The Second Congo War, also known as the Great War of Africa or the Great African War and sometimes referred to as the African World War, began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in August 1998, little more than a year after the First Congo War, and involved some of the same issues. The war officially ended in July 2003, when the Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo took power. Although a peace agreement was signed in 2002, violence has continued in many regions of the country, especially in the east. Hostilities have continued since in the ongoing Lord's Resistance Army insurgency, and the Kivu and Ituri conflicts. Nine African countries and around twenty-five armed groups became involved in the war. By 2008, the war and its aftermath had caused 5.4 million deaths, principally through disease and malnutrition, making the Second Congo War the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II. Another 2 million were displaced from their homes or sought asylum in neighboring countries. Conflict minerals were a major source of funding for the war, and for subsequent fighting. Background Kabila's march to Kinshasa The First Congo War began in 1996 as Rwanda increasingly expressed concern that Hutu members of Rassemblement Démocratique pour le Rwanda (RDR) militias were carrying out cross-border raids from what was then Zaire, and planning an invasion of Rwanda. The militias, mostly Hutu, had entrenched themselves in refugee camps in eastern Zaire, where many had fled to escape the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The Tutsi-dominated RPF government of Rwanda, which had gained power in July 1994, protested this violation of Rwandan territorial integrity, and began to arm the ethnically Tutsi Banyamulenge of eastern Zaire. The Mobutu regime of Zaire vigorously denounced this intervention, but possessed neither the military capability to halt it nor the political capital to attract international assistance. With active support from Uganda, Rwanda and Angola, the Tutsi forces of Laurent-Désiré Kabila moved methodically down the Congo River, encountering only light resistance from the poorly trained, ill-disciplined forces of Mobutu's crumbling regime. The bulk of Kabila's fighters were Tutsis, and many were veterans of various conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Kabila himself had credibility as a long-time political opponent of Mobutu, and had been a follower of Patrice Lumumba (the first Prime Minister of the independent