"Armed Defenders or Armed Abusers? Women Take Up Weapons in War-Ravaged Eastern DRC

A video report published by Al Jazeera on 26 September 2026 documents a disturbing and increasingly complex reality in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where women are reportedly enlisting with pro-government Wazalendo fighters in an effort to protect their own communities from marauding armed groups. The report's premise is stark: as war and sexual violence spread across the region, ordinary civilians — including women and girls — are being pushed toward an armed response in a country where state security has largely failed to guarantee their safety.

The report's central tension is that the same force drawing women into its ranks is itself the subject of grave allegations. Wazalendo, the militia network that has fought alongside Congolese government forces, faces "serious accusations of human rights abuses, including gang rape," according to the report's summary. In other words, women are seeking refuge in an armed group that has itself been accused of committing some of the very crimes they are trying to escape. That contradiction, rather than any single battlefield development, is what gives the story its significance.

The eastern DRC has been locked in cyclical violence for more than two decades. Successive insurgencies, mutinies, foreign interventions and the involvement of armed groups linked to cross-border trafficking in minerals, gold, tin and coltan have created a landscape in which the national army's presence is often thinner than its nominal authority. Civilians are frequently left to fend for themselves, and the communities that bear the brunt of displacement and assault are the least able to rely on formal protection.

Wazalendo is not a new formation. The name has been used for local militias drawn largely from the Democratic Republic of the Congo's militarised political history, and has been associated over the years with armed structures tied to former ruling-party networks and, at other times, to official government pacts. Such arrangements have been promoted by successive administrations as pragmatic ways to harness local fighters who know the terrain, but critics have warned that formalising militia-civilian alliances risks entrenching commanders, weapons networks and abuses rather than containing them.

Human rights organisations have repeatedly documented sexual violence in the DRC's conflict zones, describing it not only as a crime but as a tactic — used by armed groups and by some elements of the security forces to humiliate, displace and terrify populations. Congolese women's rights activists have long campaigned for sexual violence committed in war to be recognised in international law as a weapon of war, a campaign that contributed to the adoption of international treaties treating such violence as a distinct war crime.

Why, then, are women joining? Aid and advocacy workers point to a straightforward calculus of necessity. Where state authorities cannot guarantee the physical integrity of civilians, and where displacement has separated families and severed access to livelihoods, the option of taking up arms can appear as the least-bad choice available. Recruitment may also bring tangible benefits — stipends, status, protection for dependents and access to food and shelter in an economy where survival is increasingly precarious.

That choice carries its own risks. Women who take up arms are not only exposed to the dangers of combat but also risk stigmatisation from their own communities, who may view them as having violated norms of protection. Female fighters frequently carry a double burden: they face the threat of sexual violence from the enemy, and the risk of exploitation or abuse within their own ranks. Rights groups stress that women's participation in armed forces, wherever it occurs, should never become a substitute for accountability for gender-based crimes.

The allegations of gang rape within Wazalendo ranks are the most damaging element of the story because of what they imply about the mechanisms of accountability. If a militia is simultaneously relied upon as a partner of the state and accused of systematic sexual violence, prosecutors face a difficult path: investigators must document serious crimes, but the state's reliance on the same actors complicates cooperation, protection of witnesses and access to evidence. Impunity for such crimes, rights groups argue, embeds the perpetrators and removes any incentive for change.

Justice efforts in the DRC have been further complicated by legal questions, including the country's withdrawal from the International Criminal Court, announced in 2016 after the court issued warrants over crimes linked to the country's eastern conflict. Domestic courts have also opened proceedings, but they operate under severe resource and security constraints. The result is a patchwork in which some cases proceed, many stall, and the vast majority of victims receive no meaningful remedy.

Humanitarian agencies warn that the escalation of sexual violence in the east has consequences that extend far beyond the immediate victims. Mass displacement strains already overstretched camps, where food, water, health services and protection are in chronic short supply. Survivors need long-term medical and psychological support that aid systems are poorly equipped to provide, and the stigma surrounding rape frequently silences reporting, which in turn hides the true scale of the crisis from funders and policymakers.

Analysts caution against treating any armed group as a single, uniform actor. Militias are typically coalitions of local commanders with differing allegiances, motives and levels of discipline, and the conduct of one unit says little about another. They nonetheless stress a common lesson from past interventions in the DRC: militia partnerships without rigorous vetting, training, oversight and clear lines of accountability tend to reproduce the abuses they were meant to suppress.

The story of eastern DRC's women fighters therefore resists simple framing as either empowerment or victimhood. It is better understood as a measure of how completely the collapse of protection has hollowed out the distinction between defender and aggressor. When civilians must arm themselves to survive, and the protectors are suspected of the same atrocities as the perpetrators, the victims are pushed into choices that should never have been theirs to make.

What happens next will depend less on battlefield movements than on institutional follow-through: whether allegations against Wazalendo are investigated credibly, whether survivors receive reparations and care, and whether the Congolese government can demonstrate that reliance on armed auxiliaries does not come at the expense of the women and children those auxiliaries are meant to protect. For now, the report from the east captures a war whose cruellest consequences are being shouldered, as ever, by civilians — and increasingly by civilians carrying guns.