Hunting Assad's henchmen in Syria and Congo's war for blood minerals
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Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com The worry is that unless HTS can show people that they're going to make things better reasonably soon, then people might start to ask, why shouldn't I form a militia or an armed gang and put food on the table that way?

We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end. Right now, all eyes are on Washington. But who's actually watching Europe?

Israel and Hamas have finally agreed to a ceasefire deal after months of delicate negotiations.

I'm Venetia Rainey and this is Battle Lines. It's Monday, 27th of January, 2025. Today, I'm joined by our new Middle East correspondent, Henry Bodkin, to discuss the biggest headlines from the region, including what the latest hostage release tells us about Hamas's strength in Gaza and why one Israeli woman was left off the list. Henry also talks about his recent trip to Syria when he went out on the road with ruling party Hayat Tahrir al-Sham to answer the question, can they be trusted?

Plus, Roland Oliphant joins me to explain why Congo's foreign minister has accused its neighbour Rwanda of declaring war. Let's start in Gaza, where the Israel-Hamas ceasefire is still just about holding.

Welcome to Battlelines, Henry. Can you start by telling me a bit about who was released over the weekend? Yeah, well, the four hostages, they were all young, between 19 to 20 or 19 and 20 years old. They were all women. The key thing was they were all serving on duty IDF soldiers on October the 7th. They were captured in that capacity, as it were. And so that's

that was quite odd that they were slated for release when their names were published by Hamas on Friday. Many people in Israel said, well, hang on, this is quite strange. Civilians should be first. And there are a number of named female civilians on the kind of starter list of 33 for this phase of the hostage release deal who technically should have been released instead. And that, of course,

widespread worry as to the welfare of these women. Were they actually alive or did Hamas have control of them? It's an issue that we encountered in the first hostage release deal back in November, December 2023, that people that were supposed to be released actually weren't under the control of Hamas. They were under the control of a different terror group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. So

Saturday was a strange day because Netanyahu's office cried foul and said, Hamas, you've breached the terms of the deal, which is obviously... The world kind of held their breath and thought, oh, God, no, this is, you know, it's all falling apart at the end of week one. But the four women were released. They were released with...

great theatre, if you can use that word, by Hamas, similar to the week before. Perhaps even more extravagantly, they were marched on stage. There was some sort of desk up there and they were handed their certificates and their kind of leave-in goodie bags.

So they got out and Palestinian prisoners were released at the same time as per the deal. But at the same time, Israel continued to cry foul. And we found out that the IDF were reportedly preventing Palestinian civilians from heading north in Gaza.

because of this apparent breach. So we're talking here about Abel Yehud, aren't we? The female civilian who was captured on October the 7th. And we believe her to be in the hands of a Salafist organisation linked to Islamic jihad. And that's why Hamas weren't able to hand her over, but she's supposed to be in good condition, certainly alive and released later this week. Is that right? Well, yes. So there's been...

huge uptick of hope among her friends and family and wider Israeli society because this unscheduled release on Thursday has now been penciled in at least and she is on the list of three hostages who are promised to be released. The other one is a man called Agam Berger who's an IDF soldier and there's one other hostage whose name hasn't been released who are due to be

released on Thursday. And as such, Palestinian civilians are now being allowed to head north back to their homes or the remains of their homes in the north of Gaza. So the hostage release deal seems to be still in shape. I want to talk a bit more about these four women that were released because, as you say, they were part of the IDF, but they weren't armed when they were seized. They were female spotters, right? So they were based in

just on the Gaza border and their job was to watch Gaza and they had these very intense jobs where they'd sit there at a computer for 12 hours and they'd be watching all these cameras and monitoring for any sorts of changes and the spotters in the IDF, these spotters, were the ones who raised the alarm quite early on, quite a few months before October 7th, that something was afoot and they were ignored and now they've been released back and I think

