- On March 3, a group of militants attacked the headquarters of Upemba National Park in the southern Democratic Republic of Congo.
- The attack left seven people dead and caused severe damage to facilities at the headquarters.
- A group claiming responsibility for the assault said it was part of an effort to achieve independence for the mineral-rich region of Katanga, of which Upemba is a part.
- Upemba National Parks staff members spoke to Mongabay from the DRC about the attack and its aftermath.
When Christine Lain, the director of Upemba National Park, heard gunfire coming from the outer boundary of the park’s headquarters complex a little before 6 in the morning of March 3, her first thought was that it was a part of a drill.
Upemba, a sprawling 11,730-square-kilometer (4,530-square-mile) network of grasslands and forests in the southeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, isn’t a stranger to security threats. Its rangers have battled local militias, known as Mai-Mai, for years, and in January the park’s security team had run combat drills at its headquarters as part of contingency planning for an attack.
Lain, who was in the facility’s command center with a handful of staff preparing to send a group of rangers out on patrol, wondered if another exercise was happening.
It didn’t take long for her to realize that something very different was underway.
“We immediately realized that the intensity of the firing was so high that it was certainly not a drill,” she told Mongabay in a phone interview from Lubumbashi, capital of Haut-Katanga, one of three provinces straddled by Upemba.
The shots Lain heard marked the beginning of a 12-hour ordeal that would eventually leave three rangers and four civilian park staff dead, and its headquarters ransacked.
Upemba, which is managed by the nonprofit organization Forgotten Parks in conjunction with the DRC’s agency for conservation and park management, the ICCN, has lost staff to violence before. In 2024, two rangers and two community trackers were killed in clashes with militia members.
But the scale and intensity of this month’s attack far surpassed anything the park has seen in recent memory. The incident is raising concerns that fighting in the eastern DRC may be spreading southward, and that long-running conservation efforts at Upemba could be in jeopardy.
A previously unknown separatist group from the region that calls itself the Stand Up Katanga Movement for the Liberation of Congo (Mouvement Debout Katanga Pour La Liberation du Congo, or MDKC) has subsequently claimed responsibility for the attack, describing it in a communiqué as part of a political challenge to the government of President Félix Tshisekedi.
The assault comes as the DRC military, the FARDC, continues to face off against the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group hundreds of kilometers to the north. A peace agreement signed last year between the two countries failed to halt the fighting, which has encroached on other biodiversity hotspots.
The government in Kinshasa, the DRC capital, has publicly linked the attack on Upemba to M23, although it has failed to specify the nature of any connection.
Lain told Mongabay that the force that attacked Upemba was more aggressive than other militias they’ve encountered inside the park previously. So far, it’s unclear why they chose to target the park’s headquarters.
“They came in bigger numbers, some of them were very well-trained — not Mai-Mai, actually — and with better weapons, not just AK-47s but also PK [machine guns]. And that took us totally by surprise,” Lain said.
Maxime Devolder, Upemba’s head of development, confirmed to Mongabay in a phone interview that of the larger group, a contingent of 20 or so attackers appeared to be more disciplined and better coordinated than typical Mai-Mai fighters.
“They were in black military uniforms with boots and arrived in rubber gear, prepared for the rain. They had backpacks and brand-new weapons,” he said.
Upemba has a total of 256 rangers assigned to it, but there were only 40 armed rangers present at the headquarters on the day of the assault. Outgunned and outmatched by a force Lain estimates to have been at least 80-strong, the majority fled, leaving only a small handful to defend the rest of the staff.
Devolder, a Belgian national who was held hostage before being released, said he overheard the more well-trained fighters communicating in Swahili and English:
“The [commander] didn’t have a weapon, but he had a radio and was relaying orders. He would say things like ‘these are the orders from our general.’”
Two of the rangers who tried to repel the attack were killed in the firefight, with another executed after surrendering, Lain said.
After the shooting began, Lain and the group of 10 or so park staff who were at the command center huddled together as they tried to work out an escape plan. But as the firing grew closer, it became apparent that the facility’s defense line had been breached, and there was no clear path out. Two rangers arrived, one with a bullet wound to his shoulder, and told the group they would have to find a place to hide.
One by one, they climbed up a shelf into a crawl space in the building’s roof, Lain said. For hours, she and the others tried to remain silent while the attackers searched the command center and adjacent buildings for weapons, ammunition and equipment.
“They got inside and started to check and plunder everything, but they didn’t check the roof,” she said.
At one point, Lain said, they were so close that the group could make out their conversation. “They were looking for me and the arms depot where we store our weapons,” she said.
Lain speculated that they may have intended to target her to disrupt operations at Upemba. The park has been managed by Forgotten Parks since 2017, when it signed a 15-year contract with the DRC government under a public-private framework.
Devolder told Mongabay the attackers asked him where Lain was and said they wanted to speak to her.
“They wanted to tell her to essentially stop actions against the Mai-Mai or poachers, and to stop recruiting [staff],” he said.
In February, Mongabay published an interview with Lain on the organization’s approach to managing Upemba.
