Over 7,000 dead. Hundreds raped. Displaced people’s camps flattened. City centers looted. Prisons set ablaze. Businesses bankrupted. Nearly 5 million people on the move.
The latest conflict in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo has brought horrific violence and suffering to innocent people for three and a half years. The war flared up in November 2021, when the March 23 Movement rebel group attacked military positions on the border between Congo and Rwanda.
The conflict peaked this January and February when the rebels — and, notably, thousands of Rwandan soldiers fighting with them —seized the Congo’s regional capitals of Goma and Bukavu, forcing the Congolese army to flee. The impact on civilians was devastating: Locals and journalists described how bodies lined the streets and the injured crowded the cities’ hospitals, while hundreds of thousands fled their homes.
But Rwandan President Paul Kagame has carefully and repeatedly denied any role in the conflict, despite accusations from the U.N. and Western governments.
“Why are we being accused as Rwanda of supporting M23?” he asked at an April 2024 press conference commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. “They exist because they have been denied their rights as citizens.” M23, Kagame maintains, is a homegrown Congolese rebel movement fighting for the rights of the country’s threatened Tutsi minority. “It’s as if they agree with the injustice that is being done to this community,” he said of Rwanda’s accusers.
But evidence uncovered during an NBC News investigation definitively discredits Kagame’s narrative. A four-month review of confidential military reports and hours of drone footage and satellite imagery, combined with interviews with Congolese and Rwandan military personnel, officials at United Nations agencies, aid workers, diplomats and residents, reveals a carefully concealed and high-tech operation by Kagame’s armed forces to take control of a swath of Congolese territory that is home to more than 5 million people.
These revelations come as President Donald Trump’s administration says it is close to brokering a peace deal with the presidents of Congo and Rwanda that will give the U.S. access to Congo’s minerals. Rwanda’s very inclusion in these talks highlights the chasm between Kagame’s public rhetoric and the reality on the ground.
A possible deal being negotiated by Massad Boulos, Trump’s senior adviser for Africa, would allow both Congo and Rwanda to benefit from U.S. investment in the region’s mineral wealth, which includes deposits key to the production of electronics worldwide.
“There are many U.S. companies that are keen to invest in both DRC and also Rwanda,” Corina Sanders, the deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, told a conference in Washington last month. “It’s a very exciting time and there’s a lot of possibility right now.”
NBC News’ investigation raises questions about Rwanda’s credibility as a partner in a U.S.-mediated deal.
NBC News’ reporting shows “not only the extent of Rwandan involvement, but that Rwanda is not a good-faith actor when it comes to the peace process,” says Jason Stearns, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada and the founder of the Congo Research Group.
“What the U.S. underestimates is how much Rwanda has invested in this conflict and how much pressure, and not just carrots, it will require to get them to withdraw,” Stearns said. The U.S. administration’s ambition is “inspiring,” he said. “But it’s going to be extremely difficult to pull it off.”
Rwanda’s involvement in Congo is partly driven by long-running ethnic tensions and its desire to contain the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), an extremist Hutu group fighting alongside the Congolese army. It is also keen to tighten control over the region’s deposits of coltan, gold, tin, tungsten, lithium, copper and diamonds.
The material NBC News has uncovered definitively shows the Rwandan military establishing field bases on Congolese soil starting in 2021, setting up a sophisticated operation for training and supplying M23, deploying artillery, guided mortar systems and drones, digging dozens of trenches and fortified positions for soldiers and arranging the removal of Rwandan dead.
“Rwanda has repeatedly demonstrated its bad faith over the years,” Patrick Muyaya, Congolese government’s information minister, told NBC News. “The Congolese government was well aware this was happening.”
A State Department spokesperson did not respond to NBC News’ questions about Rwanda’s role in the conflict in eastern Congo, including evidence that its soldiers were fighting in the area disguised as M23 rebels. It did provide the following statement:
“There is no military solution to the crisis in eastern DRC. … The president’s selection of senior advisor Boulos to advance these efforts is a testament to President Trump’s desire to find a peaceful solution to the decades-long conflict.”
Contacted for comment, Rwanda’s government spokesperson declined to comment on the specifics of NBC News’ investigation, stressing instead the purely “defensive” nature of Rwanda’s activities on its border with DRC, allegedly prompted by FDLR actions.
“These measures have been reinforced since 2021 to counter the threat of the spillover of the conflict in DRC,” she said.
Open secret
From the start, Rwanda has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal its intervention in the Kivu provinces in eastern Congo, which went from a couple of hundred soldiers in 2021 to an estimated 5,000 today.
