Congolese Women Take Up Arms Against Wartime Rape as UN Also Documents a Gaza Forced-Marriage Surge

Eastern Congo: Women Arm Themselves as Protection Collapses

Women in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo are joining pro-government Wazalendo fighters to defend their communities as sexual violence tears through the region, according to Al Jazeera. The reporting is stark: the same Wazalendo militia these women are joining faces its own accusations of gang rape and other human rights abuses.

Women are picking up weapons because the state can't or won't protect them, then aligning with an armed group that stands accused of committing the exact crime they're trying to escape.

Since the 1990s, more than 100 active armed groups have operated inside the DRC, according to iknowpolitics, fueled by internal tensions, regional instability and the lingering effects of colonial-era borders. The current phase of the eastern conflict traces back to 2012, when the March 23 Movement, or M23, took up arms in North Kivu Province. M23 fighters claimed the central government reneged on a 2009 peace agreement it signed with M23's predecessor group, the National Congress for the Defense of the People.

Sexual violence in that conflict zone isn't limited to soldiers and rebels. iknowpolitics reports that civilians also exploit the chaos, abusing and raping women who come to their homes seeking domestic work. The outlet profiled Charline, a woman in her twenties who was a victim of exactly that kind of abuse, describing her sitting silently as tears ran down her face.

No investigation or prosecution of Wazalendo fighters over the gang-rape accusations has been announced in the reporting reviewed here. With more than 100 armed groups operating and a state security apparatus that has failed to stop mass sexual violence, some women appear to view an imperfect militia as the only available option for self-defense. That doesn't resolve the accusations against Wazalendo, but it explains the calculation women are making in the absence of anything better.

Gaza: A Separate UN Finding on Forced Marriage

In a different conflict on a different continent, a UN agency reported that violence against women in Gaza has surged, according to BBC News, which flagged the findings on social media on September 23, 2026. The findings, cited in a Daily Wire opinion column, describe a 123% increase in early and forced marriage incidents across the region in the first quarter of 2026 alone, with victims ranging from age 12 to 59.

According to the same reporting, women are in some cases traded for food or forced into marriages with the men who raped them, a practice whistleblowers say is used to avoid family shame and social scandal. One refugee quoted in the Daily Wire piece said, "When rape cases are discovered in schools, you find weddings and celebrations at the school the next day."

Daily Wire's column argues that Western activists who focus their outrage on Israel's conduct in the war have stayed largely silent on these UN findings about abuse committed by Gazan men against Gazan women and girls, and it ties that silence to broader criticism of sharia-based courts, where a woman's testimony can be weighted at half a man's or excluded outright.

If a UN agency is documenting a 123% jump in forced marriages tied to rape, it deserves attention regardless of who's committing the abuse. Whether that attention has actually been absent is harder to prove. Documenting intra-Palestinian gender-based violence during an active war and blockade is difficult under the best of circumstances, and the scale of civilian deaths from the broader conflict has dominated coverage on all sides. The absence of loud public campaigning by any particular activist group isn't the same as proof they've dismissed the findings, and no source here surveys what individual activists have or haven't said.

A UN agency documented a sharp rise in forced marriage and violence against women in Gaza in early 2026. In eastern Congo, a UN-adjacent picture of atrocity has women joining an accused militia because it's the only force standing between them and further attacks. Neither government, nor any international body named in this reporting, has announced charges tied to either set of findings.