Why has the DRC experienced Africa’s deadliest conflicts?

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This is the script for my video posted on June 4, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.

There’s a country in the middle of Africa whose sprawling, jungle-covered territory produces about 73% of the world’s cobalt, without which your phone, your laptop, and your car wouldn’t be able to exist. But the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC, has also experienced the deadliest wars ever on African soil. So how are these two facts connected, and what impact does the DRC ultimately have on geopolitics?

At about 900000 square miles, the DRC is the second-largest country in Africa and roughly the same size the entire US east of the Mississippi. It has a population of about 112m, and though there are over 200 indigenous languages, French is the official language. Most of the DRC is covered in dense rainforest and rivers, but the eastern and southern regions contain sweeping savannah and mountains that are rich with mineral wealth.

Before the 19th century, the territory was ruled by local kingdoms, but European countries broke these up, and in 1885 King Leopold II of Belgium privately acquired the Congo territory and called it the Congo Free State. Under him, widespread atrocities took place, provoking international pressure for it to become a Belgian colony instead of privately controlled territory. In 1960, the DRC finally gained independence, but it immediately faced serious issues.

This period saw violent secessionist movements that ultimately resulted in the country’s prime minister being assassinated, and in 1965 a man named Mobutu Sese Seko took power. A few years later, he renamed the country Zaire and became a full-on dictator. Eventually, neighboring Rwanda experienced conflict so violent that millions of Hutu refugees fled into Zaire, including Hutu militia members and perpetrators of war crimes who will come back up later. Rwanda invaded the region in 1996 to target the rebels there, and Rwanda was joined by an international coalition against Mobutu. The country experienced dramatic economic and political instability, and ultimately the country’s rebels were able to overthrow Mobutu, in part because his support from countries like the US had largely vanished after the Cold War.

The new government was led by rebel leader Laurent-Desire Kabila, who renamed the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kabila was backed by Rwanda and Uganda, but he wanted to distance himself from them and expelled foreign troops from the country, building alliances with other countries like Angola and Zimbabwe. This triggered a second invasion by Rwanda and Uganda, and the Second Congo War began.

You’ve probably never even heard about it, but the war and its aftermath killed a debated estimate of 5.4 million people, mainly from disease, starvation, and crimes against humanity. The conflict was unfortunately so geographically isolated and complex, with over 100 armed groups and no clean narrative, that it isn’t very well understood in the West. But the war was heavily funded and influenced by the country’s critical minerals, which were becoming more and more important for advanced electronics and batteries, and consequently highly lucrative.

During the Second Congo War, some of those Hutus from Rwanda who I mentioned earlier formed an armed rebel group called the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR. Their presence in the eastern DRC was deemed a threat to Rwanda, and in 2012 former rebels backed by Rwanda mutinied to form the March 23rd Movement, also known as M23, which was defeated by a UN intervention in 2013 but reemerged in 2021 and has been fighting the DRC government ever since. Today, they occupy swaths of the DRC’s provinces of North Kivu and South Kivu.

Each of these factions, the FDLR, M23, and the Congolese government, is fighting for control of the country’s minerals. The DRC accounts for roughly 73% of the world’s mined cobalt, about 70-80% of which is controlled or financed by China. It also produces about 40% of the world’s coltan, an ore used to extract tantalum and niobium, which are vital for capacitors used in devices and vehicles. The Rubaya mine in North Kivu, which is controlled by M23, produces about 15% of the world’s coltan supply. M23 smuggles huge quantities of minerals into Rwanda, including gold, which provides armed groups with lots of funding and is incredibly difficult to trace.

In February 2025, DRC president Felix Tshisekedi wrote to the US government offering them access to critical minerals in exchange for security assistance. That June, the US coordinated the signing of a new peace agreement between the DRC and Rwanda in Washington DC, which enshrined mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, withdrawal of Rwandan forces from the DRC, the DRC government’s neutralization of the FDLR to appease Rwanda, a joint security coordination mechanism, and a new economic integration framework. The DRC also signed a strategic partnership agreement with the US to give them preferential or priority access to the country’s minerals and establish a Strategic Assets Reserve, a pool of mining assets part of which is earmarked for the US to draw from. Under this arrangement, various US companies have expanded their presence.

In July 2025, Qatar also coordinated a nonbinding peace agreement between M23 and the DRC government. But as of mid-2026 fighting has not stopped. Rwandan troops are still in the DRC, M23 has not disarmed despite international pressure, and both sides accuse each other constantly of ceasefire violations. Analysts have reported at least 1500 civilians killed in the conflict since December 2025. The reality is that so long as critical minerals continue to flow to the US, it is unlikely to exert additional pressure, and without external influence, the country’s conflict probably won’t truly stabilize anytime soon.

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