My sense is that in Israel, there's a sense that these women were betrayed quite heavily and obviously were still waiting for an investigation into October 7th and all the various failings. But these women have become quite symbolic of how Israel failed itself on October 7th, as well as obviously Hamas's atrocities. Absolutely. And one of the points about everything that's happened since October 7th, the almost relentless and devastating war, is that

an investigation and the real questions among Israeli society haven't really started yet. I mean, obviously, the failure has been questioned and criticized, but there hasn't really been a quiet space yet for that side of things to really get going. But it has come out that...

these units, some of these units which were staffed mainly by women or in this case exclusively by women were raising the alarm before October the 7th and they were ignored and it just reinforces the point that this billion dollar wall that

that Israel had around Gaza, as many defence experts were quick to point out in the days after October 7th, it's not a defence in itself. It's part of a system of defence that involves agile use of intelligence, the ability of troops to move around. And if commanders aren't reacting to

intelligence tip-offs or surveillance tip-offs from their own people, let alone from sources or assets, then the system doesn't work and it didn't work. And so, yes, I think there is a huge feeling among Israeli society that these women were let down by the system on October 7th and that they should rightfully be repatriated

fairly high up the list. Yeah, and we should also mention that the head of the IDF actually resigned last week, Lieutenant General Herzli Halevi. And in his letter, he said that the IDF had failed in its mission to protect the citizens of Israel. He was talking specifically about October 7th. My responsibility for the terrible failure accompanies me every day, every hour, and will be so for the rest of my life. Well, we're still waiting, obviously, for a proper investigation into October 7th. And it seems unlikely while Netanyahu is in power because of the

It will probably cause to his political reputation. I want to pick up on something else that you mentioned, and that was the theatre around Hamas's release of these hostages. As you said, it was even more theatrical than the week before. What message do you think they were trying to send?

I think there are two principal messages. The first, as with the initial week, is we're still here. We're still a serious fighting force. I think you have to notice the quality, if that's the right word, of their uniforms. They look smart. They looked uniform. Their weaponry, which was personal light weapons, rifles and so on,

looked in good shape, they looked disciplined and that in itself sends a huge message. When you say to the world we've been bombarded and hunted through the tunnels for 15 months and we're still here it's supposed to send a huge message that Israeli's war, Israeli's method of warfare has been futile. Now

A lot of people have pointed out that, you know, I think to quote one expert, every family in Gaza has a gun in their home, which is almost certainly an exaggeration. But the point is that it's not hard to find a bunch of AK-47s and probably to press a few uniforms and to turn out smart. The question is,

Do they have any of the more strategic weapons and assets that they need to be a proper fighting force? And the general consensus is at the moment, no, because of the IDF action. But certainly the way they turned out on both Saturdays was supposed to tell the world, we're still here, we're still a serious force. And they did look...

They did look disciplined. And the camera angles were quite interesting because obviously they controlled those, so they could put it out as if there were lots of them and they were controlling the vast crowds and so on. The other point is that the way that they...

these female hostages who were released. They made sure that these women were themselves well turned out, that they looked relatively healthy. They put them in IDF uniforms, didn't they? Which was bizarre because they were kidnapped in their pyjamas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They did this weekend, yes. And I think that was probably obviously to make a point. And they gave them these kind of certificates at

which is obviously quite weird and quite twisted in a way. And these kind of goodie bags or almost like party bags, something you get when you leave an event. But I think really they're not talking to Israel. They're not talking to probably Europe or America. They're maybe talking to the rest of the Arab world or the rest of the Muslim world to say, you know, we are a legitimate organ of resistance and

we may not fight in the same way as the IDF but we are governed by morals and so on as well and I think the theatre of the way that these women were released was probably all part of that effort to push out that message. You've written about some of the Palestinians who were released in exchange for these hostages. What can you tell us about them? Big picture is that there's a

very broad age range. The youngest was 16, the oldest was 69. He's someone called Mohammed Al-Tuz who spent 39 years in prison for an alleged terror attack in the 80s. So he's become the kind of elder statesman of Palestinian prisoners and his release was very symbolic. A lot of Palestinians would have known his name.

More than half of those released so far have been serving life sentences. A number of them are multiple murderers have been involved in terror attacks, attacks on civilians. This was expected. A list of, I think, just over 700 potential releases have been released

put out before this all started and people have poured through them and a lot of them are convicted terrorists. Some of them are people who haven't faced charges at all but have been held under something called administrative detention in Israel which is very controversial and I think there's a couple of points to take from it again in terms of the the messaging the propaganda which is such an integral part of all of this is that Hamas want to show the world look Israel

rounds up young men, children even, without charge and keeps them in prisons and now they're coming out to get that message out there. But also, you know, they're getting their people out. They're getting their top fighters, their top doers, as it were. They need to repopulate their ranks and a lot of these people coming out are people who have

acts of terrorism for Hamas before and presumably the current leadership of Hamas hope will one day in the future be able to do so again. But a lot of the people convicted of the most serious crimes are being deported, isn't that right, to Egypt first and then further abroad? That's the plan, yes. Not being released into the West Bank or Gaza as far as I understand. Yes, yes. As part of the scheme, a lot of them are being deported into Egypt and further abroad.

and the IDF simultaneously has launched quite an aggressive operation in Janine as part of a wider activity in the West Bank, which is seen as an effort to nip in the bud any potential

any kind of unrest that could be sparked by the release of these prisoners. The last thing I wanted to ask you just on Gaza are about Trump's comments. Obviously, over the weekend, he was speaking to reporters on Air Force One, and he made, in typical Trump fashion, some quite poorly worded, perhaps, comments, basically suggesting that Egypt and Jordan should take the 1.5 million people without homes or who've been displaced, and that they could just clean Gaza out.

What's the reaction been on the ground to those comments? Well, I mean, obviously the Palestinian voices, the more moderate voices in the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah have been warning about this since October the 7th. They've been saying that Israel's operation in Gaza is not to eliminate Hamas because that's not really possible, but it is ultimately to...

destroy it as a viable place for the Palestinians there to live. And so when Trump says these comments, a lot of Palestinians turn around and say, we told you so. This was always part of the plan that the Israelis and their supporters in the US want Gaza for themselves. They don't want a Palestinian population living there. And of course, that goes on to the claims of ethnic cleansing.

of genocide. Now, on the other hand, this will be music to the ears of people like Itmar Ben-Gavir, until recently the interior minister, or security minister I should say, who resigned at the hostage deal because it meant an end to the war. Those like him want the war to continue until Gaza is not a viable home for a Palestinian population.

It's an outrageous proposition for the Palestinian people because it, as they see it, would tend to justify Israel's behavior over the last 15 months. And for Egypt and Jordan, obviously very controversial given they have their own Palestinian populations, Jordan in particular, quite a significant one that has historically caused quite a lot of trouble for the Georgian government.

So not one that they've received well either, right? Absolutely not, no. They've said all along that this war cannot result in the displacement of large numbers of extra Palestinian refugees in their countries. As you say, firstly because they've already got, particularly in Jordan's case, they've already got a lot anyway and it doesn't make life easy for them. And also because these regimes, they have to worry about their base, the opinion on the streets in their parts of the Arab world and

they don't want to be seen as complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. I think the other name of the country I saw being chucked around as a home for Gaza refugees is Indonesia, which seems pretty ludicrous. And from what I hear, Indonesia hadn't heard anything about it until it was reported in the press.

Yeah, but the way things are going, I mean, the Indonesian prime minister would probably be... He would be a fool to write it off completely. I mean, you never know, Trump could be threatening tariffs on him if he doesn't comply soon. But yeah, that name was thrown around as well. Coming up after the break, Henry talks about his time on the road with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and we look at the role that precious minerals are playing in the conflict in Congo. Welcome back. I've still got Henry Bodkin in the studio with me, and we're going to be discussing his recent trip to Syria. So...

You went out on the road with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the new ruling party in Syria. What was that like? Well, I mean, a lot of people have asked me that and actually they were charming. And despite being armed to the teeth and clearly with rather a sort of serious look on their faces, they looked professional, they looked well-motivated, which I think is crucial because something's got to hold Syria together at the moment.

