DR Congo conflict: At least 700 killed since Sunday, says UN

Thérèse Kayikwamba Wagner, the country’s foreign minister, told the BBC that Rwanda was illegally occupying her country and attempting to orchestrate regime change.

Wagner said the international community had allowed Rwandan President Paul Kagame decades of impunity and failed to hold him accountable for violating international law.

Rwanda’s government spokeswoman Yolande Makolo denied the accusation, saying the country’s troops were only deployed to prevent the conflict spilling over to its territory.

“We’re not interested in war, we’re not interested in annexation, we’re not interested in regime change,” Makolo told the BBC’s Newsday programme.

UN experts estimated last year that Rwanda had between 3,000 and 4,000 troops operating alongside the M23 in eastern DR Congo.

On Friday, the Southern African Development Community (Sadc) regional bloc declared its support for DR Congo at a crisis summit in Zimbabwe.

In a statement, the 16-member group “reaffirmed its solidarity and unwavering commitment to continue supporting the DRC in its pursuit of safeguarding its independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity”.

Sadc has sent peacekeeping troops, primarily from South Africa, to DR Congo to combat armed groups like the M23 and restore peace in the mineral-rich region after decades of unrest.

Sixteen soldiers from southern African countries have been killed in clashes with the M23 around Goma in the past week.

The fighting has also worsened the humanitarian crisis in eastern DR Congo.

Shelley Thakral, from the UN’s World Food Programme, said the city’s residents were running out of food, clean water and medical supplies.

“The supply chain has really been strangled at the moment if you think about land access, air access, when everything is closed down,” she told AFP.

Since the start of 2025, more than 400,000 people have been forced from their homes, according to the UN’s refugee agency.

DR Congo is Africa’s second-largest country – about two-thirds the size of Western Europe – and borders nine different countries.

Previous conflicts in the country during the 1990s drew in several neighbours and were dubbed Africa’s World Wars.