The Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (), also known by the French acronym AFDL, was a coalition of armed movements and political organizations composed of Rwandan, Ugandan, Burundian, and Congolese dissidents, and various disaffected ethnic and political groups. Formed on 18 October 1996, the AFDL launched a military campaign that culminated in the overthrow of President Mobutu Sese Seko and the ascension of Laurent-Désiré Kabila to power in May 1997, which then marked the end of the First Congo War.
Members of the AFDL and their allied forces were responsible for widespread and systematic human rights violations, including extrajudicial executions, massacres of unarmed civilians and refugees, arbitrary detentions, "disappearances", and acts of torture and sexual violence. This transition prompted around two million Rwandan Hutu refugees, including former members of the Rwandan Armed Forces (Forces armées rwandaises; FAR) and Interahamwe militia, to flee into eastern Zaire, especially to the provinces of North and South Kivu. Their arrival brought armed elements into an already fragile region, which the Zairean government, under Mobutu Sese Seko, was ill-equipped to control either through aid or security enforcement. As instability deepened, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (Armée patriotique rwandaise; RPA), the RPF's military wing, began launching cross-border raids into Zaire, claiming their goal was to dismantle Hutu rebel factions embedded in the refugee camps. However, these incursions extended beyond legitimate military targets and frequently resulted in mass killings of unarmed civilians. In the aftermath, survivors were relocated to the Chimanga and Kashusha camps, while no counteroffensive emerged from the ex-FAR or Interahamwe elements present in the area. Reyntjens noted that the Banyamulenge, long based in the Itombwe Mountains of Uvira Territory, were integrated into the RPA, with Rwanda providing them with military instruction and equipment as early as mid-1996. The killings were widely seen by the Bembe as the beginning of a targeted campaign against them. Additional massacres followed, including one on 6 October 1996 in Kidoti, where more than fifty civilians were executed or killed by shrapnel after being forced to dig their own graves. The coalition united four distinct movements: the Party of the People's Revolution (Parti de la Révolution du Peuple, PRP) led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the National Council of Resistance for Democracy (Conseil National de Résistance pour la Démocratie, CNRD) under André Kisase Ngandu, the Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Zaire (Mouvement Révolutionnaire pour la Libération du Zaïre, MRLZ) led by Anselme Masasu Nindaga, and the Democratic Alliance of the People (Alliance Démocratique du Peuple, ADP) under Déogratias "Douglas" Bugera, who became the movement's first general secretary. Kabila, a former Marxist guerrilla leader who had been largely inactive for years and who, according to political historian Jean-Claude Willame, "had neither warriors, nor an organized march of followers, nor weapons, nor resources", unexpectedly re-emerged at the head of the new rebel alliance. At the time, the AFDL claimed Ngandu had merely been injured in a Mai-Mai ambush, a fabricated account that persisted until July 1997. On 16 May 1997, after seven months of rebellion and the failure of peace talks, Mobutu fled the country. The AFDL marched into Kinshasa a day later. Kabila declared himself president and renamed the country to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The AFDL then became the new national armed forces.