And much has been talked about, about the fact that the roots of HTS as an Islamist jihadist organisation, they insist that they aren't anymore. But their fighters certainly, one of the dispatchers we wrote, I talked about all the guns they'd captured and all the exploding bullets lined up on the windowsills next to a bunch of Qurans. Now, Syria is quite a religious country, so there are Qurans everywhere, so I don't want to read too much into that. But they're hardly being paid anything now.

So they have to be motivated by something. And at the moment, they seem perhaps motivated by a kind of a duty towards Syria that's founded in their religion. They seem motivated to treat the local populations by and large well and to behave fairly and to try and impose some semblance of normal law and order, which is crucial because that's what keeps the population's confidence in them. So we joined them on Tuesday.

on or in some cases just in the aftermath of these security sweeps they're doing there's a huge amount of weaponry

littering Syria, just left around. A lot of the army, a lot of Assad's henchmen just left them in the streets when the regime fell. Or if they were sufficiently senior and worried that they were going to get lifted or executed or just shot out of hand for their part in the atrocities, they held on to them. So the ones that were left in the street, they were then picked up by normal civilians.

And so HTS are going around these neighborhoods quite systematically. They seem to have quite good intelligence. They know which houses to knock on the doors of, which suggests strong local support, certainly in the Sunni areas. I mean, it's a Sunni-majority country, but certainly not all areas are Sunni-majority. And it seems, from what we saw yesterday,

In Damascus, outside Damascus, in Homs, they're trying to do it fairly and they're trying to reassure the population. But it's difficult, and particularly in the west of the country where there are lots of Alawite communities, Alawite neighbourhoods, that's the minority population.

Shia sect that Bashar al-Assad and his family came from. Things are a lot more difficult in those areas. I want to just read something from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is a London-based humanitarian NGO, something they reported over the weekend.

There have been grave violations and summary executions that cost the lives of 35 people over the past 72 hours. Members of religious minorities have suffered humiliations. The observatory also listed mass arbitrary arrests, atrocious abuse, attacks against religious symbols, mutilations of corpses, summary and brutal executions targeting civilians that showed an unprecedented level of cruelty and violence.

That obviously contrasts a bit with the charming gentleman that you were escorted around. How do you reconcile that with what's going on in Syria at the moment? When these reports crop up and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights seems to be very well informed and to play with quite a straight bat, it raises a question initially as to whether these atrocities were done by HTS.

And if so, whether these were local HTS people acting out of their own initiative, out of a lack of discipline, or whether it was done by others in a relative security vacuum created since the fall of Bashar al-Assad.

There's a lot of misinformation going around. I'm not saying that the observatory is prey to it, but certainly Iran and Russia are putting a lot of stuff out there, which is making the situation seem worse than it is. I'm certainly not saying that HTS members have not been summarily executing people. They certainly have, and government affiliated to them. This may sound perverse, but you have to put it in the context of a 53-year horrendous regime has fallen.

There's a lot of scores being settled. One of the things we noticed was a lot of these HTS patrols, these security details, they're local boys, a lot of them. They're in the areas that they grew up in. So if, for want of a better term, someone's getting whacked because he was too close to Assad or has blood on his hands, is that HTS ordering it from the top or is it a local reprisal? We don't know yet. A murder is a murder, of course.

But the overwhelming attitude I noticed in, certainly in Damascus and in Homs and in other Sunni areas, is that normal Syrians are desperate for people to give HTS a chance and that they feel relatively safer than they did under Assad. And certainly they feel safer under the nightmare of a full sectarian conflagration. Obviously, it's right to look out for what's happening to minorities. And there have been some quite troubling videos popping up of

Alawite men being forced to crawl through the mud and things like that and being humiliated and being barked at and so on. So I think probably that has happened to an extent but then there's been reports of HTS working quite hard in some of the western regions to keep sectarian Sunni crowds away from Alawite crowds and away from their properties. I think there's a problem in quite a few parts of the west where these Alawite majority towns and villages are where

