Ituri's Armed Groups Are Shooting Civilians During an Ebola Outbreak

Seventy-six thousand people live at Plaine Savo, a displacement site in Djugu territory, Ituri. Most fled their villages with what they could carry. Now bullets are flying near them, and at least five civilians have been wounded in a single clash. On 8 November, fighting reached the edges of that camp, and gunfire rang out in Fataki town about 25 kilometres away. Think about what it means to be a mother with a feverish child in that place, with the nearest clinic under siege and aid workers ordered to stay away.

Ituri is not a stranger to this kind of horror. It is one of the most displaced provinces in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with more than one million people uprooted from their homes. It is also the epicentre of the current Ebola outbreak, accounting for roughly 70 per cent of confirmed cases. So the same province where people are being shot is the one where a deadly virus is spreading. That is not a coincidence. It is what happens when a state abandons its own territory and armed groups fill the vacuum.

The facts are grim and specific. Restrictions on humanitarian movement have been in place since late October, which means the people who depend on food, water, and medical care were already being cut off before the latest shooting began. A humanitarian needs assessment in the area was suspended because it was too dangerous to continue. Ebola response teams are trying to find contacts, trace chains of transmission, and reach patients, and insecurity cuts every one of those lines. An Ebola response without safe access is not a response at all. It is a countdown.

Who is doing this? Ituri has been bled for decades by militias including CODECO and the Allied Democratic Forces, whose massacres of villagers have been documented for years by Congolese civil society, UN missions, and independent researchers. Their methods are familiar: attacks on villages, killings, abductions, and the forced flight of families into camps that were supposed to be temporary. Each cycle leaves more graves and more people with nowhere to go. We should be clear that armed groups are not the only ones to blame. Every year these groups operate without consequence is a year the Congolese state has chosen, through neglect, corruption, or incapacity, not to defend its own citizens.

This is the part our leaders prefer not to discuss. The Congolese state collects taxes on gold, timber, and minerals from Ituri and the Kivus, yet a displaced child in Djugu cannot count on a single soldier, police officer, or judge to protect her. Security forces are too few, too poorly paid, and too often implicated in the abuses they are meant to stop. Accountability for the killers is rare. Impunity is the oxygen these groups breathe. Meanwhile, the wider eastern Congo is also the theatre of Rwanda's cross-border war, in which Kigali's forces and their proxy M23 have seized territory and terrorised civilians. Ituri's violence has its own roots, but both crises draw strength from the same rot: armed actors who know the state will not stop them, and foreign and domestic interests who profit while the bodies pile up.

Consider what this means for the region. When a health worker is turned back at a checkpoint, the virus moves faster. When a displaced family is cut off from clean water, cholera and measles follow. When an entire humanitarian mission is suspended, the people who will suffer first are the ones who had no say in any of this: the old, the sick, the children. This is not a Congolese problem alone. Ebola does not respect borders, and Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan all know the cost of a chaotic outbreak on their doorstep. Africa's health security is only as strong as its weakest province.

So what must change? Start with the most basic demand: the Congolese government must guarantee the safety of civilians, health workers, and aid convoys, and it must do so with credible forces, not promises. Protection must be built into the operation itself. Security corridors for Ebola teams should be negotiated and enforced, with clear rules that fighters who attack them face prosecution. The Congolese judiciary must start indicting commanders and militia leaders, and it must do so without political favouritism. A court that cannot try a warlord is not a court.

Africa has shown that a better path exists. Botswana built one of the continent's most stable democracies on a foundation of transparent diamond governance, an independent civil service, and sound fiscal management. Mauritius turned a sugar economy into a services and financial hub by protecting property rights and rewarding competence. Senegal has demonstrated that peaceful transfers of power, an independent judiciary, and an engaged civil society can keep a country calm even when pressure is high. These are not perfect models, but they prove that institutions decide outcomes. Ituri needs that same architecture: a functioning police force, independent courts, transparent mining revenues reinvested in local services, and an end to the impunity that turns militias into permanent fixtures.

The African Union, the Southern African Development Community, and the East African Community must stop issuing statements and start tying their diplomacy to measurable outcomes: secured humanitarian access, prosecutions of atrocity perpetrators, and a verified end to cross-border support for armed groups. The UN Security Council must renew and resource its mandates in Ituri with clear benchmarks for protecting civilians. And the private sector, the companies extracting minerals from the eastern Congo, must be held to account for the conflict minerals that finance the killing.

Now the question is for you. What are you going to demand? Ask your government, your parliament, and your regional bodies whether they can name the armed groups responsible for attacks in Djugu. Ask whether they have funded the Ebola response properly, and whether they will press Kinshasa to protect the 76,000 people at Plaine Savo. Silence is complicity, and we have had enough of it. Share this story. Pressure your representatives. Demand the arrest of the commanders who turn villages into graveyards. The people of Ituri cannot fight a virus, a militia, and an indifferent state alone. They need us to refuse to look away.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB