Voice of America News (VOA) saw the 21-page document on Tuesday, although it has not been officially released yet. The report included interviews with over 230 sources, and U.N. investigators visited the DRC’s conflict-torn North Kivu province.
There are many armed factions fighting for turf in the Congo, but as VOA noted, the most abusive and dangerous of them is the March 23 Movement or M23, a vicious insurgency with roots stretching back into the bloody regional tribal conflicts of the 1990s.
M23 emerged from a decade of relative dormancy in 2021 and began seizing territory in the eastern DRC, quickly supplanting the Islamic State and its affiliates as the worst regional security threat.
The U.N. report noted M23 is extraordinarily brutal toward civilians in the towns it controls, especially when the paranoid insurgency thinks they might be cooperating with its enemies: