Endangered gorillas in Congo

25 Sep 2007
Al Jazeera news


(8 min)

Al Jazeera's Yvonne Ndege reports from Virunga National Park near the Democratic Republic of Congo's border with Rwanda on the endangered mountain gorillas who live in a vast expanse of forest there. There are only 720 of them left on earth. But 9 of them have been killed since the beginning of 2007.

The national park is the kind of habitat that gorillas need to survive.

1. But it's also the theatre of an intense battle between government troops and rebels fighting alongside the renegade general Laurent Nkunda. It's not just the recent fighting that's wreaking havoc on the gorilla population.
2. Poachers set snares,
3. illegal "invaders" and
4. people going into the park to cut down the trees to make charcoal.