M23 Withdraws From Uvira: The M23 armed group says it will pull its fighters out of the key town of Uvira in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The group says it made this decision after a request from the United States. M23 took control of the town last week after heavy fighting.
Corneille Nangaa, who leads the Alliance Fleuve Congo rebel coalition that includes M23, shared a signed message on X on Tuesday. In the message, he said fighters would leave Uvira in South Kivu province near the border with Burundi. He said the move would happen “as per United States mediation request”.
Uvira sits in a very important place near Lake Tanganyika. Many people see control of this town as a big military and political prize.
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Fighters still seen in Town
Even after the announcement, the situation on the ground did not change right away. Reporting from Uvira, Al Jazeera’s Alain Uaykani said “nothing had changed” by Tuesday morning. He said people still saw M23 fighters moving around the town.
Uaykani explained that the rebel coalition does not fully trust past promises. According to Al Jazeera, he said the group warned that the Congolese army and its allies had “exploited similar withdrawals to retake territory and target civilians perceived as sympathetic to the rebels”.
The Rwanda-backed militia took Uvira last week. This move hurt a peace agreement that the United States helped arrange between Congo and Rwanda. Leaders from Kinshasa and Kigali signed that deal only days earlier. The takeover also damaged a framework peace deal that M23 and the Congolese government signed in Doha, Qatar.
The rebel coalition described the planned withdrawal as a “unilateral trust-building measure”. The group said it wanted to give the “Doha peace process the maximum chance to succeed”. It also asked “guarantors of the peace process” to watch over the town. The group called for demilitarisation, protection of civilians and infrastructure, and monitoring of the ceasefire with “the deployment of a neutral force”.
US Pressure and Fears of wider Conflict
The Doha framework deal reached in November aimed to stop deadly fighting and improve the humanitarian situation in the DRC. It followed a declaration signed in July about watching over a future ceasefire. That earlier document did not clearly explain how or when M23 would leave Congolese territory.
After M23 captured Uvira, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio reacted strongly. He accused Rwanda of breaking promises made in Washington, even though Rwanda denies backing the rebels. Rubio said Rwanda showed a “clear violation of the Washington Accords”. He also warned that the US would “take action to ensure promises made to the president are kept”.
Paul-Simon Handy from the Institute for Security Studies said the rebels acted to gain leverage. He said M23 used events in Uvira as “a negotiating tactic” to pressure the Congolese government into giving “more territorial and economic concessions”. He added that the withdrawal plan likely came from strong US pressure. “I struggle to see the strategic objective they are trying to gain by aggrieving the main backer of the peace agreement,” he told Al Jazeera.
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Handy also questioned the rebels’ timing. “Wanting to give peace a chance would have meant not taking over Uvira after the signing of the Washington and the Doha agreements,” he said. “Taking over and now saying we are withdrawing is a tactic we’ve seen … else[where] by the M23 – taking over territories, appearing to withdraw, to take them again.”
