Rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo have surrounded the eastern city of Goma, in one of the sharpest escalations in years of a conflict that has pitted the Central African country against its neighbor Rwanda.
On Thursday morning, rebels from the Rwanda-backed M23 group captured Saké, forcing Congolese forces to quickly retreat, according to humanitarian officials and eyewitnesses. That was the last major army position before Goma, a provincial capital with more than 2 million people.
Goma’s fall would be a major milestone for a group that captured the city and held it for two weeks in 2012, but withdrew after Rwanda came under intense international pressure to stop backing the militia. The United States and United Nations say Rwanda funds and directs the M23, charges Rwanda has denied.
In late 2013, the Congolese army and United Nations forces quickly defeated the rebel group, which lay dormant afterward for almost a decade.
M23 has since surged back, starting in late 2021, dealing the Congolese army a series of major defeats. At the same time, peace talks spearheaded by Angola, Congo’s southwestern neighbor, have stalled, and the fate of U.N. peacekeepers was until recently up in the air, with their mandate renewed in December for just one year.
Goma, a hub for humanitarian organizations, U.N. agencies and foreign diplomatic missions in eastern Congo, has been a refuge for more than a million civilians fleeing violence from M23 militiamen, Congolese forces and other armed groups in the region.
The rebels launched a major offensive this year, and now the city is increasingly cut off. Rebels control the land immediately to Goma’s north and west. On its east lies the border with Rwanda. Its south is demarcated by the Lake Kivu shoreline.
Wounded civilians fleeing Saké arrived on Thursday morning on foot and on motorcycles at a Goma hospital run by the International Committee of the Red Cross. Abdourahmane Sidibé, a senior surgeon with the group, said he and his colleagues have been treating twice as many civilians over the past few weeks than on average last year.
“There was too much bombing,” said Hawa Amisi, 52, who fled with only a thin mattress, a bottle of water, and four of her children, who had nothing to eat. Ms. Amisi, who had been separated from her husband in the melee, said she saw dead bodies lying in the street as they fled. “So many people died,” she said.
Bruno Lemarquis, the United Nations’ top humanitarian official in Congo, said 2025 would be “a difficult year” because humanitarian needs are likely to rise, and funds are expected to dwindle.
With peace talks having collapsed in December, dwindling attention from a distracted world, and the United States — traditionally Congo’s largest humanitarian donor — expected to slash aid, humanitarian officials and experts say one of the world’s biggest crises risks becoming even more neglected.
“Even before the new U.S. administration came in, we were told that U.S. humanitarian support would be slashed by a third,” Mr. Lemarquis said.
Caleb Kabanda and Saikou Jammeh contributed reporting from Goma and Dakar.