Kivu ConflictDR Congo · 2004–ongoing“Draw near — the atlas keeps this thread, and tonight the fire lends it a voice.”The Kivus are where the Congo wars went to live after they officially died in 2003. More than a hundred armed groups contest these eastern hills — the Rwandan Hutu fighters of the FDLR, the Ugandan ADF, the home-grown Wazalendo militias, and the Tutsi-led M23 that rose again in November 2021 and seized much of North Kivu by 2023 — each defending a hill, a community, a mine, a grievance, in provinces where the soil grows everything and the subsoil pays for everything else.