Goma, Congo (AP) Panic rushed into eastern Congo’s second-largest city on Saturday, with hundreds of citizens and troops fleeing to avoid the oncoming march of Rwanda-backed rebels. The morning after M23 militants stormed the outskirts of Bukavu, a metropolis of around 1.3 million people located 63 miles (101 kilometers) south of rebel-held Goma, several streets were inundated with civilians seeking to flee and looters filling flour sacks with whatever they could find. Later in the day, a cloud of stillness fell over residents and business owners as they braced for what would come next.

On Saturday, M23 did not appear to have taken decisive control of Bukavu, unlike the day before when they took control of an airport outside the city. Gunfights stopped after Congolese troops exited the city and drove south, according to Bukavu resident Alexis Bisimwa. “We’re no longer waiting for the crackling of bullets as we were during the day,” he told The Associated Press by phone.

Reports and social media videos showed the region’s factories pillaged and prisons emptied while electricity remained on and communication lines open in most places. “It’s a disgrace. Some civilians have fallen prey to errant gunshots. Even some soldiers still remaining in the city are engaging en masse in these acts of looting,” a 25-year-old resident of a neighborhood being looted told the AP. The Congo River Alliance, a rebel coalition that includes M23, blamed the violence in Bukavu on Congolese military and their supporters from local militias and neighboring Burundi.

“We call on the population to remain in control of their city and not give in to panic,” Lawrence Kanyuka, the alliance’s spokesperson, said in a statement on Saturday. Pierre Bahizi, the rebels’ new self-proclaimed governor of Bukavu, implored the city’s residents to remain calm and organize among themselves to bring a return of order. “We must not leave power in the street,” he said Saturday.

M23, a rebel group backed by about 4,000 troops from neighboring Rwanda, is the most prominent of more than 100 vying for control of Congo’s mineral-rich east. Its southward expansion encompasses more territory than rebels had previously seized and poses an unprecedented challenge to the central government in Kinshasa. Taking Bukavu could risk deeper scrutiny from an international community whose attentions have been divided amid several global conflicts. French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday called for an immediate ceasefire, an M23 withdrawal and a safe return of Congolese authorities to Bukavu.

The rebellion underway has killed nearly 3,000 people in eastern Congo and stranded hundreds of thousands of displaced. At least 350,000 internally displaced people are without shelter, the U.N. and Congolese authorities have said.

The conflict was among the top agenda items at the African Union summit in Ethiopia on Saturday, where U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned it risked spiraling into a regional conflagration. “Regional escalation must be avoided at all costs,” Guterres told the African Union summit. “The sovereignty and territorial integrity of (Congo) must be respected.” Yet African leaders and the international community have been reluctant to take decisive action against M23 or Rwanda. Though Guterres said that the solution to the conflict lay in Africa, African leaders disagree on how to resolve the conflict in a way that satisfies the warring parties.

Despite widespread demands for a cease-fire, the uprising has rekindled historical tensions in the Great Lakes region. Burundi and Southern African Development Community troops have been dispatched to support Congolese forces. Ugandan military are fighting other rebel groups in various areas of eastern Congo, where civilians have been targeted in recent months. Ugandan military are seeking Islamist Allied Democratic Forces fighters in Ituri, hundreds of kilometers north of where M23 is marching.

Ugandan military are seeking Islamist Allied Democratic Forces fighters in Ituri, hundreds of kilometers north of where M23 is marching. On Saturday, the violence threatened to spiral out of control. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, Uganda’s senior military commander, informed the armed forces in the province’s capital that they had 24 hours to surrender and that the Ugandan Army would shortly take over. “If they don’t, we’ll consider them enemies and attack them,” Kainerugaba wrote in a post on X, without naming the other forces.

FILE PHOTO: People ride past Congolese people, displaced by recent clashes between the M23 rebels and the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (FARDC), as they prepare to leave the camp after being instructed by the M23 rebels to vacate the camps on the outskirts of Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo February 12, 2025. REUTERS/Stringer/File Photo