33 Dead, Ebola Patients Scattered as Armed Groups Rule

Thirty-three bodies. That's the count so far from Cantine-Aloya, a village in North Kivu province in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where militants from the Allied Democratic Forces, a group Islamic State recognises as an affiliate, raided at about 11pm on Thursday, three days ago. Most of the dead bore gunshot wounds, according to Tchetche Aliamini, a local civil society leader. Others had been burnt or hacked with machetes.

The attackers set fire to a health post and to several houses. Then the sick ran.

Who Gets Crushed

Patients from a nearby hospital fled into the night, including one confirmed Ebola patient and five suspected cases, three of them high-risk contacts, according to the head doctor there, Christian Kakule Vulembera. People already fighting a deadly virus were forced to choose between a burning building and an unknown road. Nobody asked them. Nobody ever does.

The village sits about 50km west of Beni, in a province that now accounts for half of all new infections in the country's outbreak. Authorities have recorded more than 10,000 cases and 5,000 deaths across the DRC. Half of everyone infected has died. North Kivu is a hotspot, and the people living in it are caught between a virus and men with guns.

Heavy rain hampered army operations and investigations, said Col Charles Omeonga, the Beni territorial administrator, so a final death toll could not yet be established. The number 33 is a floor, not a ceiling. Somewhere in the mud and the wet, there may be more of the dead nobody has reached.

What They're Calling Security

Omeonga's account of events came from the administrative post of a territory held together by army operations. Those operations, hampered by rain, were not in place at the village when 11pm came on Thursday. The attackers walked in, set fire to the health post and the houses, and killed civilians. The officials who spoke to reporters could tell us what the militants burned and how the rain slowed the investigation. They did not say who was standing guard over the village before the attack.

The structure is familiar. Armed groups, whether they fly an Islamic State affiliation or answer to a uniformed chain of command, claim the right to decide who lives in a place like Cantine-Aloya. Officials arrive afterward to count the bodies. The people in between, the ones who own no weapons and hold no rank, absorb the cost of every decision made far above them.

Where the Sick Went

Here is what the record shows about the patients: they fled. Five suspected cases and one confirmed case left a hospital that had been treating them. Three of the five were high-risk contacts, meaning people who may have been exposed and now moved through the countryside beyond the reach of any monitoring.

The base facts don't tell us where they went or who found them. They don't tell us whether neighbours took them in, hid them or turned them away. What they do tell us is that a health system built around a clinic and a hospital collapsed in a single night when armed men set a fire. The care that survives in places like this tends to be what people do for each other, carried in the dark, without a mandate or a budget line.

Aliamini, the civil society leader who counted the dead, is part of that web: a local voice naming bodies when the official count wasn't yet possible. The officials spoke of rain and uncertainty. The people on the ground counted corpses, one by one.

Thirty-three people are dead. Six sick people are somewhere out in the open. The outbreak hasn't paused to wait for anyone to restore order.