When Christine Lain, the director of Upemba National Park, heard gunfire coming from the outer boundary of the park’s headquarters complex a little before 6 in the morning of March 3, her first thought was that it was a part of a drill. Upemba, a sprawling 11,730-square-kilometer (4,530-square-mile) network of grasslands and forests in the southeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, isn’t a stranger to security threats. Its rangers have battled local militias, known as Mai-Mai, for years, and in January the park’s security team had run combat drills at its headquarters as part of contingency planning for an attack. Lain, who was in the facility’s command center with a handful of staff preparing to send a group of rangers out on patrol, wondered if another exercise was happening. It didn’t take long for her to realize that something very different was underway. “We immediately realized that the intensity of the firing was so high that it was certainly not a drill,” she told Mongabay in a phone interview from Lubumbashi, capital of Haut-Katanga, one of three provinces straddled by Upemba. The shots Lain heard marked the beginning of a 12-hour ordeal that would eventually leave three rangers and four civilian park staff dead, and its headquarters ransacked. Upemba National Park’s headquarters before the attack. Image by Justin Sullivan via Forgotten Parks. Upemba, which is managed by the nonprofit organization Forgotten Parks in conjunction with the DRC’s agency for conservation and park management, the ICCN, has lost staff to violence before.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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