Reality Check

So the refugees moved again, this time to Donbosco school, where dilapidated buildings cluster in the lava flow of Mount Nyiragongo, an active volcano with a permanently smoking crater.

Some had fled two camps in the last five days, making them not double but triple-displaced at the hands of M23. In all, the rebel offensive emptied Kanyuruchinya camp of every one of its 50,000 inhabitants.

Tabu Taliana, 38, left on Sunday when the fighting broke out. “There were gunshots and explosions and the national army soldiers were running away. We had to go,” she remembered.

Mrs Taliana gathered her four sons and two daughters and ran to the school several miles away. But this panic-stricken journey was too much for her baby son, Josue, who was only eight months old and stricken by fever. “He died here when we arrived,” said Mrs Taliana simply.

When she left her village in June - her first displacement - her uncle, Kasore, was severely maimed by a mortar bomb that shattered both of his legs. “I have not seen him since then,” she said.

Mrs Taliana and her children arrived in their latest place of refuge with nothing except the clothes they wore. They now sleep in the open air, on a concrete verge outside a school building.

Other fugitives have flooded every classroom and a large assembly hall, leaving thousands to sleep outside on razor sharp volcanic rock, the legacy of Mount Nyiragongo’s last eruption in 2002. Smoke rises from cooking pots and, everywhere, ragged and barefoot children run, play or forage for food and firewood.

Solange Uwase, 26, has now been displaced three times. She fled her village in July after four M23 rebels raped her neighbour. She then spent four months in Kanyuruchinya camp before leaving on Sunday when M23 pressed home their offensive.

Read more at The Telegraph