Burundi is Fighting Congo's War. Here's Why.

By late last year, Burundi’s footprint in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) had grown to 18,000 troops. Congolese intelligence sources cited in early 2026 put the total number of Burundian soldiers that had rotated through the country since August 2022 at roughly 29,000. And yet, few beyond regional experts are aware of the role that this small East African nation plays in the war against Rwanda and the Rwandan-backed M23 rebels—a role that has become difficult to separate from Kinshasa’s ability to hold its ground.

Most accounts of the ongoing war frame it as a two-sided conflict: Kinshasa and its patchwork of allies on one side, and the Rwandan army and M23 on the other. While broadly accurate, this framing obscures Burundi’s growing role as a key regional actor, whose forces are shouldering much of the Congolese war effort, particularly on the southern front in South Kivu province.

Thanks to this, Kinshasa has been able to avoid a decisive defeat. But the Burundian intervention has also made the war significantly more convoluted and much harder to end. Burundi’s bitter regional rivalry with Rwanda predates M23 and is likely to outlast it. Its strategic interests overlap with those of Kinshasa, but they are not the same. Yet the Washington Peace Accords, brokered between the DRC and Rwanda by the United States in December 2025, make no mention of Burundi. Anyone who wants to understand the war in the eastern DRC and the prospects for peace therefore first needs to understand what drives this small nation to intervene in a neighboring conflict… and what it hopes to get from its role as Kinshasa’s savior.

Putting Out a Neighbor’s Fire

Burundi’s role in the fighting has come at a steep and rising price. At least six senior Burundian officers have been killed since late 2023, while insider sources put the total number of dead in the hundreds, possibly even in the thousands. M23 claimed that it captured hundreds of Burundian soldiers when it advanced on the city of Uvira in South Kivu province in late 2025, and one battle in the highlands this June may have left 100 to 150 Burundian soldiers dead.

As such, it’s tempting to ask what may have convinced the Burundian government to take part in such a costly campaign. While a definitive answer would require high-level access to classified decision making, at least four publicly-known factors help explain things.

The first is commercial. About 90 percent of Burundian exports to the DRC move through the Uvira–Bujumbura corridor (where M23 rebels have been active) and smuggled gold from South Kivu flows through Bujumbura, where it is blended into official Burundian exports or re-smuggled to the Gulf. A rebel army occupying territory here therefore poses a threat to the economy and the illicit minerals trade.

The second is patronage. Kinshasa has reportedly offered Burundian President Évariste Ndayishimiye personal and financial inducements, including up to $5,000 per soldier deployed—with most of this money likely never reaching the soldiers—and an agreement to overlook gold smuggling from South Kivu that benefits ruling party and army figures. Local reports in June indicated that Kinshasa was again offering mineral benefits for more Burundian military support, particularly for operations in the South Kivu highlands.

The third is domestic politics. Ndayishimiye faces pressure from a hardline faction within Burundi’s ruling party, the CNDD-FDD, led by party secretary general Révérien Ndikuriyo, that wants a tougher line on Rwanda. A Burundian human rights group assessed that Ndayishimiye likely greenlit operations in South Kivu against RED–Tabara, a Burundian rebel group opposed to the Burundian government, to appease hardliners in his government back in 2021. These hardliners see him as weak, and how he managed relations with Rwanda during a period of détente between 2020 and 2023 is a political liability for him. Ndikuriyo’s strong grip on the Imbonerakure, the ruling party’s paramilitary youth wing, combined with his consistently hawkish views, has allowed him to carve out his own space as someone strong on security.

The last important factor is Burundi’s national security. Burundi has almost no strategic depth. The town of Uvira on Lake Tanganyika, which sits about 24 kilometers from the economic engine of Bujumbura, commands the approaches to the city—a large plain that makes up most of the Burundi-DRC land border—and routes toward the southern DRC. Full M23 control of these areas would effectively encircle Burundi and cut it off from its most important neighbor, making Burundi wholly dependent on Tanzania to the east as its only outlet. Burundian officials have openly acknowledged this reality—as the foreign minister put it, “what threatens Uvira threatens Bujumbura.” Ndayishimiye often uses a proverb that illustrates their view: help your neighbor put out a fire before it reaches your own house.

Old Grudges, New Proxies

Underlying all four of these factors is a deeper source of tension, one rooted in the history that has shaped the Great Lakes region over the past three decades. Rwanda and Burundi emerged from the turmoil of the 1990s with sharply contrasted political arrangements and national priorities. In Kigali, Paul Kagame consolidated a minority Tutsi-led autocracy focused on economic development and rebuilding a country devastated by genocide. On the other hand, the Hutu-dominated CNDD-FDD emerged as the dominant political force in Burundi after a 12-year civil war and soon began weakening the ethnic power-sharing settlement in favor of majoritarian rule. Each regime’s trajectory has become a nightmare for extremists on the other side, and each has long viewed the other’s enemies as potential allies.

