On Saturday night, rebel fighters walked into villages in Ituri province and killed at least 69 people. They used machetes, they used firearms, and they used the easy cover of a state security apparatus that has not been functional in that part of the Democratic Republic of Congo for the better part of a decade. By Sunday morning, the death toll was still climbing and humanitarian agencies were quietly briefing that the real figure was higher. This is the third such massacre in northeastern DRC in six weeks.
The Ituri killings are being attributed to the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), the Ugandan-origin militia that has now affiliated itself with the Islamic State and operates with chilling impunity across the Beni-Butembo-Ituri corridor. But the killings cannot be separated from the wider collapse of the country’s eastern security architecture. Two hundred kilometres to the south, M23 — the Rwanda-backed rebel coalition that captured Goma in early 2025 — has used May to forcibly march as many as 2,000 people from the town of Sake to Goma, in what humanitarian sources describe as a vetting operation against suspected supporters of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR). The Congolese army claims to have shot down an M23 drone in the South Kivu highlands. Wazalendo militias allied to Kinshasa have engaged M23 around Walikale.
Officially, all of this is happening inside the framework of a peace deal. In December 2025, the United States — under direct intervention by President Donald Trump’s Africa envoy — brokered an agreement between Kinshasa and Kigali, and a parallel framework between Kinshasa and the AFC/M23 coalition. By mid-April, the parties announced they would facilitate humanitarian aid and release prisoners within ten days. That commitment has been honoured selectively at best. President Félix Tshisekedi’s government has, according to the International Crisis Group’s most recent briefing, been “stalling progress” on its own commitments. M23 has been more than happy to use the diplomatic cover of a peace process to consolidate territory.
The political stakes have escalated further. In May, the Congolese Senate stripped former president Joseph Kabila of his lifetime parliamentary immunity, paving the way for prosecution on charges that he backed M23. Washington has piled on with personal sanctions against Kabila over his alleged ties to the rebels. Whether or not the charges stick, the move signals that Tshisekedi has decided to wage the political war against M23 inside Congolese institutions even as the military war on the ground stagnates. It is also a not-so-subtle warning to other opposition figures that the legal infrastructure of the state can be turned on them if they are perceived to be on the wrong side of the eastern question.
For East Africa, this is not a far-off problem. The EAC’s regional force was withdrawn under acrimonious circumstances when Kinshasa accused Kenyan and Ugandan units of being insufficiently aggressive against M23. The SADC force that replaced it has itself been pulled back after South African losses. The result is a security vacuum that Uganda is filling with unilateral operations against the ADF inside DRC territory, Rwanda is filling through its proxy support to M23, and Burundi is filling through its own deployments. Four neighbours, four uncoordinated interventions, and a Congolese state too weak to expel any of them.
The continental conversation has begun to shift. African Union Commission officials are quietly arguing that the Washington-led peace process needs to be re-anchored at the AU, because a deal made in the Trump White House cannot survive the next pivot in Washington’s attention. They are right that the deal is fragile. They are wrong that the AU can do better without first solving its own credibility problem with Kinshasa.
For Kenya specifically, the eastern Congo crisis is increasingly a humanitarian and economic question. Kenyan exporters use the Northern Corridor to feed the Goma–Bukavu market. Kenyan banks have meaningful exposure to the DRC after the EAC accession. And Kenyan citizens of Congolese descent — there are hundreds of thousands in Nairobi alone — are increasingly raising the political temperature, demanding that Nairobi articulate a clearer line on M23, Rwanda and the regional response. So far, the Ruto administration has been silent to the point of evasiveness, perhaps because it does not want to disturb the Trump-brokered process, perhaps because it does not want to choose between Kigali and Kinshasa.
What to watch next: whether the AU’s Peace and Security Council places eastern DRC on its agenda in June, whether MONUSCO’s drawn-down successor force receives any of the additional 8,000 troops it has requested, and whether Tshisekedi survives the legal and political fallout of the Kabila prosecution without his own coalition fracturing. The Ituri 69 are not a one-off tragedy. They are a forecast.
