![A soldier looks on as a woman pans for gold near an open pit at a mine in Central African Republic [File: Siegfried Modola/Reuters]](https://www.military.africa/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Democratic-Republic-of-Congo-mining-armed-militia.webp)
On February 18, 2026, a ceasefire in the Democratic Republic of Congo was supposed to begin. It did not. M23 had publicly rejected the Angolan-proposed truce days before it was meant to take effect, and the FARDC and M23 traded fire within 24 hours of the announced start.
On December 4, 2025, Donald Trump brokered what he called a landmark minerals-for-security agreement between the DRC and Rwanda. Both governments, Presidents Tshisekedi and Kagame, signed the Washington Accords at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. The deal carried over earlier provisions on Rwandan troop withdrawal and the neutralization of the FDLR. The timelines passed. Rwanda did not withdraw. The FDLR was not dismantled. The war continued. Yet Washington still presents the agreement as a diplomatic success.
What makes this particularly striking is that the US does not need the peace to succeed to benefit from the deal. Even as eastern DRC burns, a US State Department joint steering committee held its inaugural meeting on February 5, 2026, to begin operationalizing American access to the DRC’s mineral wealth: coltan, cobalt, lithium, gold, the raw materials that power smartphones, electric vehicles, and defence electronics. Washington has separated economics from security and structured the arrangement to secure access to critical minerals even if the guns do not fall silent.
Violence on the continent has become a way of managing extraction rather than a by-product of it. The wars are not diplomatic failures; they are a feature of how twenty-first-century competition over African resources now works. The DRC–Rwanda–US triangle is one example of a wider pattern: across Africa’s mineral belts, peace is negotiable, but access to resources is non‑negotiable. From cobalt in Congo to gold and uranium in the Sahel, armed groups, foreign powers, and local elites orbit the same deposits.
From Pit to Missile: The Mineral‑to‑Munition Chain
The twentieth-century defence systems ran on oil and steel; the twenty-first century depends heavily on lithium, cobalt, coltan, graphite, and rare earths, many of which are mined in Africa. The line drawn between these raw minerals extracted from Africa and the finished products in non-African nations is not that straight. The supply chain is long but in principle, traceable; what remains absent is the institutional infrastructure to trace it.
Take China as an example: it controls 60-80% of global refining of cobalt, lithium, graphite, refined magnets, and rare earths, even though much of the underlying ore are extracted elsewhere. In cobalt alone, more than 60 per cent of the world’s mined supply comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, yet close to 80 per cent of global cobalt refining occurs in China. On the African side of that equation, countries like Mozambique, Madagascar and Tanzania together hold about 21 per cent of global natural graphite reserves, while the continent also hosts significant lithium deposits in Zimbabwe, Namibia and Mali, but most of the higher‑value processing still takes place outside Africa.
Many of the deposits discussed so far sit inside active conflict zones, where the same conditions that make extraction and tracing difficult also make armed groups viable economic actors.
Violence on the continent has become a way of managing extraction rather than a by-product of it. The wars are not diplomatic failures; they are a feature of how twenty-first-century competition over African resources now works.
Sahel Gold Belts and Jihadist Balance Sheets
In the Sahel, gold belts and recruitment belts overlap; armed groups and mining operations compete for the same labour pool but offer radically different social contracts.
JNIM is an active, al-Qaeda-affiliated Salafi-jihadist alliance operating in the Sahel region of West Africa, with approximately 6,000 fighters as of 2025, which funds itself through a combination of artisanal gold mining taxation, livestock theft and coerced zakat, kidnapping ransoms, road tolls, and investment in local businesses via hawala networks, data also shows it doubled its attack tempo in 2025 compared to 2024 and escalated “economic warfare” as a deliberate strategy. In September 2025, JNIM declared a blockade on the Malian towns of Kayes and Nioro, banning fuel imports from Senegal, Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, and Mauritania.
