Women Take Up Arms in Eastern DRC to Defend Homes Ravaged by Sexual Violence

In the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, an unlikely coalition is forming on the front lines of a brutal conflict: women who have been systematically targeted, abducted and sexually assaulted are now picking up weapons of their own. An Al Jazeera video report published on 26 September 2026, part of the network's NewsFeed, documents women joining the pro-government Wazalendo fighters — local militias recruited to defend their communities as armed groups and armed men roam the countryside of North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri.

The scenes described in the report come from a region where civilians have become the principal targets of warfare. Thousands have been displaced from their villages, fields have been emptied, and sexual violence has spread not as a by-product of fighting but as a deliberate instrument of terror. International human rights monitors say survivors are often told they were punished for their ethnicity, for the actions of their husbands or male relatives, or simply because they were women and therefore defenseless. Children, including very young girls, have been reported among the victims.

The transformation is visible in the towns and villages on the M23 front line. Where state security forces are thin, absent or widely suspected of collusion, armed civilians are the last line of defence — and women, many of whom have already lost relatives and livelihoods to violence, are increasingly part of that line. Some are described as joining in small groups with their husbands, brothers and neighbours; others have reportedly joined the formalised ranks of the Wazalendo network, which offers weapons, training and a degree of pay or protection in exchange for service.

Analysts of conflict dynamics in the Great Lakes region caution that civilian arming is a symptom of state failure rather than a solution to it. When the government in Kinshasa cannot guarantee the safety of its own citizens, the argument runs, the choice is not between militia and no protection, but between a militia and nothing at all. For women specifically, that calculation is sharpened: they are far more likely than men to be attacked at home, on the road to market, or in the fields, and far less likely to see attackers brought before any court.

The uncomfortable contradiction at the heart of the story is that the Wazalendo are themselves the subject of serious allegations. The same group now being enlisted in the protection of women has been accused by human rights organisations and United Nations reporting of abuses including gang rape, summary executions, forced recruitment of children, theft and illegal taxation. Rights groups have stressed that armed recruitment does not make a group accountable, and that the presence of women within a militia's ranks does not offset abuses allegedly committed by that militia.

Researchers who study women's participation in armed groups point out a persistent double standard. Women fighters are frequently celebrated as symbols of resistance when they are fighting on the side of their own government, and simultaneously stigmatised — as perpetrators, as victims of "bad" armed groups, or as instruments of propaganda — when the political line is drawn. The historical record offers no clean template: women combatants have been central to liberation struggles from Rwanda in 1994 to Kurdish and Syrian armed movements, and in each case they have won admiration for their courage and faced suspicion for their weapons.

Accountability remains the most difficult piece of the puzzle. Sexual violence in the DRC is prosecutable in principle under national law, and the country is a party to the Rome Statute, but in practice cases collapse before they begin. Survivors face stigma, threats, lengthy waits, and the loss of evidence; many crimes are never reported at all. Critics of the international response argue that the gap between documentation and prosecution is precisely what allows violence to continue at its current scale, and that a raft of sanctions and demarches has done little to change battlefield behaviour.

There are also humanitarian costs to a militarised civilian population. Humanitarian organisations warn that villages where residents carry guns are more exposed to retaliation, harder to reach with aid, and more likely to be treated as military objectives. Armed women, who are not listed among the categories of people protected by the Geneva Conventions in the way civilians are, can also lose the specific protections that international humanitarian law extends to those they are defending.

Diplomatic pressure has intensified. Washington and Brussels have pressed for a durable framework to end the eastern fighting, while international panels have documented the external support that has sustained the armed groups involved — including Rwandan allegations that have long been firmly denied by Kigali. Regional leaders in the East African Community and the Southern African Development Community have struggled to translate peace initiatives into ceasefire monitoring on the ground.

For the women now serving with the Wazalendo, the calculus is immediate and personal. The offer of a weapon comes with uniforms, camp life, discipline and, in some cases, the only wages available in an economy that has collapsed. What happens after any ceasefire — whether survivors are recognised as combatants entitled to demobilisation benefits and reintegration support, or simply left to navigate the same violence unarmed — remains largely unresolved, and is likely to determine whether the gesture produces security or simply a new front line.