M23 soldiers are seen in Goma on February 6, 2025 for a public gathering called by the armed group.

After bearing witness to waves of fighting throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the eastern Congo city of Bukavu may once again find itself at the center of a decadeslong armed conflict. Home to 1.3 million people, the regional capital of the South Kivu province has begun closing schools and businesses in preparation for an imminent attack as M23 rebels advance toward government-held positions in the volatile Great Lakes region.

Hailed by some Congolese as liberators and denounced by others as foreign invaders, the armed group is now threatening to push “all the way to Kinshasa”—the country’s far-off capital—in its campaign against President Félix Tshisekedi’s government. The renewed violence, which the United Nations estimates has left nearly 3,000 people dead and displaced 700,000 others since January, marks the latest bloody chapter of what has long been described as Africa’s forgotten conflict. And it shows no signs of slowing, as longtime ethnic rivalries rear their heads.

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Leaders of southern and eastern African countries gathered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Saturday to call for negotiations toward a ceasefire. But neither Kinshasa nor M23 appear eager to engage in talks. Last month, the rebels captured the city of Goma—the largest city in eastern Congo with an estimated population of 2 million—setting off a wave of unrest across the country, including the capital. Pro-government rioters attacked the American Embassy in Kinshasa in January, accusing the U.S. and other foreign allies of looking the other way while the insurgency in the east gained traction.

Compounding the crisis is the Congo’s looming humanitarian disaster. Despite its abundance of natural resources, it remains one of the poorest countries in the world, ranking 180^th out of 193 countries in the latest Human Development Index. The U.N. warned last month that more than 21 million people were in need of live-saving humanitarian aid, while another 1 million were displaced in neighboring countries.

Tshisekedi blames M23 and its Rwandan backers for the instability gripping Congo, while the armed group says it’s fighting a discriminatory and deeply corrupt government. But despite its new faces, the conflict in eastern Congo predates both the Congolese president and the rebel faction. Many analysts view this latest round of fighting as a direct spillover from the 1994 Rwandan genocide—a killing spree by the ethnic Hutus against their Tutsi neighbors that left more than 800,000 people dead in 100 days.

When a Tutsi uprising led by Rwanda’s current president, Paul Kagame, put a stop to the massacre, many Hutus fled into Congo and shortly thereafter began the process of re-arming. Congolese Tutsis did the same, leading to the outbreak of the First Congo War two years after the Rwandan genocide. That conflict and subsequent wars have led to some 6 million deaths in the last three decades.

M23 formed in 2012 in response to what it described as the Congolese government’s ethnic incitement against Tutsis. After its establishment, the Tutsi-dominated militia—which takes its name from March 23, 2009, the date of a peace deal that it claims Kinshasa reneged on—quickly seized Goma but later withdrew from the city following a ceasefire. After years of low-level insurgency, it launched another full-scale offensive in North Tivu in 2022 and has been fighting ever since, expanding into the neighboring province of South Tivu last month.

As with most conflicts, civilians have suffered the most. Both the Congolese army and the rebel group—one of dozens operating in eastern Congo—have a record of human rights abuses, including extrajudicial executions, forced evictions, and sexual violence. Washington has previously sanctioned both M23 and Kinshasa-aligned militias over their roles in destabilizing the region, and the new administration appears on track to continue that approach. The U.S. is “deeply troubled by escalation of the ongoing conflict in eastern DRC, particularly the fall of Goma to the Rwandan-backed M23 armed group,” a State Department spokeswoman said in January.

The Congolese government also accuses M23 of looting valuable minerals on behalf of neighboring Rwanda, which it says arms and trains the fighters—a charge that Kigali denies. Raw materials are Congo’s biggest exports and China is its biggest customer, relying on Congo for 67.5 percent of its refined cobalt supply. According to a December report by the U.N., at least 150 tons of coltan were smuggled into Rwanda last year. The rare mineral is essential for the production of electronic components.

But some analysts argue that understanding Congo’s war through the narrow lens of cross-border resource competition is counterproductive. The international community has for decades sought to rid supply chains of conflict minerals through sanctions and other penalties, yet hostilities persist. And what the U.N. considers smuggling into Rwanda, many Congolese view as a legitimate way to circumvent their country’s corrupt leadership, which takes a much steeper cut of their proceeds.

Dismissing M23’s grassroots appeal as a product of foreign intervention risks overlooking the endemic corruption that pushed Congo to the brink in the first place, said Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who recently traveled there. “Kinshasa was not safe after dark, but Rutshuru—under M23 control—was. The M23 zone was bustling, and word has spread. Congolese were seeking to cross lines to enter the M23 zone,” he told TMD. “Farmers had resumed planting since they no longer had to worry about arbitrary taxation.”

President Tshisekedi rose to power in a 2018 election denounced by many independent observers as fraudulent. In the absence of any real achievements since then, opponents say he has stoked existing ethnic divisions in the eastern Congo as a distraction from his own poor policy record. And as M23 picks up territory and supporters, he remains reluctant to engage with the rebel faction. “Any attempt to normalize or legitimize these criminals constitutes an insult to the memory of the victims and an affront to the fundamental principles of international law,” Tshisekedi said last month.

“There has to be real pressure on Kinshasa,” Rubin said, adding that an “Iraqi Kurdistan-like solution with regional autonomy” in eastern DRC may be one possible solution to the conflict. “If Kurds couldn’t trust Baghdad after so much persecution, why should the people of North Kivu trust Kinshasa?”

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