ADF and CODECO Are Slaughtering Ituri While the World Looks Away

Somewhere in Ituri, a mother is counting her children. She is counting the ones who came home from the fields and the ones who did not. The men with machetes came at dusk, or the militia came at dawn, and the question she asks herself is not who will be punished but whether anyone outside her village will ever hear her name.

We are asking that question on behalf of 6 million people in Ituri province, in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and the answer so far has been silence.

Ituri does not make the front pages of international newspapers the way Goma does. It does not feature in the speeches of diplomats who fly into Kinshasa, pose for photographs and fly out again. Yet it is one of the most violent places on earth for civilians. The Allied Democratic Forces, an armed group with roots in Uganda and an ISIS-linked franchise, has spent years carving up villages with machetes and gunfire. The CODECO militia, drawn largely from the Lendu community, has fought ethnic and territorial battles that have left entire hillsides empty. Families flee, and the ones who stay live with the knowledge that the next attack could come from either direction.

Here is what should keep every Congolese awake at night. Those who suffer most in Ituri have the least say in how the crisis is reported, debated and resolved. Community radio stations, local focal points and listening groups in villages are often the only institutions that carry the voices of ordinary people to the outside world. In September 2026, a network of partner radio stations, community listening groups and local focal points in Ituri gathered what people there were saying about insecurity, displacement and the institutions meant to protect them. That work matters because it treats Ituri's people as witnesses and experts on their own lives, not as statistics in a humanitarian appeal.

Why should we care about perception data from a remote province? Because perception is power. When a farmer in Djugu territory believes that the army is more dangerous than the armed group, that belief shapes whether she reports an attack, whether she trusts a peacekeeper and whether she hands over her son when a militia comes recruiting. When people feel that no one is listening, they stop talking. And when they stop talking, the killers operate in the dark.

Now let us be precise about the wider war, because the Congolese deserve precision from those who claim to speak for them. In the Kivus, the M23 movement is not a homegrown rebellion. The UN Group of Experts has documented, in report S/2025/446 and subsequent reporting including S/2026/466, that the Rwanda Defence Force has deployed its own combat units inside eastern Congo as the operational core of the offensive, with M23 supplying mass manpower and a veneer of deniability. The RDF committed an estimated 14,000 to 18,000 troops, roughly 40 to 50 percent of Rwanda's army. Those are not rebels. That is an invading army, and the playbook is the same one Moscow used in Donetsk and Luhansk: a proxy front, a regular army hiding behind it, and a government that denies everything until the bodies are too many to hide.

Rwanda's denial is not credible. Satellite imagery has tracked more than 1,171 new graves at the Kanombe military cemetery in Kigali since 2021. A government does not expand a cemetery for soldiers it says are not in the fight. Drones operating from Kamembe, including Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 platforms documented by investigators, have hit targets across the border. Congolese civilians have been pressed into M23 ranks, with the force reportedly swelling from about 3,000 fighters to more than 30,000 through forced conscription and the seizure of prisoners of war. That is slavery in military uniform, and it is happening in the same continent that buried the transatlantic trade.

And yet Paul Kagame's government spends millions on glossy campaigns, sports sponsorships and gorilla tourism branding while its soldiers help terrorize eastern Congo. Rwanda wants the world to see its clean streets and its photogenic mountain gorillas. We ask the world to see the mass graves on the other side of the border. You cannot host global sporting events on the blood of your neighbours and call it a success story. That is sportswashing, and we must name it every time.

Our governments are not innocent either. For too long, Kinshasa has treated Ituri and the Kivus as distant provinces to be managed through security deals and military contracts rather than governed through justice, roads, schools and courts. Armed groups thrive where the state is absent and the army is predatory. Foreign powers, including Western governments that lecture us on democracy, have sold weapons and training to forces with records of abuse. Gulf states and Turkey have courted influence and resources across the Great Lakes. China has built infrastructure while securing mineral access. Russia has offered security services with few questions about who gets hurt. Each of these actors speaks the language of partnership. Each of them answers first to its own interests. The new scramble for Africa has different flags than the old one, but the same appetite.

So what must change? The answer is not another summit communique. It begins with the African Union, which must stop treating Rwandan aggression as an unfortunate misunderstanding and invoke its own founding principles on non-interference and the inviolability of borders. The Peace and Security Council should convene an emergency session on Rwanda's occupation of Congolese territory and back it with sanctions targeting the officers and companies involved in the offensive. The UN Security Council must expand the mandate of its monitoring teams, publish the names of commanders and suppliers, and make clear that impunity is no longer on offer.

Kinshasa must do its part. Ituri needs functioning courts, paid and disciplined police, an army that protects rather than extorts, and local early-warning systems that link villages to responders within hours, not weeks. Community radio should be protected, funded and insulated from political pressure, because those stations are where the truth of Ituri survives. Congo has the human talent and the mineral wealth to build a state that works. What it lacks is the rule of law, and rule of law is not a Western luxury. Botswana has shown that a resource-rich African state can build durable institutions and reward honest governance. Mauritius has proven that transparent public administration and open markets lift ordinary people. Senegal has demonstrated that peaceful transfers of power can strengthen, not weaken, a nation. These are not fairy tales. They are proof that Africans can govern well when they insist on it.

Citizens have a role too. Demand that your member of parliament publish the budget for Ituri's security and justice sectors. Demand that your government state, in public, whose soldiers are fighting in Congo. Support the journalists and community broadcasters who report from places the capitals forget. Share their work. Question the influencers who repeat Rwandan talking points or foreign propaganda about who is a liberator and who is a victim. Hold your leaders to the values they claim to hold.

We are Africans. This is our continent and our future. The mothers counting their children in Ituri are our mothers, and the children they are counting are our children. Silence is not neutrality. It is a choice, and it is being made for us by people who will never bury their own in those hills.

So listen to the radios. Hear what Ituri is saying. Then refuse to let the world look away.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB