Violence in the eastern DRC provinces of North Kivu and Ituri highlight the precarity of the country’s security due heavily armed rebel groups, foreign intervention, and battle over access to the DRC’s mineral reserves.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is the site of the world’s longest-running and most expensive peacekeeping operations, including a UN peacekeeping presence for several years after its independence in 1960 and more recent UN missions starting in the late 1990s. Despite this, an estimated five million people have died in the years since the second regional war began in 1998, and millions more have been forced to flee their homes.
