Rwanda’s Support for M23 Rebels: Congo’s Counterinsurgency Response and Regional Implications

The conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has become one of the most devastating wars of the twenty-first century. What began as a proxy-backed insurgency in 2012 has escalated into a full-scale territorial occupation. The M23 rebel group — widely documented by the United Nations, the United States, and the European Union as receiving direct military support from Rwanda — now controls most of the eastern DRC’s two richest provinces, North Kivu and South Kivu, including their capitals Goma and Bukavu. An estimated 22,000 M23 fighters, reinforced by thousands of Rwandan Defence Force (RDF) personnel, hold strategic cities, mining sites, and border crossings while operating a parallel civilian administration.

The humanitarian toll is staggering. At least 7,000 people were killed in 2025 alone, according to conservative estimates, with some Congolese officials putting the figure far higher. Over a million people have been displaced. Hospitals are overwhelmed, banks remain shuttered a year after falling under rebel control, and the conflict has drawn in regional actors from Burundi to Uganda, raising fears of a wider Great Lakes war. For practitioners of irregular warfare, the M23 campaign is a case study in state-sponsored insurgency, resource-driven conflict, and the limits of international diplomacy.

Background: M23’s Origins and Rwanda’s Role

The March 23 Movement takes its name from a 2009 peace agreement between the DRC government and the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), a Rwandan-backed rebel group composed primarily of ethnic Tutsi fighters. When the agreement collapsed — its provisions for military integration poorly implemented and its political commitments unmet — former CNDP officers mutinied on 6 May 2012 and formed M23 under the command of Colonel Sultani Makenga. The group captured Goma briefly in November 2012 before being defeated by a combined Congolese-UN military operation in 2013.

Rwanda officially withdrew support under international pressure, and M23 went dormant — a period documented in detail in Jason Stearns’ Dancing in the Glory of Monsters — until 2021, when it reconstituted with renewed Rwandan backing. By 2022 the group had launched a sustained offensive, capturing the border town of Bunagana and expanding across North Kivu. The pattern — a Congolese rebel movement receiving Rwandan military leadership, logistics, weapons, and direct troop support — has remained consistent across two decades. A 2024 UN report found that Rwandan military assistance was “critical” to M23’s campaign, estimating 4,000 to 7,000 RDF soldiers were fighting inside Congolese territory.

Rwanda’s stated justification centers on the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu militia group with roots in the 1994 Rwandan genocide that continues to operate in eastern DRC. The deep history of how the genocide’s aftermath destabilized the entire Great Lakes region is covered comprehensively in Gérard Prunier’s Africa’s World War. Kigali argues that M23 and the RDF deployment are necessary to protect ethnic Tutsi populations and neutralize the FDLR. Critics — including the UN, the United States, and the EU — counter that this framing provides cover for Rwanda’s economic and territorial objectives in the mineral-rich Kivu provinces.

The 2025 Escalation: Fall of Goma, Bukavu, and Uvira

The conflict’s character changed fundamentally in January 2025. After months of territorial gains that cut off Goma’s road connections, M23 launched a direct assault on the North Kivu capital on 25 January. The Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC), supported by UN and Southern African Development Community (SADC) peacekeepers and assisted by Romanian private military contractors, attempted to hold a defensive line in northern Goma. By 30 January, the city of two million people had fallen. At least 2,900 civilians were killed in the battle, and 17 peacekeepers — including seven South Africans and three Malawians — died in the fighting. UN sources estimated that between 500 and 1,000 Rwandan troops participated in the Goma operation directly.

Weeks later, M23 captured Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu. The rebel leadership announced their intention to march on Kinshasa — a statement of maximalist ambition that echoed earlier Congolese wars. In December 2025, M23 launched a further offensive and seized Uvira, a strategic city on Lake Tanganyika near the Burundian border. The fall of Uvira was particularly alarming because it eliminated the last major FARDC stronghold in eastern DRC and positioned Rwandan proxies at the gateway to the mineral-rich Katanga region and directly on Burundi’s doorstep.

By early 2026, M23 may have quadrupled its force strength to approximately 22,000 fighters — making it the largest armed rebellion in the DRC since the Second Congo War. Satellite imagery of the Kanombe military cemetery in Kigali revealed at least 600 new graves dug since the offensive began, suggesting significant Rwandan casualties that Kigali has not publicly acknowledged.

Congo’s Counterinsurgency Response and Its Limits

Kinshasa’s counterinsurgency campaign has been hampered by the same structural weaknesses that have plagued the FARDC for decades. The Congolese military is large on paper but suffers from poor training, inadequate logistics, endemic corruption, and a fractured command structure. Units regularly lack ammunition, medical support, and functioning communications equipment. In the field, FARDC soldiers are routinely outgunned by M23 fighters equipped with Rwandan weapons systems.

The FARDC’s response has evolved, however. Outmatched on the ground, Kinshasa has invested in aerial capabilities — deploying long-range Chinese and Turkish drones that have given the Congolese military relative control of the skies over eastern DRC. In February 2026, drone strikes targeted M23 positions near the Rubaya coltan mine, killing the group’s military spokesperson Willy Ngoma and signaling a shift toward asymmetric escalation. The drone campaign represents perhaps the first effective counter to M23’s ground superiority, though its strategic impact remains uncertain.

Foreign paramilitaries have also featured in the FARDC’s order of battle. Romanian private military contractors were hired to train Congolese troops and guard key positions outside Goma, though their presence was insufficient to prevent the city’s fall. The reliance on foreign military assistance — from SADC peacekeepers to commercial contractors — underscores the depth of the FARDC’s institutional weakness and raises questions about the sustainability of any military solution that depends on external support.

The Wazalendo and the Militia Dilemma

Facing a conventional military gap, Kinshasa has turned increasingly to irregular forces. The Wazalendo — “patriots” in Swahili — are a loose network of nationalist militia groups that have mobilized against M23 across eastern DRC. Organized largely along ethnic lines and operating with significant autonomy from the FARDC, Wazalendo fighters have become one of the primary combat forces on the government side, particularly in the South Kivu highlands where the terrain favors small-unit guerrilla operations.

The decision to arm irregular militias carries profound risks that students of guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency will recognize. The Mai-Mai groups — community-based militias that have operated in eastern DRC for decades — are notorious for human rights abuses, including attacks on civilians, sexual violence, and the forced recruitment of child soldiers. The Wazalendo movement, while positioning itself as a patriotic resistance force, lacks the discipline, coordination, and accountability structures that would distinguish it from the armed groups it opposes.

Historically, governments that rely on proxy militias to fight insurgencies create long-term stability problems. Irregular forces that are armed, trained, and given legitimacy during a conflict rarely demobilize cleanly when the fighting ends. In the DRC context — where over 100 armed groups already operate in the eastern provinces — the Wazalendo mobilization risks adding another layer to an already fragmented security landscape. The dynamic mirrors patterns documented in politicized military environments worldwide, where the blurring of state and non-state force boundaries weakens institutional coherence.

Critical Minerals: The Economic Engine of Conflict

The eastern DRC holds some of the world’s most valuable deposits of coltan, gold, tin, and tungsten — minerals essential to modern electronics, from smartphones to electric vehicle batteries. This resource wealth is inseparable from the conflict’s dynamics. M23’s territorial control is concentrated in mining areas, and the group derives significant revenue from mineral extraction, illegal taxation, and smuggling operations.

The Rubaya mine in North Kivu is a focal point. Producing an estimated 15 to 30 percent of the world’s coltan supply, Rubaya has been under M23 control since the group’s territorial expansion. UN investigators documented that M23 generated at least $800 million in mineral revenue between April and December 2024 alone. Much of this output is smuggled across the border to Rwanda, where it enters international supply chains through Rwandan refineries and export firms.

Rwanda’s own export data tells a revealing story. The country exported a record $2 billion worth of gold in 2025 — a fivefold increase in four years — despite having minimal domestic gold deposits. Rwandan President Paul Kagame himself acknowledged that minerals from the DRC pass through Rwanda en route to destinations including Brussels, Tel Aviv, Russia, and Dubai. The EU signed a Memorandum of Understanding on sustainable raw materials with Rwanda in February 2024, a deal that has drawn sharp criticism from human rights organizations who argue it legitimizes Rwanda’s role in the conflict minerals trade.

The minerals dimension has also shaped international responses. The DRC has reportedly offered the United States a direct quid pro quo: help Kinshasa defeat M23 in exchange for preferential access to critical mineral deposits — a proposition that appeals to Washington’s strategic imperative to reduce dependence on Chinese-controlled supply chains. The competition for critical infrastructure and strategic resources has become a defining feature of the conflict’s geopolitical significance.

International Response: Sanctions, Diplomacy, and the Washington Accords

International pressure on Rwanda escalated sharply following the fall of Goma. In February 2025, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Rwandan Minister of State for Regional Integration James Kabarebe — identified as the central coordinator of RDF support to M23 — along with M23 spokesperson Lawrence Kanyuka Kingston and two of his companies. The UK suspended bilateral aid, ended high-level diplomatic engagement, and paused defence training assistance. In March 2025, the EU imposed sanctions on nine individuals and one entity, including three RDF generals, five M23 leaders, the CEO of Rwanda’s Mines, Petroleum and Gas Board, and the Gasabo Gold Refinery — one of Rwanda’s main gold processing facilities.