JNIM also intensified attacks on foreign-run mining and industrial facilities in Kayes, targeting economic infrastructure as part of a coordinated campaign to sever state supply lines. Armed groups like them are beginning to claim territory and compete with employers in regions where formal employment is scarce. In southern Burkina Faso, JNIM opened restricted forest land for gold mining, winning local support from miners frustrated by bureaucratic licensing delays. Researchers note that JNIM’s integration into local economies is critical to its expansion, forging social ties by offering civilians income while denying the state control over resources.
The “compensation” offered by these terrorist groups is not only cash: it includes access to mining sites, protection, rudimentary governance (dispute resolution, sharia courts), and social belonging. Young men in the Sahel choose among digging at an informal gold site under the protection of an armed group, joining the group directly, enlisting in state-backed militias (such as Burkina Faso’s Volunteers for the Defence of the Homeland), or migrating. The formal economy is largely absent as a competitor.
What makes JNIM activities particularly dangerous to the countries they operate in is that the gold does not stay in the Sahel. JNIM’s protection rackets and road tolls sit on top of a smuggling chain that moves artisanal gold from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger into coastal states and then into global bullion hubs, particularly the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Switzerland.
SwissAid’s 2024 study found that the UAE absorbed roughly 47 per cent of undeclared African gold between 2012 and 2022, the single largest destination, importing hundreds of tonnes of African gold in recent years that it then refined and re‑exported into formal supply chains. By the time it appears as a London Good Delivery bar or on the balance sheet of a trading house, its origin in a JNIM‑taxed pit is effectively erased, but the margin, it generated has already been converted into cash, weapons and logistics for the insurgency.
The same informal pits in southern Burkina Faso that offer young men a day’s wage are feeding bullion flows through Dubai that help underwrite the missiles, drones and electronics discussed elsewhere in this magazine.
Rubaya’s Tantalum and the Washington Corridor
M23, a Tutsi‑led rebel movement that emerged from a mutiny of former Congolese army officers and has since become eastern Congo’s most lethal insurgent actor, expanding with Rwandan support to roughly 27,000 fighters by late 2025, a fivefold increase in twelve months (International Crisis Group), advancing with significant Rwandan support to capture key territories and mining zones, killing many in their wake. Since April 2024, M23 has held the Rubaya coltan sites in North Kivu; Rubaya alone accounts for more than 15 per cent of the world’s tantalum supply. Rubaya coltan yields tantalum, a mineral valued for its extreme heat resistance. It is used in core components of the aerospace and defence industry, medical & chemical applications, electronics, and much more.
On 24 January 2026, a landslide at the Rubaya mine killed at least 200 people, most of them artisanal miners. Ores are manually mined by local diggers working for very low pay. According to UN reports, it is then loaded onto bikes, SUVs, pickups, and other vehicles capable of hauling between 2 and 20 tons. Coltan trucks can now pass through Goma on paved roads, since M23 has taken control of the border city and driven Congolese forces out. This has shortened transport times to the Rwandan border.
The United Nations estimates that M23 earns at least $800,000 per month in taxes from Rubaya coltan production and trade, levying $7 per kilogram on coltan and $4 per kilogram on tin, on roughly 120 tonnes of coltan monthly. The mined ore is usually carried by trucks out of Rwanda and other neighbouring countries before being shipped to Asia for processing, largely cutting the Congolese government and local communities out of the gains from this mineral. Experts warn that illegal mining profits are used to fund conflict. These trades do not generate much wealth for locals, and child labour is very common. At least 12 children were seen working in the Rubaya Mine: Boys entered the shafts and hauled out the ore, then carried it to basins where the girls, alongside the adults, washed and dried the coltan.
The Congolese government pitches Rubaya as a potentially “fully traceable, conflict‑free” tantalum supply to the world. Under a US‑DRC framework, Rubaya could become a model of traceable supply, but in reality, as of now, M23 still controls the mine, imposes rebel taxation, and engages in untraceable smuggling into Rwanda. What this basically means is that a rebel‑run revenue office in one of the world’s richest tantalum deposits, each kilogram of ore leaving Rubaya has already paid M23 before it ever encounters an audit, by the time it becomes a capacitor in a missile guidance system, almost all traces it came from Rubaya are lost.
