“We are fleeing and we don’t know where to go,” Mwamini wrote to a volunteer.
That morning, rebels from the March 23 Movement, or M23, the Rwanda-backed militia that has taken swaths of eastern Congo, entered the sprawling displacement camp of Kanyaruchinya on the outskirts of the border city of Goma. The men rampaged through the camp, knocking down makeshift shacks and ordering its inhabitants to leave.
The attack sent hundreds of thousands of people, most of them women and children who had previously been displaced by the group, on a desperate trek into Goma, a longtime hub for international aid groups working in the war-torn region.
Since then, fighters from M23, supported by troops from neighboring Rwanda, have taken control of much of Goma itself. On Tuesday, the rebels still were exchanging gun- and artillery fire with the Congolese army in parts of the city, trapping more than a million civilians inside Goma and threatening to open a bloody new chapter in a decades-old war set off by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called Rwandan President Paul Kagame and “urged an immediate ceasefire in the region, and for all parties to respect sovereign territorial integrity,” the State Department said.
Senior U.N. officials said streets in Goma were littered with bodies and hospitals were flooded with hundreds of wounded. Several World Food Program warehouses had been looted, and officials warned of severe shortages if emergency assistance wasn’t restored in the coming hours. Swaths of the city were without power and water, deepening what was already one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises.
Some 1,500 miles away in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, mobs angered over the city’s fall set fires and besieged the U.S., French, Belgian, Ugandan and other embassies, as well as the headquarters of the U.N. peacekeeping force.
Displaced people from Sake gather in front of a room where they are taking refuge with their families, following the intensification of fighting between M23 rebels and the Congolese army, in Goma, North Kivu province, in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, February 2, 2025. REUTERS/Arlette Bashizi
Observers and diplomats fear that the M23’s gains could encourage the rebels and Rwanda’s army to advance on Kinshasa in an echo of the 1990s wars, which sucked in several other Africa countries and led to the deaths of more than five million people. Rwandan officials have denied that the country has deployed troops inside Congo and say its military is defending Rwanda’s territory and security.
Caught in the middle of this week’s violence was Mwamini, one of six women who last year gave rare testimony to Wall Street Journal reporters about an unprecedented proliferation of sexual violence in the camps around Goma. Psychologists, nurses and others working with survivors of sexual violence estimated that some 80% of women in the camps, which at the time housed more than 500,000 displaced people, had been raped, including girls as young as 8.
“I am speaking out so there is help and so that the war ends and that other women don’t get raped,” Mwamini said last year, while balancing her baby son Gabriel on her lap.
Mwamini, who turned 29 in December, was pregnant with Gabriel when three armed men tied her to a tree and raped her in a forest near Goma. She and the other women said lack of food and other essentials in the camps forced them to venture into Virunga forest, a known hideout for a growing number of armed men involved in the war with M23, in search of edible plants and firewood. They spoke out about their assaults in spite the stigma that accompanies survivors of sexual violence and the risk of reprisals from the armed men who attacked them.
The Journal article documented how international efforts to curb the use of rape as a weapon of war has fizzled out. It prompted many concerned emails from Journal readers who asked how they could help the women. Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, referred to the article in a December debate on sexual violence in Congo and Sudan at the European Parliament. “Whatever the EU can do to change this, we must do,” Kallas said. Donors requested notes on the rape crisis from aid groups active in the region so they could brief members of Congress in the U.S.
Congolese Minister of Defense Guy Kabombo Muadiamvita and military governor Major General Somo Kakule Evariste are escorted by soldiers from the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC) during their visit to Beni territory, in North Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo February 10, 2025. REUTERS/Gradel Muyisa Mumbere
A trained seamstress, Mwamini had been living in Kanyaruchinya camp since October 2022, when M23 took her home village of Rugari, some 20 miles north of Goma. She said her husband left her after she was raped, making it even harder to care for her two children.
Still, in recent months, Mwamini’s life had taken a turn for the better. Rather than going back to the forest and risking another assault, she started begging on the streets of Goma and eventually earned enough money to restart a small sewing business to support her family. On Jan. 19, a week before M23 fighters entered the camp, Mwamini, accompanied by two other women profiled in the Journal article, sent greetings to a Journal reporter in a voice message.
A Journal reporter and the volunteer Mwamini had written to on Sunday were unable to reach her after she sent her message, and her phone appeared to be off. Espérance Kanyamanza, who told Journal reporters last year that she had been raped by armed men in Virunga forest on three separate occasions, reached the volunteer by phone on Monday and said she was hiding in another part of Goma close to the camp.
On Tuesday, Congolese soldiers, fighters from government-aligned militias and countless civilians streamed into U.N. peacekeeping bases in Goma and surroundings looking for protection.
U.N. “bases are not able to accommodate the large number of surrendering elements and civilians,” Vivian van de Perre, deputy head of the peacekeeping mission, known as Monusco, told the U.N. Security Council. Van de Perre, clad in a bulletproof vest and helmet, was speaking by videolink from Goma.
South Africa’s military, which has deployed troops with both Monusco and a separate peacekeeping mission from the Southern African Development Community, said three of its soldiers were killed in the battle for the city on Monday, taking the total number of peacekeepers killed in the latest fighting to 17.
U.N. officials said Tuesday that there were already reports of rape and sexual violence from Goma. On Monday shells struck a maternity hospital in the city, killing and injuring several people, including newborns and pregnant women.
M23 briefly occupied Goma in 2012, but withdrew after intense international pressure on Rwanda’s leadership, including from then-President Barack Obama. Named for a failed 2009 peace treaty, the group says it is defending Congolese Tutsi from persecution by the government and other militias.
Rights organizations say M23 fighters, like those of the Congolese military and other armed groups, have abused civilians, including through summary executions, forced conscription and mass rapes, during their current offensive, which started in late 2021. A spokesman for the group said this week that M23 had entered Goma to protect civilians.
The latest expansion of M23 in eastern Congo has coincided with an order from President Trump last week to freeze large sections of U.S. foreign aid for 90 days, pending a review on whether assistance programs were in line with the administration’s “America First” agenda.
Spokespeople at the U.S. Agency for International Development on Tuesday didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on plans for a $15 million initiative to support survivors of sexual violence and other vulnerable communities in eastern Congo that was supposed to begin early this year. The agency was set to provide more than $800 million in assistance for Congo in the current fiscal year, but all remaining funds apart from those going to immediate humanitarian aid are now halted by the funding freeze.
A Goma-based activist who has been working with survivors of sexual violence for many years said she was worried about the situation of women in the embattled city and the broader region. She said thousands of displaced people were now camped out on the city’s streets with no shelter or protection from the fighting.
“Of course the situation remains worrying, not only for my colleagues, but also for displaced women and young girls,” she said. “The pillaging has started.”
Write to Gabriele Steinhauser at Gabriele.Steinhauser@wsj.com
