Militia attack in eastern Congo kills at least 69 people

Bodies from a late-April militia attack in Ituri province were recovered only after insecurity eased, a delay that showed how civilians in eastern Congo are not only killed but left waiting for even a count of the dead. At least 69 people were killed, and a local civil protection official put the toll at more than 70.

The killings were attributed to armed men linked to Codeco, short for the Cooperative for the Development of Congo. The militia says it defends the mainly farming Lendu community, especially against the mainly pastoral Hema community. Another armed group in the province, the Convention for the Popular Revolution, says it fights for the Hema. The Congolese army has also sometimes used Codeco as an auxiliary force, a sign of how fluid and contradictory the armed landscape has become in Ituri.

That instability has made eastern Congo one of Africa’s most volatile conflict zones for years. The attack took place in a province rich in gold and bordering Uganda, where armed groups continue to fight over territory and resources while state control remains weak. The fact that bodies could not be recovered immediately because of insecurity underlined the deeper protection failure: violence does not end when the shooting stops, because the state often cannot move quickly enough to count the dead, support families or establish accountability.

MONUSCO said on May 9 that it "strongly condemn[ed] the recent wave of deadly attacks targeting civilians in Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu provinces." Peacekeepers had already intervened in Djugu territory during the night of May 4 to 5 after another escalation of security tensions, a reminder that the province was still on edge days after the killings.

The wider humanitarian picture is worsening. The International Committee of the Red Cross said in November 2025 that conflict and armed violence in Ituri were trapping civilians in a "murderous cycle," and that some 1.5 million people in the province were suffering food insecurity. Médecins Sans Frontières said in late April that its teams were witnessing the impact of renewed violence in Ituri.

The Congolese military has also operated in the region alongside the Ugandan army, which has been deployed in northern North Kivu and Ituri since 2021 to fight the Allied Democratic Forces. Even with those deployments, the latest massacre fits a familiar pattern in eastern Congo: armed attacks in remote territory, delayed recovery of bodies, fragmented casualty counts and little visible protection for civilians caught in the middle.