It's not so much that people there are holding a flame for Bashar al-Assad. I mean, I'm sure many of them would prefer him still to be in power because they profited from it enormously. But they just don't trust HTS yet to give up their weapons. They don't know what's going to happen if they do and whether they'll be massacred. Certainly there's been quite a lot of reports of HTS trying to go about this in a sensible way, of sort of sending an emissary up to a village or a town or a neighbourhood where...

where the Alawites are in the majority and saying, look, could you give up your weapons, please? Can we do this in a civilised way? Can we talk about it? Rather than just piling in and starting shooting. Although, as you say, there have been reports of massacres. But then I think within the last two, three days, there was a report of 10 HTS shootings.

turning up dead. So it's very febrile in the west of the country. Certainly in the main belt Damascus Homs, there seemed to be at least a week, 10 days ago when I was there, there seemed to be a lot of support still for HTS and a general confidence in the way they were running things. It sounds like the EU is going to lift at least some sanctions this

Later today, I see the EU foreign ministers are going to be meeting later. We're recording this on Monday morning. The French foreign minister said that regarding Syria, we're going to decide today to lift, suspend certain sanctions...

that had applied to the energy and transport sectors and to financial institutions that were key to the stabilisation of the country. So that suggests that there is starting to be some international buy-in to help stabilise Syria and support HDS as the legitimate rulers of Syria. European governments have been quite on the front foot. I think France, Italy, Germany are the main ones and probably others to have sent their foreign ministers since the fall of Assad.

And yeah, and EU lifting various sanctions would be a

pretty massive step. I mean, the US tinkered with a few things a couple of weeks ago to temporarily lifted a couple of sanctions to make things a bit easier. But that would also be huge if the US lifted sanctions. I did get the feeling when I was there that the window for this sort of thing is reasonably small. You know, Syria is a beautiful place in many ways, and there's great population and it's clearly got great potential. But it's also, in terms of governance, a total basket case, not just because the

previous regime has been knocked over, a lot of the structure of the previous regime has been deliberately held on to. They don't want to repeat the mistakes of Iraq in 2003. But the problem was that it was built on total kleptocracy, total corruption.

In certain senses, they are starting from scratch and they really need some help. And it's difficult to live there at the moment. There's not much electricity. A lot of things don't work. And the worry is that unless HTS can show people that they're going to make things better reasonably soon, then we talked about all those weapons that are still hiding under people's beds.

people might start to ask, you know, why shouldn't I form a militia or an armed gang and put food on the table that way? So sanctions being lifted is a big step. We had Hamish de Breton-Gordon on a couple of weeks ago who has followed Syria very closely in terms of chemical weapons and chemical weapon attacks. And he was saying a very similar thing about there being quite a small window actually for the international community to help the new government get on its feet.

You also went to the same site that he went to in Eastern Ghouta, which was the site of a deadly sarin attack in August 2013. What did you find? How is the investigation going into trying to prove that this was a chemical attack?

The opportunity now is there for a proper investigation to happen, but it's not happening yet. I spoke to sources who lead me to believe that the White Helmets, the rescue workers who went in to pull people out of rubble during the civil war, who are now actually quite a central part of Syria's emerging health system, that they've been having discussions with Ashraf, the new leader, to get this kind of investigation going.

I mean, samples did come out after the 2013 attack.

and there was eyewitness testimony and videos and so the evidence was there but I'm sure people will remember it all got very murky, Russia obviously denied it and then you had people in the West who perhaps it genuinely wasn't convincing for them or perhaps they were looking for a reason not to back military action which was of course Barack Obama's red line but people such as Ed Miliband calling for more evidence. Well

It's all going to be there. We visited the mass graves, something like 1,200. I mean, more than 1,200 were killed, but there were something like 1,200 bodies

buried beneath three strips of hardened dirt, which were roughly the same shape as a cricket wicket, really, a cricket pitch. It's unbelievable how they've managed to get so many bodies into that small space, but they did it in layers, obviously. And sarin gas is not what's known as a persistent gas, so it's not like mustard gas. So once you get down to the bodies, it won't kind of pervade the bodies in the way that mustard gas does.

decades afterwards, but the DNA signature will be there in the teeth and the bones and things like that. So the evidence is there. Gouta's not particularly safe, so the new regime would have to secure it, but I don't think there's any reason why they couldn't do that. There are international organisations who do these things properly. A lot of them are based in The Hague, and I think they're dying to get in. And then just finally, you wrote another story for us about...

looting by Assad's henchmen, removing cancer drugs from the market in Syria. Can you tell us a bit more about that? So yeah, we had an extraordinary chat with an extraordinary person called Dr Hazem Bakler, who's now taken over as the head of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, their version of the Red Cross. And he's extraordinary because he was quite senior in it

under Assad during the war, but the people kept trying to kill him. He survived a number of shooting attempts and bomb attempts, and that was because he was calling out the fact that Assad's henchmen were trousering the supply warehouses for their own personal profits, selling off all the drugs, selling off all the medical equipment.

So anyway, he left and narrowly escaped being killed and now he's back as president of the whole thing and he's warning basically that Syria is all but out of cancer drugs, which is a horrendous thing. And this applies all the way through the country and it's not just cancer drugs.

is in a terrible state. If you're diabetic, it's an absolute nightmare trying to get hold of the insulin or whatever substances you need. So for his part, from the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, because they're getting...

plane loads in from Saudi from other places a very important symbolic thing for him is that he's cutting the warehouses out of it because the warehouses just became a shop for the black market criminals to come and buy the drugs and put them onto the black market so they go straight from the

the tarmac from the aeroplane out into the clinics. Obviously a huge number of staff have changed because a lot of corrupt people had to go. The situation is pretty parlous and we spent a fair bit of time up in Homs talking to health officials and a lot of them have come in from Idlib which was the northwestern part of the country which never fell to Assad and was where the rebels held out and where they broke out from originally in November, December.

So a lot of the people who are now, for example, the head of the health directorate in Homs were working up in Idlib and they got down to these major cities which were still under Assad control, which had never fallen.

Never fall into the rebels. And they were absolutely flabbergasted. And they said the health there is worse than it was in the rebel-held areas. And the rebel... I mean, bear in mind that the rebel-held areas, places like Idlib, a lot of it is just rubble. But they said you got better health care under the... Well, under the HDS-held areas and the rebel-held areas because it was just so corrupt under Assad. And so they're trying to build...

the health system up from the ground up now and like with everything else they're desperately trying to get stuff in from abroad. Now I think there are exceptions to sanctions when it comes to medical products and equipment but as with everything else they're really looking to the rest of the world to help. Thanks so much for sharing your stories with us. We'll make sure to link to those in the show notes. Henry Bodkin, our Middle East correspondent. I'm sure we'll be hearing lots more from you in the weeks to come.

Now, I'm joined in the studio by my co-host, Roland Oliphant. Hi, Roland. How are you doing? Very well, thank you. So, let's talk about Congo. Over the weekend, Congo's foreign minister accused its neighbour, Rwanda, of declaring war. Why? Over the past 24-48 hours, there have been very rapid developments in the east of Congo, right up against the border with Rwanda. And basically, a rebel group called M23 – we'll get to their name later –

has assaulted and now says it's captured Goma, which is the biggest city. It's a city of 1.5 million people, basically bang on the border with Rwanda.

M23 are believed not just by the DRC government, but by the United Kingdom, the United States, France, the United Nations, to be not just backed by Rwanda, but basically to be a Rwandan proxy group, armed, supplied, guided, and it's widely believed that Rwanda has got its own conventional forces embedded with them. So that's why big assault. It looks like they've basically taken over Goma overnight. And as you say, the DRC saying basically Rwanda's declared war on us.

So who are the M23 rebels? What do we know about them and what they want? Okay, so the M23 are an ethnic Tutsi rebel group, which is significant because it's a majority Tutsi government over the border in Rwanda. The M23 stands for March 23rd, 2009. That's the date over the cord that ended a previous Tutsi-led rebellion in eastern Congo. M23's kind of raison d'etre, their big cause is...

the Congolese government has not lived up to the terms of that deal and they say they're fighting for justice under that deal. They had a revolt in 2012, they were then subsequently defeated, they've reappeared in 2022. Now, they say...