Relations took a downturn after M23’s first rebellion in 2012 and collapsed after Burundi’s failed 2015 coup attempt, which Bujumbura accused Kigali of supporting. Burundi closed its border with Rwanda, while Rwanda reportedly began backing RED–Tabara in the eastern DRC. Meanwhile, Burundi resumed engagement with the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Rwandan rebel group whose remnants participated in the genocide, as well as Rwandan dissidents linked to a political opposition group with an armed wing based in the eastern DRC and led by a defected Rwandan army general.

Relations briefly improved between 2020 and early 2023, as the two sides exchanged prisoners and Burundi reopened the border. But the thaw depended largely on the two presidents’ willingness to maintain it, and as the fighting expanded and Burundi’s stake in Kinshasa’s survival grew, the war eventually swept it aside.

The break came in January 2024, after Bujumbura blamed Rwanda for RED–Tabara attacks on Burundian soil. Burundi cut diplomatic ties, and Ndayishimiye—whose rapprochement efforts had cost him political capital with hardliners in his base—began openly accusing Kagame of lying, including from podiums in Kinshasa. RED–Tabara has since aligned with M23, while Burundi has resumed state support to and is likely fighting on the side of FDLR factions in South Kivu. A bilateral effort to ease tensions in early 2025 was followed by failed talks between M23 and Burundi on a withdrawal before M23 and the Rwandan army finally went for Uvira.

The Lingering Ethnic Dimension

The rivalry is shaped by distinct ethnic undertones, although these dynamics are seldom acknowledged publicly. Ethnic extremists in Burundi and across the Great Lakes region, including hardline elements within the ruling party, have framed the war in the eastern DRC as part of a broader, age-old, racist conspiracy in which the ethnic Tutsi are seeking to restore a Tutsi-led government in Burundi and establish a regional empire at the expense of Bantu peoples, who are painted as the true “indigenous” people of Central Africa. M23’s advances and Rwanda’s efforts to carve out its sphere of influence in the eastern DRC provide fodder to this unfounded narrative, further fueling anti-Tutsi rhetoric and hostility toward groups perceived as Tutsi or connected to Rwanda in Burundi and the DRC.

Burundian elites have sought to reinforce and capitalize on these xenophobic fears. Human rights groups continue to report discrimination and arbitrary detention of some Tutsi and have linked ethnic hate speech to senior government officials. Burundian authorities have used the war to intensify domestic repression, exploiting fears of Rwanda and M23 to target individuals perceived as sympathetic to the rebels or critical of the regime.

These ethnic politics may also be shaping Burundi’s approach to the war itself. Since M23 withdrew from Uvira under US pressure in January, Congolese and Burundian forces, supported by contractors linked to Erik Prince, an American private security entrepreneur with ties to the Trump administration, have mounted offensives against Twirwaneho, an M23-allied militia based in the Banyamulenge-majority highlands around Minembwe. The Banyamulenge, who share ethnic ties with Rwandan Tutsis, have long faced discrimination from Congolese authorities. For much of 2025 and 2026, coalition forces encircled Minembwe, cutting off an estimated 170,000 civilians and restricting humanitarian access. The Burundian army’s blanket accusations that Minembwe residents support Twirwaneho and recent coalition airstrikes on livestock, schools, clinics, churches, and radio stations raise serious concerns about the treatment of Banyamulenge civilians and compliance with the laws of war. A report submitted to the UN by Burundian civil society groups in October 2025 warned that the army’s presence in these areas could reinforce ethnic divisions in both Burundi and the DRC and revive stereotypes that contributed to earlier conflicts.

Why Burundi Matters to Kinshasa’s War Effort

Kinshasa’s reliance on Burundi shows no sign of fading. Ndayishimiye has personally made at least 11 visits to Kinshasa since 2021, and a visit in June led to agreements to expand troop deployments, drone capabilities, and intelligence cooperation. The Burundian army’s value to the coalition also extends beyond sheer manpower. Since late 2024, Burundian units have participated in every major battle in North and South Kivu, often fighting on the front lines and, on several occasions, holding positions alone after elite Congolese units retreated. After M23 and Rwanda captured North Kivu’s capital, Goma, in early 2025, ten of Burundi’s 16 battalions in the eastern DRC repositioned to the Ruzizi in South Kivu to forestall a further M23 push southward, likely helping to explain why M23 and the Rwandan army initially struggled to break through the corridor to reach Uvira.

Burundian territory also serves as a vital logistic and administrative rear base for Kinshasa’s war effort. After Bukavu fell, the South Kivu government relocated to Uvira, but Congolese officials spend most of their time in Bujumbura, and officers and officials routinely transit through the city, sometimes under escort from senior Burundian officers. Bujumbura’s international airport has become a hub for the war effort. Long-range drone operations and cargo flights carrying materiel from numerous countries increased in the second half of 2025 and are unlikely to cease any time soon as military operations continue in the South Kivu highlands.

Burundi is also a training ground for coalition forces. Local reports have circulated since early 2025 that ruling party members, Burundian soldiers, and Western private military contractors train Imbonerakure recruits for deployment to the DRC. By spring 2026, several thousand Congolese, Burundian, and Rwandan fighters were conducting military exercises outside Bujumbura under Belgian instructors in preparation for possible renewed large-scale conflict with Rwandan forces.