But there have been lapses in Rwanda’s secrecy. In May 2022, Congolese forces announced they had captured two Rwandan soldiers who had entered the country. Rwanda denied this, claiming the soldiers were kidnapped across the border.
NBC News obtained a Rwandan military report that admitted that these soldiers were captured while taking part in an M23 attack on barracks at Rumangabo military base. The internal report says members of the Rwanda Defence Force crossing the border were supposed to leave cellphones behind and strip identifying insignia from their uniforms. It recommends punishment for the soldiers’ commander for failing to ensure the captured soldiers did so.
In a bid to remove witnesses, Rwandan soldiers forced Congolese villagers to evacuate areas they occupied, according to a contractor hired to provide intelligence for the Congolese military.
Operations like this drove hundreds of thousands from their homes.
“This is not business as usual in the DRC,” Antoine Sagot-Priez, Congo country director for the aid agency Concern Worldwide, said in March, commenting on the mass displacement. “We need people to know what is happening here.”
These villagers ended up living in 17 camps around the city of Goma, the capital of Congo’s North Kivu province, that would eventually swell to hold 400,000 to 500,000 people.
Reports drawn up by the same contractor state that Rwandan forces were moving their mortars in and out of Congo — sometimes each day — apparently to avoid detection. Rwandan soldiers also often don outfits usually worn by the M23 rebels.
Much of the information used in this report was compiled by Western military experts, who included former French army officers, Romanians, Poles and Bulgarians, hired by Congo President Felix Tshisekedi in 2022 when he realized his army was disastrously losing ground. They were assigned the task of protecting cities in the east and providing Congo’s artillery with key information — thanks to a small fleet of Chinese drones.
In March 2023, these new hires helped turn the tables on the Rwandans attacking the town of Sake, west of Goma, by hitting their mortar positions with Sukhoi fighter jets.
The entire Rwandan force in Congo withdrew the following day.
Military contractors believe this was the moment Rwanda — one of Africa’s poorest states and heavily dependent on foreign aid — went on an international military shopping spree, placing orders in Poland and Turkey for sophisticated anti-missile systems, drones and signal-jamming equipment.
Then in late 2023, Rwandan forces began returning to Congo.
This time the numbers were 10 times higher than before — 3,000 to 5,000 men, according to the same military contractor. The Congolese army put its new drones to devastating use.
Satellite imagery shows a sudden, dramatic increase in the number of graves at Kanombe Military Cemetery, Rwanda’s main military burial ground in the capital, Kigali. It expanded by some 350 graves between mid-2023 and early 2024, according to a manual count carried out by NBC News. The images also show that from late 2021 to today, the cemetery has added 900 graves, even though the country says it is not engaged in any military conflict in Congo.
Rwanda’s government spokesperson declined to comment on the fresh graves, saying: “Speculation about a military cemetery in Kigali has no basis in reality.”
The DRC’s air superiority did not last long.
According to senior Congolese army officers, Rwanda used the opportunity presented by a U.S.-negotiated truce to install Chinese-made Yitian anti-missile systems in Congo. The addition in early 2024 of GPS-jamming equipment turned the war’s tide, making it nearly impossible for the DRC’s hired contractors to deploy their drone fleet.
“The new equipment changed everything,” said Gen. Sylvain Ekenge, a Congolese army spokesman. “When we were asked by the Americans for a ceasefire to calm things down, the Rwandans used it as a chance to bring in these systems.”
Punished for mourning
The Rwandan military has gone to great lengths to conceal the casualties it has taken, with specialized teams assigned to recover the dead, according to the military contractor with the Congolese army.
“We never managed to get hold of any RDF bodies,” the contractor said, referring to the Rwanda Defence Force. “The [bodies of] officers were sent back, and as for the rank and file, when there were a lot of dead, they were buried in DRC, in zones where we didn’t have access.”
Families of Rwandan soldiers who have died in Congo are forbidden from publicly discussing or mourning loved ones — and risk severe punishment for doing so.
NBC News was nonetheless able to independently verify 91 examples of Rwandan families posting “RIP” notices for soldiers who had died fighting in Congo — often accompanied by weeping emoji — on TikTok and other social media.
Funerals are tightly controlled events, with families getting just half an hour at the graveside and all photographs taken by army personnel.
“They say ‘only close family,’” said a former member of the Rwandan military who lost friends and family members in the DRC’s drone strikes.
“I attended some and it was total silence. You are not allowed to enter with your phone,” said the former soldier, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of being punished for discussing the secret war. “After, you are all escorted home. After that, they follow up with the families, their conversations, if they’re sharing what happened to them. They’re supposed to stay silent.”