Yeah.

What's at stake in Congo? We hear a lot about it being mineral rich in areas. What exactly do they have and what are these rebel groups chasing? To give you some context, I think part of the reason everyone's really focused on what's happening there, this part of Congo, northern Kivu, it is really, really rich in all those metals that...

are in massive demand because of the global energy transition, because of modern technology. It's the same reason that Donald Trump's interested in Greenland. It's another reason why Mongolia is very interesting at the moment. Basically, this part of Africa is full of that stuff. One is something called coltan.

Coltan is in everything. Smartphones depend on it. So it's become really, really valuable. And Eastern Congo is a big source of it. And spring last year, M23 captured a place called Rubaya, which is near Goma, which is a really key coltan-producing mine. And the United Nations says that has brought them massive, massive revenues because, of course, the mining hasn't stopped there.

So when people are looking at this and people are asking, like, the large assumption by most observers, I think, is that Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, is the big decision maker here. Why would you suddenly want to, you know, grasp control of a large part of eastern Congo? Well, there's an obvious financial incentive.

How did they seize Goma so quickly? What happened? So M23, since they re-emerged in 2022, they started off with this little kind of thumbnail of land kind of backed up against the Rwandan border, but they expanded quite quickly. I mean, by the end of 2024, they were basically surrounding Goma on two sides. So Goma is at the top of Lake Kivu. On the eastern side of Goma, that is literally the Rwandan border. And then M23 had the land to the north.

And then along the lake, there was a place called Sake. And that was the last road into and out of Goma. That fell on Thursday last week. There was a big battle there. There were some South African peacekeepers who were basically taken by surprise. South African press reports they were fighting ferocious battles and they ran out of ammunition.

We think they're still there in their base, but surrounded by basically Sarko-Fell. That was it. Then the M23 declared, okay, we're closing the airspace over Goma using air defense missiles. Or where did they get the air defense missiles? The United Nations says Rwanda. Rwanda says nothing to do with us. So that's the air bridge gone. No way to resupply. So...

On Sunday, they issued an ultimatum saying we want government forces to surrender by 3 a.m. At 10 p.m. local time on Sunday evening, they said, no, we've actually captured it. Now, on Monday morning, artillery fire and small arms fire could still be heard. Sky News' Yusuf El-Gabir, who is there, says that there are reports that about 350 Congolese special forces are still holding out on Mount Goma, which is this kind of...

It's basically a big hill in the middle of town down by the port but they've got nowhere to go. The only way out is across the lake and we believe the M23...

shut down transport across the lake. So quite a rapid collapse of the Congolese forces there, but also a very big United Nations peacekeeping force, which we understand has been ordered to withdraw to its bases. More than 10 UN peacekeepers have died. Several of the South Africans have been reported killed in fighting over the past several hours. But then there's the other element of the mercenaries who are fighting there.

So over the past couple of years, it's been reported that the Congolese government was increasingly relying on foreign security companies, including from Romania. This morning, we have a statement from the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs saying there are a large number of Romanians stuck in Goma whose families have appealed for consular support.

doesn't mention what they are. We understand that they are mercenaries, security contractors and so on. There are reports that they've been surrendering their weapons and seeking refuge with the United Nations. So at the moment, this looks like a really interesting

big victory for the Rwandans in M23. And just to add to the complicated picture, we've got reports this morning from the United Nations that Rwandan regular forces are firing on or exchanging fire with Congolese forces across the border and may have crossed it at certain points. A very fluid situation then. Thanks, Roland Oliphant, my co-host on Battlelines. That's all for today's episode. We'll be back again on Friday with another US-focused show. Speak to you then. Goodbye.

Battle Lines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battle Lines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave us a review as it helps others find the show. To stay on top of all of our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest. You can also get in touch directly by emailing battlelines at telegraph.co.uk or contact us on X. You can find our handles in the show notes.

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