An attack on a village in western Congo killed 14 people and set several homes on fire, a military official said, deepening concern over violence linked to land disputes between rival communities near Kinshasa.
The assault happened during the early hours of Sunday in Nkana, about 75 kilometres northeast of the capital. Capt. Antony Mualushayi, the military spokesperson in the area, said the attackers were armed with rifles and machetes and exchanged gunfire with the soldiers deployed in the village. When they retreated, he said, they massacred 13 civilians, including three children under the age of 5, and killed one soldier.
The military said the attackers belonged to the Mobondo militia, a group that presents itself as defending the Yaka people. Nkana is in Kwamouth territory, where conflict has raged for three years between the Teke and Yaka communities. The dispute began in June 2022 over land and customary claims, setting so-called native and non-native communities against one another in a cycle that has repeatedly turned local grievances into deadly violence.
The latest attack is part of a conflict that has already displaced 280,000 people and killed more than 5,000 since 2022, according to the International Peace Information Service, a research institute that monitors conflicts. The U.N. has said Mobondo militiamen have carried out killings in five provinces around Kinshasa, including its outskirts, showing that the violence is no longer limited to one isolated rural pocket.
Human Rights Watch has described the underlying struggle as a fight over land ownership and customary authority. That matters because the conflict is not just about one armed group, but about overlapping claims to land, identity and local power that have proved hard to resolve. In that environment, even a small village like Nkana can become the scene of a massacre when armed men move through with little warning.
The AP report made clear that the latest death toll may not be the final one if more information emerges from the area. But even the current figures are enough to show that violence once thought of as local has become a persistent security problem close to one of central Africa's biggest capitals.
The fighting in Nkana sits inside a broader conflict that has repeatedly shifted near the capital. The land dispute between Teke and Yaka communities has already displaced hundreds of thousands of people, so every new attack adds pressure to a region that is both heavily populated and politically sensitive. The use of rifles and machetes in the latest assault shows how quickly local disputes can become militarized.
That is why the AP account matters beyond the immediate death toll. A village attack less than 50 miles from Kinshasa signals that the conflict has outgrown one territory and become a regional security issue. If the U.N. is right that Mobondo violence has spread across several provinces, then the attack on Nkana is not an isolated burst of violence but another sign that militia activity is continuing to move outward.
With the attack close to Kinshasa, the military has to think not only about a single village but about the wider signal sent to communities already living with years of militia violence. The AP report shows that even where the conflict began as a dispute over land and identity, it now has the footprint of a continuing security crisis.