In footage that was posted to social media after the assault and which Mongabay has reviewed, groups of men in civilian clothing and bearing assault rifles are seen pulling boxes of equipment out of buildings in the facility, taking laptop computers and other gear. Upemba staff can be seen bound and lying on the ground nearby or being escorted away with their hands raised, some with visible signs of injuries.
While Devolder was held captive he overheard a radio message to the group’s commander instructing the latter to avoid harming foreigners:
“The response was ‘above all, do not touch them. Do not kill them,’” he said.
The group in the roof waited until 2 p.m., eight hours after the shooting started, when they heard Upemba’s law enforcement commander calling for any hidden survivors. They climbed down and were administering first aid to the wounded when they heard the sound of a vehicle approaching.
“We thought, OK, maybe it’s a reinforcement or something, but unfortunately it wasn’t,” Lain said. “It was a group of [attackers] coming back with one of their vehicles to continue the looting, and they saw us.”
Under fire, Lain and the other survivors ran across a muddy field toward a tree line.
“We’re lucky that it was rainy season and the grass was quite high, so we could go on all fours and try not to get shot in our back,” she said.
The group was able to escape into the forest, eventually making its way toward a village in a journey that lasted until daybreak. There, along with other survivors of the attack who were trickling in, they called for evacuation from Forgotten Parks staff who had returned to headquarters to survey the damage. With their dead in the back, they were transported by truck to Lubumbashi.
In the end, three ICCN rangers under the command of Forgotten Parks along with four of the organization’s civilian staff had been killed in the attack. The dead included Subira Bonhomme, a grant manager, as well as veterinarian Ruth Osodu.
According to Louise de Bruin, CEO of the Game Ranger’s Association of Africa, the March 3 attack was the deadliest event in African conservation since 17 people were killed in an ambush in Virunga National Park, also in the DRC, in 2020.
“If we look at the last few years (just looking between 2020 and 2026) there have been deaths by homicide in protected parks annually — a worrying trend,” she said.
A communiqué issued by the attackers on March 6 described the event as the beginning of an “armed struggle to liberate Katanga and Congo from tyranny.”
Originally one of the four Belgian colonial administrative provinces of what is now the DRC, Katanga — which encompasses Upemba National Park — has long had separatist movements. Immediately after Congolese independence in 1960, the province attempted to declare independence in a rebellion that was put down with the assistance of U.N. and U.S. forces. In the years since, a Mai-Mai group known as Bakata Katanga — or “cut off Katanga” — has periodically staged attacks on government forces, including a 2013 assault on Lubumbashi that left 33 dead.
Poorly armed Bakata Katanga forces inside of Upemba have waged a long-running contest for control of the park and its resources. When Devolder asked the attackers why they’d targeted Upemba’s headquarters they replied that it was part of an effort to “liberate Katanga” and seize weapons.
“We were perhaps also targeted because we were seen as part of a system that’s opposed to them,” he said.
Katanga is a strategically vital region of the DRC, with its lucrative “copper belt” mineral deposits generating billions of dollars in government revenue, and is the center of the DRC’s cobalt production. The region has taken on added geopolitical significance in recent months as the U.S. vies for greater access to those deposits, which have been offered to U.S. companies by Kinshasa in exchange for assistance in its fight against Rwanda and its proxy M23 militia in the east.
In remarks made before Tshisekedi at a March 14 ministerial meeting in Kinshasa, the DRC’s minister of communication and media, Patrick Muyaya Katembwe, described the Upemba attack as an extension of the conflict with M23.
“There has been a growing insurgent movement likely linked to AFC/M23, which is associated with the Bakata Katanga armed groups in Haut-Katanga. This is marked by the latest incursion into the headquarters of Upemba National Park and the town of Lusinga, a significant indication,” he said.
Muyaya did not present any evidence in support of a link between the two groups.
With the FARDC largely tied up in the M23 crisis, if the attack on Upemba’s headquarters is more than a one-off incident, it will add to Kinshasa’s security woes.
“I think [the military] would be in a position of spreading themselves thin if they had to defend [against] an additional rebellion in the south,” said Ladd Serwat, a senior analyst with the nonprofit research group the Armed Conflict Location & Data Event Project.
According to Lain, the FARDC sent a detachment of soldiers to defend Upemba’s headquarters after the attack and is providing support to other stations inside the park.
Forgotten Parks is currently providing counseling for staff who survived the attack, many of whom, including Lain, were evacuated to Lubumbashi.
“Everybody got traumatized,” she said. “The whole station, everybody. Some of them saw their colleagues being shot, others didn’t know if they were going to survive or not.”
A GoFundMe page set up by Forgotten Parks to support the families of those who were killed and rebuild damaged infrastructure was taken down due to the website’s restrictions on conflict-related fundraisers, but Lain said she hopes it will be restored soon.
“We’re going to have to start again from scratch,” Lain said. “We’re going to be reviewing our operational plan and make adjustments, but that’s a reality that other protected areas in the DRC have seen, and we feel that if our team remains strong, it’s something we can do.”
Jahëna Louisin contributed to this report.
Banner image: A ranger at Upemba National Park. Image by Justin Sullivan via Forgotten Parks.
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