uganda has started sending more troops across into eastern Congo, sparking fears of another regional competition for influence, and various efforts by African mediators to bring Congo and Rwanda together at the negotiating table have stalled. Tshisekedi and Kagame held a surprise face-to-face meeting in Qatar on March 18, but the prospect of a peaceful resolution is still uncertain. Congo stands at the precipice of another devastating war, with no clear way out.
✺ Published in “Issue 26: Gospel” of The Dial