On the ground, local officials in Uvira have increasingly come to view Burundian troops as a stabilizing presence, in part because the alternative security force is the pro-government Wazalendo militias, which often operate with little effective oversight and harass civilians. An increased Burundian presence since early 2026 in Baraka, roughly 80 kilometers down the lakeshore highway from Uvira, and as far south as Kalemie, the gateway to Katanga’s mining region in the extreme south, now forms a defensive barrier against any renewed M23 push southward.

Rwanda and M23 have taken notice and increasingly targeted Burundi directly, likely seeking to degrade its military support for Kinshasa and constrain the use of Burundian territory as a rear base. The United Nations reported as early as June 2024 that Rwandan forces were deliberately targeting Burundian troops in North Kivu, while the offensive on Uvira was likely aimed in part at pushing the Burundian army out of the eastern DRC and severing supply lines from Bujumbura. In March 2026, a Burundian arms depot in Bujumbura exploded, killing dozens. The army attributed the blast to an electrical fault, and while reports at the time raised the possibility of a drone attack, Ndayishimiye later said there was no evidence of sabotage. Whatever caused the explosion, the depot had recently received military shipments from abroad and was likely used for military operations across the border.

The Bill Comes Due

As mentioned earlier, the price Burundi is paying for its intervention in men and materiel is high. But while the government has sought to obscure the full cost from the public - Bujumbura has never publicly confirmed the death of a single named soldier or released casualty figures - that doesn’t mean that the impacts aren’t still being felt.

Chief among those affected are the families of the poorly-equipped, often undertrained recruits who are thrown into the meatgrinder with little or no air support. Families say the bodies of their loved ones are sometimes buried in secret without their knowledge and that they are prevented from holding public funerals. They also receive no compensation for their dead, unlike the families of Burundian peacekeepers killed in Somalia.  In 2023, Ndayishimiye said callously that soldiers dying in the eastern DRC was “normal,” because he claimed that they had agreed to it. 

The war has also further strained an economy already in its worst crisis since the civil war, with chronic shortages of fuel, fertilizer, and essential goods. Unrest in Tanzania in late 2025 briefly threatened vital trade routes on which Burundi’s food security depends, and the fall of Uvira added to these woes by severing Bujumbura’s links to South Kivu and driving tens of thousands of refugees across the border.

Pressure from Burundi’s military and political elite to bring the troops home is rising. Discontent first surfaced among rank-and-file soldiers in November 2023, when several hundred troops deserted in North Kivu over unpaid allowances and poor conditions. In early 2025, senior officers complained about inadequate equipment and intelligence leaks to M23 and Rwanda. M23 sought to exploit divisions within Burundi’s military leadership during talks in late 2025, and Ndayishimiye allegedly clashed with his generals over war strategy following the fall of Uvira.

The war is also deepening ethnic divisions inside the army. The Burundian army has never fully overcome the split that emerged after the 2015 coup attempt between soldiers loyal to the ruling party and officers from the old, Tutsi-dominated army. Poor conditions and growing frustration among troops deployed in the DRC could deepen those divisions. Rather than confronting the issue, the ruling party appears to be building around it. Its new reserve force drew more than 200 Imbonerakure veterans of the Congo campaign into its first 2026 intake and recruited an overwhelmingly Hutu cohort in western Burundi in May. The creation of a force that sits outside the constitution’s ethnic power-sharing quotas and answers to the ruling party rather than the state is a significant development, particularly with national elections a little over six months away, and these youth militias playing a key role in enforcing the ruling party’s dictates.

The Overlooked Stakeholder in Regional Peace Efforts

All of this matters to peace efforts. A significant weakness of the Washington Accords is that they neither directly address nor meaningfully account for Burundi, another regional state actor with thousands of troops deployed on Congolese soil, in a formal framework. Its interests, military activities, and ties to local armed groups are variables any credible peace effort must reckon with.

For Washington, Burundi poses a contradiction that it has struggled to address as it has grown closer to Bujumbura. Burundi already contributes troops to the African Union mission in Somalia, supporting the burden-sharing role the United States wants African governments to play against al-Shabaab. Burundi has also discussed a possible role in a postwar stabilization force for Gaza, signed major mineral agreements with US mining companies, and agreed to take in US deportees. Africa watchers have consequently described Burundi as “more relevant” to US policymakers.

As such, we can safely say that the Washington Accords as they are today suffer a structural flaw, with one of the key military actors on the ground sitting largely outside the peace process. An agreement between Kinshasa and Kigali will ultimately be necessary to resolve the conflict, but it is unlikely to be sufficient to end the war if the broader regional dynamics that sustain the conflict simmer beneath. The lack of a durable ceasefire between Kinshasa and M23 means that there is little pressure on Burundi to constrain its own military activity, and Burundi has its own reasons to remain involved. Burundi’s unresolved role also gives Kinshasa the ability to keep pursuing a military solution and Kigali grounds to label Burundi’s involvement as a major security threat, undermining both parties’ buy-in to the accords. Burundi’s role in the conflict may be unknown to most outside of specialist circles, but it is likely to be key in determining if this war ever ends.