Photo credit: Accord
The Ituri region, which borders Uganda and South Sudan, is a victim of some of the fiercest fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The region is home to dozens of warring ethnic militias and the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), the DRC branch of ISIS. It is heavily involved in – but still affected by – the war between the Congolese government and the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels, who launched a renewed insurgency in 2023.
The Independent reports that the M23, ADF, militias in the government-aligned Wazalewndo coalition, and dozens of other armed groups in the DRC, are all accused of recruiting children, both boys and girls, who are forced to kill, search for food, spy, work on the land, or serve as “wives” for commanders.
One of the children, Kito, says the image of his victims is engraved into his memory. “They were looking at me. It will stay with me forever, the things I saw and the horrible things I had to do. I killed people, I saw these people every day.”
He is one of thousands of children to have become cannon fodder for the endless violence in the DRC, which is home to the world’s most severe child recruitment crisis. In the Ituri province alone, 13,000 children remain in armed groups after 1,300 were released in 2025. The UN’s annual report says at least 2,365 children were recruited across the country in the year to June 2025, but experts say this is likely a major underestimate; in the North Kivu province, at least 2,054 children were recruited according to the NGO Children for the Future and Development (EADEV).
Most are forcefully abducted, coerced, or drugged by militia groups, while others volunteer following pressure from the militia or from their friends.
Children like Kito, whose family was left cash-strapped after his father died, are targets for the local militias, coercing children with promises of money and respect. He was a positive and self-assured boy, those who know him well say, a big dreamer who was fixated on transforming his impoverished childhood before his father’s death left him in a desperate financial situation.
He was recruited on 24 September 2024 as an assistant to one of the colonels. “The colonel was really mean to me,” Kito recalls. “He was really demanding, giving me too many orders; it was really difficult.”
That November, he would seize an opportunity to flee the militia, afyer taking stock of possible escape routes when tasked with laying the trail through the Ituri rainforest for an upcoming mission. “I was creating the trail, so I managed to escape the road, which I traced for the group. I took another main road and left while no one was watching,” he says. “It was because the colonel asked me to get some water. I took advantage of this situation to escape the group.”
Escaping such a fate was extremely complicated for Imani, who was recruited in August 2020 when she was 12 years old.
A friend had convinced Imani to join an armed group when she was “young and didn’t have the capacity of thinking”, the now 18-year-old tells The Independent.
She was handed several laborious roles within the group. “I was made to carry water, cultivate the land, carry nags. It was difficult, because sometimes I would not eat for three days, and then I was made to do that.”
Imani was forced to serve as a so-called “wife” to one of the captains. She was repeatedly raped until she fell pregnant, little more than two years into her time with the group, aged just 15 years old. Discussing this period of her life, Imani says, brings too many painful memories. “It’s too difficult to talk about.”
After a pregnancy fraught with complications, Imani gave birth to her daughter in her home village. But soon afterwards, she would return to the militia with her child, where, for nearly another year, she was forced to work with an infant baby in her arms.
She would be sent to steal food from local farmers to feed the mikitia men, or to the market to carry large loads of food to the base. She fell ill several times after the pregnancy. Often, she would go to bed having not eaten in days.
Both Imani and Kito are among the minority who successfully escape the clutches of an armed group each year, to be reunited with their families and supported by NGOs that help them reintegrate into society.
Leaving the armed groups does not necessarily guarantee an end to their hardships. Resettling at home is difficult, with children months or years behind their peers at school, often struggling to fit in society after losing so much of their childhood to war and violence. The psychological impact of what they have witnessed or taken part in can be hugely damaging.
