In the mineral-rich hills of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Rubaya mining area has long been synonymous with both extraordinary wealth and extraordinary human suffering. Home to some of the world's most significant deposits of coltan — a mineral from which tantalum is refined and used in capacitors for smartphones, laptops, and other electronics — the Rubaya mines have attracted tens of thousands of artisanal miners working in conditions that safety experts have long described as dangerously inadequate. The events of January and March 2026 transformed that chronic danger into catastrophe.
On January 28, 2026, heavy rains triggered a severe landslide at the Luwowo mining site within the Rubaya complex in North Kivu province. Two separate slides were reported: one during the afternoon of January 28 and a second on the morning of January 29. The force and volume of the mud and debris overwhelmed multiple individual mine shafts simultaneously, burying an unknown number of miners in an instant. Initial estimates placed the death toll at around 200 people, but rescuers quickly realized the true scale of the disaster was far worse.
Recovery efforts were complicated from the start by the sheer volume of mud, the instability of surrounding terrain, and the chaotic nature of artisanal mining sites where detailed records of who entered a shaft on any given day are rarely kept. Around 20 injured miners were transported to hospitals in Rubaya town and in the regional center of Goma. As the days passed and bodies were recovered, the numbers climbed relentlessly. By February 2, 2026, authorities confirmed more than 400 deaths in the incident — making it one of the deadliest mining disasters in the country's history.
The victims were not only miners. Because artisanal mining sites in the DRC function as informal economic hubs, small traders, food vendors, women, children, and residents of surrounding villages were also present when the landslide struck. Several nearby settlements were partially or entirely destroyed. The youngest and most vulnerable bore a heavy share of the toll.
The structural causes of the disaster were not mysterious. Mine tunnels at Rubaya are typically dug by hand with minimal equipment and no meaningful engineering oversight. Shafts are left without reinforcement and run without maintenance for years. Mining pits sometimes hold up to 500 workers simultaneously, creating enormous underground voids that are structurally vulnerable to any ground movement. Decades of intensive extraction had left the hillsides riddled with interconnected passages, and heavy seasonal rains provided the destabilizing force the already compromised terrain could not absorb.
The political dimension of the catastrophe deepened its tragedy. Since May 2024, the Rubaya mines have been under the control of the M23 rebel group, which has imposed taxes on coltan production amounting to more than $800,000 per month. M23's dominance over the mines has allowed it to sidestep national safety regulations entirely. The Rubaya area accounts for more than 15 percent of the world's tantalum supply, giving whoever controls it significant economic leverage and equally significant motivation to keep production moving at all costs.
In the aftermath of the January disaster, the M23-appointed governor of North Kivu province, Erasto Bahati Musanga, announced a halt to artisanal mining at the site. Some residents living near the mines were ordered to relocate. Yet the mines were reopened by February 2, even as an unknown number of bodies remained unrecovered beneath the mud. The DRC government issued a statement blaming M23 for operating the mines illegally and without safety standards; M23 accused the government of politicizing a tragedy.
The situation did not improve. On March 4, 2026, a second landslide struck the same site, collapsing another mine shaft at Rubaya. The DRC government stated that more than 200 people were killed in the second disaster, including approximately 70 children. Among the dead were miners, food vendors, and other small-scale traders who had returned to work alongside the pits that had already taken so many lives. Others were left injured, and still more were reported missing.
The Congolese mines ministry attributed the second collapse to M23's continued tolerance of illegal and unsafe mining operations. M23 did not issue an official response, but a source speaking to the BBC from Rubaya offered a sharply different account, claiming that only six people had died and attributing the collapse to attacks by Congolese government forces rather than structural failure. Al Jazeera's reporting, however, pointed once more to heavy rainfall as the proximate cause, consistent with the conditions that had preceded the January disaster.
The two collapses together killed at least 600 people across barely six weeks, in a region where the international community has long known about the dangerous intersection of conflict minerals, rebel governance, and absent regulatory oversight. The tantalum extracted from these hillsides ends up in the devices carried by billions of people worldwide, and the human cost of that extraction has rarely been rendered so starkly as it was in the mud and wreckage of Rubaya in early 2026.
