A drone strike in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on a house used by international relief staff killed a French aid worker Wednesday morning. Two other people were also killed, according to the rebel group M23. Their names, and the full count of those killed and injured, could not be verified immediately.
M23 blamed government forces for the attack. Congo’s Information Ministry and military did not respond to requests for comment.
The drone strike — according to local residents who spoke with The Washington Post; M23; and Hadja Lahbib, the European commissioner for equality, preparedness and crisis management — hit a two-story building where European Union E.U. personnel and international relief workers lived, in a residential neighborhood in the city of Goma.
French aid worker Karine Buisset, employed by the United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, was killed, the agency’s executive director, Catherine Russel, said in a post on X. UNICEF staffers were “devastated and outraged” by the attack, she said. “Civilians, including aid workers, must never be targeted.”
“I call for respect for humanitarian law and for the personnel who are on the ground and who are committed to saving lives,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a statement.
A blast interrupted the quiet of the neighborhood just after 4 a.m., Emmanuel Serugo, 34, a local resident, said in an interview. “It was like bombs falling, and there was a lot of fire.”
The strike was not far from a house used by former Congo president Joseph Kabila and his wife, Olive Lembe di Sita, local residents said.
Eastern Congo has been mired in political upheaval since the early 1990s, fueling decades of conflicts that have displaced thousands of people and contributed to more than 5 million deaths, including from hunger and disease, according to estimates by the International Rescue Committee and others.
Conflict flared beginning early last year between Congo’s military and M23. The U.N. says Rwanda supports the rebel group, which Rwanda denies. M23 has gained significant territory in eastern Congo, including Goma, the center of most of the fighting and the capital of the mineral-rich North Kivu province, known for its reserves of coltan, an ore used to produce metal critical to electronics.
This conflict in eastern Congo is one of the eight wars that President Donald Trump says he has ended during his second term. Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his Congolese counterpart, Félix Tshisekedi, were the main signatories to a peace agreement signed in December in Washington, which gives the U.S. access to critical minerals in Congo.
Just weeks after the pact was signed, M23 regained control of Uvira, a strategic commercial hub, from which it had withdrawn earlier. Oscar Balinda, an M23 deputy spokesperson, told The Post earlier this week that the group was never part of the peace deal and did not consider it binding.
This month, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the Rwandan military and four senior officers, accusing them of supporting M23. The State Department followed days later with visa restrictions on unspecified senior Rwandan officials over alleged support for M23.
The backdrop to the conflict is the battle for strategic resources between the U.S. and China in Congo, amid Congolese accusations that its mineral depots have been illegally exploited by Rwanda.
Last month, the exchange of strikes between the military and M23 intensified, according to Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a monitoring group based in the United States, which said airstrikes and drone attacks reached the highest level yet recorded in the country.
Willy Ngoma, the military spokesperson for M23, was killed in a drone strike last month near the mining town of Rubaya, in eastern Congo. The U.S. Treasury Department in 2023 designated Ngoma as a perpetrator of human rights abuses and accused M23 of killing civilians and perpetrating sexual violence against them. The rebel group has denied targeting civilians, but investigations by Human Rights Watch and others point to the wide-scale slaying of noncombatants.
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