Who Is Buying The Gold That Funds Congo’s Deadliest Insurgency?

A decade of Ugandan troops and a round of US sanctions have not starved the Allied Democratic Forces. According to a new report, it is because the group has become a mining operation.

An Islamic State-aligned insurgency in eastern Congo generates most of its revenue from gold production and smuggling, financing its own operations, a report said on Tuesday.

The Sentry, the US-based investigative organisation that tracks conflict and illicit financial networks, found the Allied Democratic Forces — accused of killing thousands of civilians and security personnel over the last decade — earns between $1 million and $1.6 million a year from gold mining sites in one area of North Kivu province alone.

The gold moves through trading hubs in eastern Congo to refiners and export networks in neighbouring Uganda. That is a central irony: Uganda has deployed thousands of troops into Congo to help local forces fight the ADF, yet the group has proved resilient by embedding itself in the very economic networks the borderlands run on.

The financial independence is recent and consequential. Gold revenue has let the ADF rely less on support from Islamic State since late 2024, when US sanctions targeted key facilitators in its networks.

The group still earns from cocoa production, extortion and kidnapping. “The ADF has adapted to military pressure and sanctions by finding new ways to fund its operations, particularly through gold and other resource trafficking,” said Justyna Gudzowska, executive director of The Sentry. “That means going after the financiers, gold traders, and facilitators.”

The report describes how the arrangement works on the ground. A representative of a Congolese mining cooperative, speaking anonymously for security reasons, said the ADF moved into the area in mid-2024 and established bases near mining sites, abducting miners and prospectors to extract, transport and sell gold on its behalf.

Some residents cooperated for payment — a system sustained by coercion and economic incentive at once.

Historically, the ADF was founded as an Islamist group in Uganda in the 1990s, shifted most operations into eastern Congo by 2000, and pledged allegiance to Islamic State in 2019. It has since carried out bomb attacks in Uganda and drawn fighters from across the region. Joint Congolese-Ugandan operations from late 2021 secured major cities and trade routes but fragmented rather than defeated the group, pushing it into remote mining areas of North Kivu, Ituri and Tshopo provinces.

Spokespersons for Uganda’s army and both governments did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The ADF’s persistence is also a question of attention: most international focus in eastern Congo remains on the Rwanda-backed AFC/M23 rebellion, now known as FRN, which seized large swathes of territory last year.