The Roles of Foreign Powers in the Extraction
Washington and Brussels present themselves as building “responsible” alternatives, but their projects sit awkwardly atop the same extraction zones. The US‑led Minerals Security Partnership and the 753-million-dollar Lobito Corridor package are designed to bring copper, cobalt, and other critical minerals out of Angola, the DRC, and Zambia via an Atlantic rail route that bypasses Chinese‑controlled ports and processors. The EU’s Critical Raw Materials agenda, with roughly 60 “strategic” projects on its books, wraps similar ambitions in ESG, due diligence and traceability requirements, promising cleaner supply chains without directly confronting the war economies around many mine sites.
The dissonance is sharpest in eastern Congo: even after the security provisions of Washington’s minerals‑for‑security deal with Kigali and Kinshasa effectively collapsed, a US–DRC steering committee still moved ahead to operationalise American access to tantalum, cobalt and lithium, including deposits around Rubaya that are currently taxed by M23. In practice, the Western model tries to civilise the corridor through standards and concessional finance, but it does not stop convoys from burning or rebels from levying their own taxes upstream.
Moscow’s footprint in the extraction zone runs on a security‑for‑resources model: Africa Corps inherits Wagner’s role as regime bodyguard in Mali and the Central African Republic, and is compensated not just with cash but also with privileged access to gold and uranium. Mali’s junta has paid roughly $10 million a month for Russian security services since late 2021 (US State Department), although The Sentry’s 2025 investigation found Wagner’s bid for Malian mining concessions was largely rebuffed by Bamako. Russia’s Yadran Group holds a 38 per cent minority stake in a new Bamako refinery (Mali retains 62 per cent), targeting up to 200 tonnes of gold a year.
China’s involvement is less about soldiers at mine gates and more about owning the chokepoints where African ore becomes something the defence industry can actually use. It controls the majority of global refining capacity for cobalt, lithium, graphite and rare earths, so cobalt dug in Katanga or lithium blasted out of Malian rock typically only becomes a battery‑grade chemical once it passes through a Chinese plant. Chinese firms hold key stakes in the DRC’s flagship cobalt mines, including Kisanfu and Tenke Fungurume, and Ganfeng’s majority stake in the Goulamina lithium project in Mali ties West African spodumene directly into Chinese cathode and battery supply chains.
Belt and Road‑era railways, roads and power lines extend this control from the refinery back into the corridor, making mines in Congo, Zambia and Mali increasingly dependent on Chinese‑financed infrastructure to move ore to port. At the same time, Beijing’s investment in sodium‑ion battery chemistry is a hedge against dependence on cobalt and lithium; if that technology scales, African producers could find themselves with stranded or devalued assets even as they continue to deal with the security fallout of the extraction boom. In simple terms, Russia securitises the pit, China securitises the corridor and the refinery.
Conclusion
The pattern across these three theatres is consistent enough to be called a system. JNIM taxes the pit and lets the gold flow to Dubai. M23 taxes the pit and allows coltan to flow through Rwanda. In both cases, the ore eventually enters formal supply chains with little to no trace of its origin. Foreign powers have learned to work around this rather than against it. Russia secures the pit where the host government allows it; in Mali, where the junta did not, it has paid a heavy price for limited returns. China secures the refinery and the corridor. Washington has now added a third function: the legal designation that converts a rebel‑taxed deposit into an investable strategic asset.
For African states, the structural position is unenviable. Kinshasa lists Rubaya on a US strategic asset reserve while M23 collects rent on the same ore. Bamako pays for Russian security while JNIM blockades its capital. None of them currently control the chokepoints where African ore becomes something the global economy can actually use. Those chokepoints: the refineries, the traceability standards, the offtake contracts, sit elsewhere.
This is the negative space any serious response would have to address. Continental refining capacity that does not depend on Chinese, Emirati, or Swiss processing. Traceability architectures designed and enforced by African institutions rather than imported from Brussels. Public revenue transparency on every mineral‑for‑security agreement, including those signed in Washington. None of this is a quick win, and none of it stops a convoy burning next month. The alternative is what the current decade has already produced: African terrain as the site, African labour as the cost, African states as the legal cover, and the value captured almost entirely offshore.