As of 2026. The displacement figure is drawn from OCHA and UNHCR monitoring during the M23 offensive and its aftermath and changes month to month as front lines shift and populations return.
Eastern DR Congo has been in near-continuous conflict since the Second Congo War formally ended, with more than a hundred armed groups active across North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri. The resurgence of the M23 movement from 2021, which UN groups of experts have reported receiving Rwandan military support, drove repeated mass flight around Goma, culminating in the group's capture of Goma and Bukavu in early 2025. Roughly 5 million people are internally displaced and about 8.2 million forcibly displaced in total, making this one of the largest and least-reported displacement crises in the world. Displacement here is highly repetitive: many families have fled multiple times, and camps around Goma have been overrun and emptied more than once.
Fighting between the Congolese army, the M23 movement backed by Rwanda according to UN experts, and scores of other armed groups has repeatedly uprooted civilians across North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri
The DRC has had no census since 1984, so provincial figures are projections: the four eastern provinces most affected by the fighting are estimated to hold roughly 25 million people out of a national total of about 100 million. Displacement in the east has run between five and seven million people in recent years, the largest internal displacement crisis in Africa, and rose sharply after the M23 offensives that took Goma and Bukavu in early 2025.
No consolidated count exists for this phase. The Kivu Security Tracker (Human Rights Watch and the Congo Research Group) recorded about 1,900 civilians killed and more than 3,300 abducted by over 130 armed groups in the Kivus in its first two years alone (June 2017-June 2019); the UN Human Rights Office documented hundreds of civilian killings in single months of 2025, including 319 by M23 and Rwandan forces in Rutshuru in July 2025 and 70 by the ADF in Ituri in one attack. DRC's prime minister said more than 7,000 people were killed in the east in the first weeks of 2025, a figure well above UN verified counts for the fall of Goma, and Rwanda denies the UN experts' finding that it backs M23. Compilations of ACLED event data across all armed actors since 2017 run to the tens of thousands.
The UN Human Rights Office, the Kivu Security Tracker (Human Rights Watch and the Congo Research Group) and Human Rights Watch documented summary executions of civilians by M23 in Goma, mass killings by the ADF and CODECO, rape, mass abductions including of children recruited by armed groups, and the burning and looting of homes, shops and villages.
Rwanda, Dem. Rep. Congo, Burundi, Uganda