In August 2025, the U.S. Treasury extended sanctions to conflict mining entities, designating the PARECO-FF militia and the CDMC mining cooperative for their roles in illegal extraction at Rubaya. The sanctions also targeted Hong Kong-based export companies involved in the supply chain.

Diplomatic efforts produced two headline agreements. In June 2025, the U.S. facilitated a DRC-Rwanda peace agreement. In November 2025, the Doha Framework Agreement, mediated by Qatar, established principles for a ceasefire and political dialogue. On 4 December 2025, Presidents Tshisekedi and Kagame signed the Washington Accords in a ceremony hosted by President Trump at the U.S. Institute of Peace — an event the administration subsequently cited as evidence that it had “ended the war.”

The reality on the ground has been starkly different. Days after the Washington signing, M23 launched the offensive that captured Uvira. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the attack a “clear violation of the Washington Accords,” and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz warned that “Rwanda is leading the region toward war.” By February 2026, a ceasefire monitoring mechanism had been agreed in Doha, and Angola proposed an additional ceasefire — but fighting continued across multiple fronts in South Kivu.

The gap between diplomatic progress and battlefield reality illustrates a pattern familiar to students of influence and subversion in irregular warfare: agreements between state actors are ineffective when the armed group executing the campaign — M23 — is not a party to the deal and has no incentive to comply. Rwanda can sign accords while M23 continues to fight, maintaining Kigali’s plausible deniability while the territorial fait accompli deepens.

The Secondary Threat: ADF and the Islamic State

The M23 campaign has created a security vacuum that a second armed group has exploited. The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) — an Islamist group affiliated with the Islamic State as its Central Africa Province (ISCAP) — has intensified operations in areas where the FARDC has been forced to redeploy troops to confront M23. ACLED data show that the first quarter of 2025 was the most fatal period in the DRC since the Second Congo War in 2002, with over 2,500 reported fatalities from armed group violence.

The ADF and M23 operate in geographically proximate but historically distinct areas of North Kivu. As M23 expanded northward into Lubero territory in 2025, the two groups’ operational zones began to overlap. In December 2024, UN Security Council reporting indicated that M23 had sought non-aggression pacts with the ADF, though the Islamist group refused. The FARDC’s inability to confront both threats simultaneously has left civilian populations exposed to escalating ADF violence, including mass killings and forced displacement.

Implications for Irregular Warfare Practitioners

The M23 conflict offers several lessons that resonate across the field of irregular warfare. For a foundational overview of how state and non-state actors wage irregular campaigns — including the proxy, subversion, and insurgency dynamics at play in eastern DRC — see Masters of Resistance from The Distillery Press.

First, it demonstrates how a state can wage war through a proxy force while maintaining diplomatic engagement and plausible deniability. Rwanda’s model — directly commanding and reinforcing M23 while denying involvement and signing peace accords — represents a sophisticated application of proxy warfare that has achieved territorial results far exceeding what conventional military deployment would have risked politically.

Second, the conflict illustrates the intersection of resource extraction and armed group financing. M23’s capacity to sustain and expand its operations depends on controlling mineral-producing areas and integrating into international commodity supply chains. Disrupting these financial flows — through sanctions, supply chain transparency mechanisms, and pressure on refining states — is a counterinsurgency lever that has been underutilized relative to military and diplomatic approaches.

Third, the DRC’s reliance on irregular militia forces to compensate for conventional military weakness mirrors dynamics observed across numerous counterinsurgency campaigns. The Wazalendo mobilization — like the Sahwa Awakening in Iraq, the Afghan Local Police, or Colombia’s paramilitaries — trades short-term tactical utility for long-term institutional fragmentation and accountability deficits.

Fourth, the failure of multiple peace agreements underscores a fundamental challenge in conflicts involving proxy forces: diplomatic frameworks that address state-to-state grievances but exclude the armed groups actually fighting will not produce durable ceasefires. The international legal and diplomatic architecture for resolving proxy conflicts remains inadequate to the scale and complexity of wars like the one in eastern DRC.

The coming months will test whether sustained financial pressure — particularly U.S. and EU sanctions targeting Rwanda’s mining sector and military leadership — can alter the cost-benefit calculus that has driven Kigali’s intervention. Without meaningful consequences for treaty violations, the risk is that the peace process will formalize, rather than reverse, what amounts to a de facto partition of the DRC — with a Rwandan-backed armed group controlling the strategic and mineral-rich eastern provinces indefinitely.