Members of the Rwandan diaspora and Rwandan military families who spoke with NBC News said the mounting death toll is causing widespread fear. Authorities have reduced cadet training from one year to a few months, with families back home receiving despairing phone calls from recruits who regard being dispatched to the Congo as akin to a death sentence. Desertions, they’ve noticed, are on the rise.
The former Rwandan soldier recalled his last conversation with a cousin: “He said, ‘The enemy is very dangerous here.’ He said, ‘We are very afraid.’ And he said, ‘If I had somewhere to run, I would run.’”
“He was shaking, you know, the voice was shaking,” the former soldier added.
The cousin subsequently died in Congo.
‘Accumulated, multiple displacements’
The war’s impact on eastern Congo’s population has been devastating.
Before M23 seized the capitals of North and South Kivu in January and February, 4.6 million people had already been uprooted by three years of fighting, according to the U.N.’s refugee agency, UNHCR.
Now, they are moving again.
“It’s a story of accumulated, multiple displacements,” UNHCR spokeswoman Eujin Byun said. “These people are just done. Done.”
One of the first actions by a victorious M23 was to give residents of camps for people displaced by the violence 72 hours to leave, claiming it was safe to return home. They then flattened rows of tents, clinics and schools set up by U.N. agencies.
Some 1.8 million tried to return home, according to the International Organisation for Migration. But since mid-2024, local organizations in the Kivu provinces have reported instances of displaced Congolese returning home to find their homes occupied and their land being worked by new arrivals.
The UNHCR estimates that 140,000 displaced people who had been living in camps have crossed into Burundi and Rwanda, and another 70,000 have trekked northeast into Uganda. Many have clustered around the borders, without food, proper shelter or basic services, uncertain where to turn.
Women and children become particularly vulnerable in these conditions. UNICEF has reported 10,000 cases of rape and sexual violence in North Kivu and South Kivu provinces in January and February alone, with children accounting for 45% of cases.
Residents describe a state of near lawlessness in city centers, where gangs of armed men, some escaped from local prisons, prey on civilians using weapons left behind by the Congolese army.
The Congolese Interior Ministry in Kinshasa reports scores of murders and says more than 4,000 men and boys were loaded onto trucks to an unknown destination in May. Human Rights Watch said M23’s efforts to consolidate control of Goma have involved possible war crimes, including the summary execution of civilians in February.
“The Rwandan government, as the direct supporter of the M23, may be complicit in the armed group’s war crimes,” said Clémentine de Montjoye, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Men and boys live in fear of forcible recruitment by either M23 or local Congolese militias. That concern is a key factor in driving many families to head for the borders.
One of the biggest problems in areas captured by M23 has been a desperate shortage of liquidity, as banks remain closed on orders from the government in Kinshasa.
So now a huge question mark hovers over Rwanda’s plans for the giant swath of land its proxy currently controls.
A wave of sanctions unveiled by Rwanda’s Western allies following M23’s capture of Goma and Bukavu prompted a defiant “Go to hell” response from Kagame.
Boulos, Trump’s adviser for Africa, will be hoping that Kagame and Tshisekedi can be persuaded that both their countries have more to gain from a series of investment deals aimed at boosting and regularizing Congo’s minerals industry, characterized for decades by the systematic smuggling of ore into Rwanda.
Boulos’ team is looking for signs of good faith from Kagame, in the form of a pullback of M23 and Rwandan troops on the ground by early June, diplomats say. There were no signs of significant withdrawals at the time of publication.
Negotiators see M23’s retreat from Walikale in North Kivu province in mid-March — the first since the war’s start — as a sign that sanctions unveiled by former Western allies, combined with pointed pressure from the U.S., have finally registered with Kagame.
But fighting continues on the ground, and it’s unclear whether the leader often described as “Africa’s Putin,” who has put so much work into covering his tracks from the start of this war, will play ball. Kagame has been on the brink of signing peace deals before and balked, for example failing to show up for a key summit in Luanda, Angola, in December.
Failing to clinch a deal would undermine Rwanda’s carefully nurtured image as a reliable Western ally in a troubled region. But analysts note the self-defeating nature of Rwanda’s history of aggressive military intervention in its own backyard.
“They’ve sacrificed hundreds of their young men just to give the Congolese more reason to fear and hate them,” says one Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity. “For all their concern about root causes, the Rwandans have been remarkably shortsighted.”
With additional reporting by Frank Matt, Gabe Joselow, Abigail Williams, Marin Scott, Jean Lee and Tavleen Tarrant.
