Category World News

The DRC government has said the M23 armed group’s unfulfilled pledge to withdraw from the key town of Uvira is a “distraction”, as the group said its conditions for a pullout were yet to be met.

Patrick Muyaya, a spokesperson for the Democratic Republic of Congo’s government, said Wednesday that the group’s statement it would withdraw from the town in South Kivu province, in line with a request from US mediators, was a “non-event, a diversion, a distraction”.

“The son, M23, offers itself in sacrifice before the US mediator to protect the father, Rwanda”, Muyaya said, referring to Kigali’s support for the group.

“The intention is to distract the American mediation team, which is preparing to take measures against Rwanda”, Muyaya told Reuters.

Later on Wednesday, footage aired exclusively on Al Jazeera appeared to show dozens of fighters from the group and several vehicles on the move near the M23’s main base in Uvira.

Reporting from the town, Al Jazeera’s Alain Uaykani described the movement of the forces as a “withdrawal” and said the group was “voluntarily leaving”.

“These are the soldiers leaving the main headquarters, the main operational base of the town of Uvira. They are going now, leaving. We cannot say exactly where they are going, how many kilometres out from this town of Uvira”, he said.

It was not immediately clear if the group was withdrawing from the town.

The Rwanda-backed militia seized the strategic town last week, imperilling a tenuous US-brokered peace agreement between Kinshasa and Kigali signed amid fanfare just days earlier and raising fears of a widening conflict.

The seizure of the town led ​​US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to accuse Rwanda, which denies backing M23 rebels, of a “clear violation” of the deal, promising that Washington would “take action to ensure promises made to the president are kept”.

Earlier this week, the leader of the Alliance Fleuve Congo&nbsp, rebel coalition, which includes the M23 group, said their fighters would withdraw from the strategic town near the border with Burundi, in accordance with the request from US mediators.

Corneille Nangaa, leader of the coalition, described the withdrawal as a “unilateral trust-building measure in order to give the … peace process the maximum chance to succeed”.

But despite that pledge, M23 fighters remained visible in the town earlier on Wednesday, stationed near government offices and along major roads, saying there were conditions for any withdrawal.

M23 spokesperson Willy Ngoma had told Reuters that the group was “ready to leave, but our conditions have to be reviewed”.

The group said a neutral force must be deployed to maintain security in the town if the group were to pull out, to avoid a repeat of previous withdrawals that it says have led to renewed violence.

Jean Jacques Purusi, governor of South Kivu province where Uvira is located, told Reuters that the M23 fighters “do not want to leave”.

Markets reopen

Al Jazeera’s Uaykani reported earlier on Wednesday that a fragile sense of normality was returning to the town after days of fighting.

Markets were reopening, and traffic was returning to the streets, he said – although daily life remained overshadowed by the ongoing political instability.

Resident Feza Mariam said the priority for locals was an end to the fighting.

“We don’t know anything about the political process that they’re talking about”, she said.

“The only thing we need is peace. Anyone who is able to provide us with peace is welcome here”.

Fellow resident Eliza Mapendo said locals had suffered “a lot”, but that calm had been restored sufficiently for daily life to begin to resume.

“For now, we feel secure and we’re working freely in this market”, she said, adding that the sense of normality was fragile.

“They could attack without any reason and take your business away”.

Meanwhile, DRC’s army spokesperson, Sylvain Ekenge, told Reuters that fighting was continuing daily across the conflict-hit east, where M23 made a rapid advance this year.

As Washington launches airstrikes and declares alleged drug networks terrorist organizations, there are growing concerns in Latin America about the US military’s expansion in the Caribbean. Hassan Massoud of Al Jazeera reports from Bogota, Colombia, where tensions are rising due to the region’s largest US military display in decades.

Washington, DC – For the past two years, weekdays for Susanna have meant thumbing through picture books, organising cubby holes and leading classroom choruses of songs.

But her work as a pre-school teacher came to a screeching halt in October, when she found out her application to renew her work permit had been denied.

Susanna, who uses a pseudonym in this article for fear of reprisals, is one of the nearly 10 percent of teachers in the United States who are immigrants.

But while the US has increasingly looked abroad to fill teacher shortages, some foreign-born teachers say the deportation push under President Donald Trump has threatened their livelihoods — and risks traumatising their students.

Susanna, an asylum applicant who fled violence in Guatemala nearly a decade ago, said that losing her permit meant she had to stop working immediately.

She recalls breaking the news to her students, some of whom are only three years old. Many were too young to understand.

“In one week, I lost everything,” Susanna told Al Jazeera in Spanish. “When I told the kids goodbye, they asked me why, and I told them, ‘I can only tell you goodbye.’ There were kids that hugged me, and it hurt my heart a lot.”

