A nine-month-old baby was shot and injured when her mother, who was carrying the child on her back, was shot to death.
Two sisters, aged four and 16, were repeatedly hacked with machetes in the head and arms. Their mother, who was eight months pregnant, was seriously injured by multiple blows.
A nine-year-old boy was shot in the stomach – and saw his mother and two siblings "hacked to pieces" with a machete. He hid in a shower cabin.
The injuries described in a Doctors Without Borders report from the Congolese Ituri are brutal – and increasingly, women and children are falling victim. So far this year, they have accounted for over half of MSF's cases in the provincial capital Bunia.
Sexual Violence
Ituri has been plagued by violence and ethnic tensions for decades, but the situation has escalated in recent years and months. Since the beginning of the year, around 100,000 people have been forced to flee, according to the UN. At least 200 have been killed.
In total, nearly every fifth inhabitant in Ituri is on the run – but even in refugee camps, civilians are not spared. In September 2024, MSF received five civilians who had been shot in an attack on the Plaine Savo camp.
The organization's clinics are also seeing an increasing number of victims of sexual violence. Women are most vulnerable. Many of them are attacked, according to the report, while working in the fields, gathering firewood, or moving along roads.
"No Choice"
What MSF is seeing is likely only the tip of the iceberg, they warn. A very small proportion of Ituri's population has access to healthcare. Furthermore, healthcare facilities have been attacked several times – with patients and staff in direct firing line.
When a hospital was recently forced to close, a doctor continued to perform a cesarean section, he recounts in the MSF report.
"It was dangerous and I risked my life, but we had no choice. We had to take the women in, otherwise they would have died."
Ituri is located in northeastern Congo-Kinshasa. The province was formed from the former province of Orientale, which was one of the scenes of the very bloody Second Congo War that broke out in 1998.
The province was occupied by the Ugandan army between 1998 and 2002. Between 1999 and 2006, around 60,000 people lost their lives in several separate outbreaks of violence in Ituri.
The years between 2007 and 2017 were marked by relative calm. Late 2017, violence erupted again in several places, with a large number of armed groups involved and several thousand deaths as a result. At the bottom lies land disputes between the ethnic groups Hema and Lendu.
Since 2018, the number of people on the run in the province has more than doubled. By the end of 2024, an estimated 1.36 million people were on the run in Ituri, around 18 percent of the total population. The UN and various human rights organizations have repeatedly sounded the alarm about a humanitarian catastrophe.
Sources: Ocha, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), International Crisis Group
