After per week of combating, rebels backed by Rwanda have wrested nearly full management over Goma, a metropolis of two million within the jap Democratic Republic of Congo.
Hospitals are overflowing with the wounded, and the town morgue with the useless. Goma’s residents are starting to emerge from their hiding locations, desperately looking for water and meals. And the Congolese army that was supposed to guard them has been vanquished.
On Thursday, in a yard outdoors Goma’s largest stadium, rebels with the Rwanda-backed M23 militia loaded greater than 1,000 troopers they’d captured into truck beds, the place the lads stood packed collectively. Most wore the uniforms they had been captured in. Lots of them had been livid.
However the curses they spat weren’t directed at their captors; somewhat, at Felix Tshisekedi, the Congolese president, whom they accused of promoting them out, and on the army commanders who had deserted them. Their commanders, along with authorities officers, had left behind their autos, seen in movies and pictures, and boarded boats within the early hours of Monday morning as M23 arrived within the metropolis, escaping throughout a moonlit lake whereas leaving their males to combat alone.
Lots of the troopers within the vehicles had fought on, alongside armed teams recognized regionally because the Wazalendo. However no reinforcements had been despatched.
“Tshisekedi can pay for this,” one soldier shouted.
“We’ll seize him with our personal arms,” one other mentioned.
“God can pay him again,” yelled one other.
A commander of the 231st infantry battalion of the Congolese Military — recognized by its French acronym, F.A.R.D.C. — climbed down from the cabin of one of many vehicles, the place his seniority had earned him a cushty spot. The captured commander, Lt. Col. John Asegi, defined that they’d no alternative however to give up. M23 was taking them someplace to offer them some coaching, he mentioned, including that they might now do no matter their new masters commanded.
“If we’re despatched to combat the F.A.R.D.C.,” he mentioned, “we are going to combat the F.A.R.D.C.”
Because the M23 rebels strode across the yard getting ready for the vehicles’ departure, they seemed extra like a military with their rocket-propelled grenades, fatigues and helmets, whereas the Congolese troopers seemed like a drained, ragtag insurgent group.
The rebels, who already management huge tracts of mineral-rich Congo, have mentioned they plan to march to the capital, Kinshasa, almost a thousand miles to the west, and take over the entire nation.
The rebels had already handed over to Rwanda a whole lot of captured Romanian mercenaries who had been combating alongside Congolese forces.
Lots of of civilians stood across the vehicles filled with troopers, watching this reversal of roles, and getting have a look at the lads who had been now in cost. A dozen ladies and kids had been crying inconsolably, having simply noticed their husbands and fathers among the many males within the vehicles.
“I don’t know the place they’re taking him to,” wept Marie Sifa, who had a child lady on her again and three different youngsters in tow. She was from Fizi, 270 miles south of Goma, she mentioned, and she or he misplaced every part within the assault on Minova final week. They sought shelter in a faculty, however they might not keep.
“We now have been chased out of the varsity,” Ms. Sifa mentioned, crying as if she had been in mourning. “How will I survive? How will I get these youngsters again to Fizi?”
In a while Thursday, a insurgent chief, Corneille Nangaa, gave Goma’s residents a style of their new actuality underneath the highly effective militia — which some specialists say counts 6,000 troops in jap Congo, backed by as much as 4,000 Rwandan troops.
“Return to regular actions,” Mr. Nangaa instructed Goma’s residents at a two-hour information convention at an area resort. He was flanked by males in helmets and battle gear.
However the scenario in Goma, a metropolis constructed round black lava streams from a close-by dwell volcano, is much from regular.
Useless our bodies lie within the streets. Shops, supermarkets, and humanitarian businesses’ warehouses have been looted. Cholera is breaking out. Folks with bullet wounds — those that survived — are lastly managing to get to clinics for remedy, solely to discover a lack of medication and of surgical workers.
And lots of households who had been cut up up as they fled have but to search out one another.
Elysée Mopanda misplaced observe of her two youngsters within the chaos. The rebels had been holding her husband, a soldier, prisoner. The occasions of the previous week had left her household in ruins.
“I don’t know the place to go,” she mentioned.
Wounded, harrowed, hungry, thirsty or misplaced, a lot of Goma’s residents are in an especially precarious scenario.
Most weak is Goma’s displaced inhabitants, which numbers within the a whole lot of 1000’s.
For greater than a yr, folks have fled the insurgent advance by way of jap Congo’s countryside and small cities, searching for refuge in and round Goma, in sprawling, unsanitary camps which can be notably harmful for girls and ladies.
As M23 closed in on these camps final week, 1000’s of people that had been barely surviving there fled the clashes, carrying the little they’d on their heads towards Goma, which might itself quickly be overtaken.
Three households who fled one of many camps simply outdoors Goma hid in an academic heart, surviving on some beans and rice they got.
With out that kindness, “I don’t understand how we’d have survived,” mentioned Furaha Kabasele, a 34-year-old mom whose youngest youngster is barely 5 months outdated.
They did survive this perilous week. However they don’t know what they are going to do now.
For a lot of, probably the most urgent want is water. Town’s water provide, in addition to its energy and web, was lower in the course of the battle for Goma, and those that had managed to avoid wasting watched it dwindle over the week. Those that had no water tried to beg it from those that did, or paid a hawker as a lot as $5.20 for a jerrycan that normally prices 20 cents.
Because the combating subsided, a whole lot of individuals have ventured to the sting of Lake Kivu to gather water, including a little bit chlorine to attempt to maintain waterborne illnesses at bay.
A kind of fetching water on Thursday morning was Tailor Mukendi, 13, who carried two stained yellow jerrycans to the lakeshore, took off his flip-flops, and plunged into the shimmering lake. Because the combating blazed, his household had run out of water to drink.
“We couldn’t go away the home due to the gunshots and the bombs falling,” he mentioned.
He stuffed the cans, and struggled to lug them out of the lake.