Looking abroad for teachers

Estimates vary as to how many foreign-born teachers currently work in the US. But one 2019 report from George Mason University found that there were 857,200 immigrants among the country’s 8.1 million teachers, in roles ranging from pre-school to university.

For the 2023-2024 school year alone, the US government brought 6,716 full-time teachers to the country on temporary exchange visas to fill openings in pre-kindergarten, primary and secondary school education.

Many hailed from the Philippines, as well as countries like Jamaica, Spain and Colombia.

The uncertainty for immigrants under Trump’s second term, however, has proven disruptive to schools that rely heavily on foreign-born teachers.

That is the case for the pre-school where Susanna worked, CommuniKids, which offers language immersion programmes in Washington, DC.

Cofounder and president Raul Echevarría estimates that immigrants — both citizens and non-citizens working with legal authorisation — comprise about 90 percent of CommuniKids’s staff.

But Echevarría told Al Jazeera that the push to rescind legal pathways to immigration has jeopardised the employment of several faculty members.

Five other teachers at the school have seen their ability to work affected by changes to the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) programme.

All five, Echevarría explained, were originally from Venezuela. But in October, the Trump administration ended TPS status for more than 350,000 Venezuelan citizens, including the teachers at CommuniKids.

Their authorisation to work legally in the US will expire on October 2, 2026, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services website.

“These teachers lost their ability to make a living,” Echevarria said, noting that his school requires educators with expertise in languages like Spanish, French and Mandarin.

‘Strong bonds’

For the schools themselves, the losses can be devastating. Every state in the US has reported teacher shortages to the federal government.

But advocates say the high stress and low pay of education make teachers difficult to recruit and keep.

That leads some states to look abroad for education workers. In North Carolina, for example, 1,063 foreign nationals worked full-time as grade-school teachers on temporary J-1 visas during the 2023-2024 school year.

The top destinations for such recruits were all southern states: North Carolina was followed by Florida with 996 teachers on J-1 visas, and Texas with 761.

But Echevarria said some of the biggest impacts of the deportation drive are felt by the students themselves.

“Our students develop strong bonds with their teachers, and all of a sudden, overnight, they lost their teachers,” said Echevarría.

“Their number one superpower”, he added, “is their ability to empathise and to create strong, effective bonds with people from any background”.

But when those bonds are broken, there can be mental health consequences and setbacks for educational achievement, particularly among younger children.

A 2024 study published by the American Educational Research Association found that, when teachers leave midyear, children’s language development takes a measurable hit.

In other words, the loss of a familiar teacher — someone who knows their routines, strengths and fears — can quietly stall a child’s progress. The consequences extend to a child’s sense of self and stability.

Mental health consequences

For parents like Michelle Howell, whose child attends CommuniKids, the loss of teachers has also made the classroom environment feel fragile.

“The teachers there aren’t just teachers for these young kids,” Howell said of CommuniKids. “They’re like extended family.

“They hug them, they hold them, they do the things a parent would do. When those people disappear, it’s not just hard for the kids. It’s hard for everyone.”

Howell, who is Chinese American, said the sudden disappearances reminded her of her own family’s history.

“I used to read about things like this happening in China, the place my family left to find safety,” she said. “It’s very disturbing to know that what we ran from back then is our reality now. People disappear.”

School psychologist Maria C, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her work in the Texas public school system, has noticed the children she works with struggling with instability caused by the deportation push.

The disappearance of a loved one or mentor — say, a favourite teacher — could flood a child’s body with cortisol, the hormone meant to protect them in moments of danger, she explained.

But when that stress becomes chronic, the same hormone starts to hurt more than it helps. It interferes with memory, attention and emotional regulation.

“For some, it looks like anxiety. For others, it’s depression or sudden outbursts,” Maria said. “They’re in fight-or-flight mode all day.”

She added that selective mutism, an anxiety disorder, is on the rise among the children she sees, who range in age from five to 12.

“It used to be rare, maybe one case per school,” she said. “Now I see it constantly. It’s a quiet symptom of fear.”

Preparing for the worst

Back at CommuniKids, Echevarría explained that he and other staff members have put together contingency plans, just in case immigration enforcement arrives at the pre-school.

The aim, he said, is to make both employees and students feel safer coming to class.

“We put those steps in writing because we wanted our staff to know they’re not alone,” he said. “We have attorneys on call. We’re partners with local police. But above all, our job is to protect our children.”

But as an added precaution, teachers are advised to carry their passports or work permits with them.

Even Echevarría, a US citizen born in Virginia, said he carries his passport wherever he goes. The fear of deportation has a way of lingering.

Buildings across Gaza are being destroyed by Israeli bombardment due to heavy rain and strong winds. Since the start of December, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been sheltered in unsafe structures or in temporary tents.