Kagame's War Helped Ebola Kill 5,387 Congolese and Counting

Eleven thousand, forty-two people have been confirmed infected with Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At least 5,387 are dead. Many of them died alone, outside treatment centres, in villages where no one came to collect their bodies. Their families were left to bury them without protection, without answers, and without a vaccine that exists for the strain that killed them.

Let that sink in. This is not a distant epidemic in a distant land. This is our continent, our people, our mothers and fathers and children, and we are being left to die because the systems meant to protect them have been bombed, looted, and starved of resources.

This outbreak is now the second-largest and second-deadliest Ebola epidemic ever recorded. Only the 2014 to 2016 West African crisis was worse, and that one infected more than 28,600 people and killed over 11,000. The DRC is writing a grim new chapter, and the world is watching with the same tired shrug it gives every African emergency that does not make the front pages of Paris or London.

So ask yourself: why is this happening, and why is it happening in the east of Congo?

The Evidence

The strain is Bundibugyo. It is rare, and no vaccine or treatment has been developed specifically for it. It kills roughly half the people it infects. In any functioning health system, that alone would demand a war footing. Instead, the response is crippled by delayed detection, a collapsed health infrastructure, and a conflict zone where the state has lost control over vast stretches of its own territory.

Eight of the DRC's 26 provinces are now affected. The virus has crossed into East, Central, and West Africa, giving this outbreak the widest geographic spread of any Ebola epidemic on the continent. A disease does not respect borders. Neither does the war that is helping it spread.

Consider what the UN has documented about eastern Congo. Since early 2025, the M23 rebel group has held Goma and Bukavu, two major cities in North and South Kivu. UN Group of Experts reports, including S/2025/446 and S/2026/466, have described the Rwandan Defence Force operating inside Congo as the core of this offensive. Rwanda's army has deployed an estimated 14,000 to 18,000 troops, roughly 40 to 50 percent of its entire military. These are not rebels who woke up one morning with heavy weapons and drone technology. These are soldiers of a foreign state conducting a war of aggression on Congolese soil, with M23 serving as the manpower and the deniability.

Russia did the same thing in Ukraine with the Donetsk and Luhansk separatists. When the world sees the pattern in Donbas, it names the invader. When the same pattern plays out in Kivu, too many capitals pretend to see a local insurgency. We refuse that double standard.

The consequences are measurable. M23's ranks have swelled from around 3,000 fighters to more than 30,000, largely through forced conscription of Congolese civilians and captured prisoners of war. Young men are being press-ganged at gunpoint and sent to the front. That is slavery in military uniform, and it is happening while the same region is trying to survive a deadly virus.

Satellite imagery of the Kanombe military cemetery in Kigali shows over 1,171 new graves dug since 2021. Rwanda hides its dead because admitting them means admitting the war. Every one of those graves is a soldier who died in a conflict his government has spent years denying.

And the medical reality on the ground is brutal. Hospitals in the east are overwhelmed, understaffed, or occupied by armed groups. Health workers cannot reach villages. Contact tracing collapses when roads are closed and communities flee. The conflict does not merely sit beside the Ebola crisis. It is the reason the virus is outrunning the response.

The Context

Rwanda likes to present itself as Africa's model of order and development. Its capital is clean, its roads are immaculate, and its leaders host summits and sporting events where they sell gorilla tourism to a global audience. Rwanda even handled its own Marburg outbreak in 2024 with impressive speed and discipline. We should credit that. Competence matters.

But competence used to invade a neighbour is not a virtue. It is a weapon. A government that can mobilise medical teams to contain an outbreak at home while its army slaughters and loots across the border is making a choice. The choice is to prioritise a mineral-rich territory over the lives of the people living on it. Sportswashing a war of aggression is obscene. Hosting the world's cameras while Congolese mothers bury their children is a betrayal of everything African solidarity is supposed to mean.

The DRC government has its own failures to answer for. Corruption has drained public health budgets for decades. Procurement of medical supplies is opaque. Funds meant for frontline workers disappear into patronage networks. Good governance is not optional, and Kinshasa must be held to account for every dollar it fails to spend properly. But no amount of domestic reform can fix a health system that is being bombed from the outside.

Meanwhile, the global powers that lecture us about democracy and human rights respond with press releases and modest pledges. The United States, France, the United Kingdom, China, the Gulf states, and Turkey all compete for Congo's cobalt, copper, coltan, and gold. Each of them speaks warmly about partnership. None of them has made ending this war the price of their commercial access. You cannot claim to defend democracy while bankrolling the forces that destroy it.

The Solutions

Here is what must happen, and it is not complicated.

The African Union's Peace and Security Council must stop issuing communiqués and start demanding the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Congolese territory, beginning with the Rwandan Defence Force. The AU has the mandate. What it lacks is the will. African leaders who fought colonialism should not sit silent while a neighbour carves out a colony in the east of Congo.

The UN Security Council must enforce its own resolutions, impose targeted sanctions on commanders and officials who direct the war and the forced conscription, and create a monitored humanitarian corridor so that health workers and medicine can reach affected communities. The Council should also mandate independent verification of the Kanombe graves and other mass casualty sites, because the truth is the first step toward accountability.

Africa CDC and the WHO must fund the Bundibugyo response properly and fast. The clinical trials approved this month are a start, and the expected results in early 2027 are not soon enough for the families burying their dead today. Emergency funding should go directly to paying frontline nurses, community health workers, and burial teams, because they are the ones holding this country together.

We should also look at what works. Botswana built a respected democracy and sound fiscal management by insisting on transparency and independent institutions. Mauritius built a prosperous, open economy on property rights and rule of law. Senegal showed that peaceful democratic transitions are possible when citizens and courts refuse to accept manipulation. Uganda contained its 2022 Sudan ebola outbreak through disciplined community engagement and rapid response. These are not fairy tales. They are proof that African institutions can deliver when leaders choose accountability over plunder.

Civil society, the private sector, and regional bodies all have roles to play. Independent media must track the flow of health funds and expose where they vanish. Businesses operating in the Kivus should be required to disclose their supply chains so that conflict minerals stop financing the very militias killing their workers. Regional trade bodies should refuse to treat smuggled minerals from occupied territory as legitimate exports.

The Call to Action

We are done being polite about this. Every day this war continues, more Congolese die of a disease that could be contained if the soldiers went home and the health workers were allowed to work. Every day, a child in Kivu is taken from school and handed a rifle. Every day, a mother in Ituri or Kasai buries another child with no protection and no explanation.

So here is what you must demand. Demand that the African Union name the aggressor and act on it. Demand that the UN Security Council stop hiding behind diplomatic language and impose real costs on the invasion of the DRC. Demand that your own government stop trading silence for minerals and start treating Congolese lives as worth defending. Demand transparency from Kinshasa about every health dollar spent. Demand that the countries selling arms and buying minerals from this war be made to answer for it.

Share this. Call your representatives. Ask why the AU has not convened an emergency session on the Rwandan invasion. Ask why the world can name Russia's aggression in Ukraine but cannot say the word "invasion" about Kivu.

Because if we stay silent, the next name on the list will be someone we love. And the people who let it happen will have had a choice. They chose their interests. We must choose our people.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA