The First Congo War was fairly straightforward. In the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide, the ousted Genocidaires fled across the border into western Zaire. There, they drew on support from local Hutus and continued their campaign of genocide against Tutsis in the region. As a result, the Rwandans began to support Tutsi militias in the region known as Banyamulenge. As the region fell into anarchy, Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda formed an alliance with the intention of securing their border. All three had suffered from the presence of rebel groups operating out of Zaire - be it due to active state sponsorship, complacency, or just a sheer inability to secure the region - giving plenty of reasons to invade to secure the region. The Tutsi militias would be joined by other anti-Mobutu rebel groups to form the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL), who the allied forces placed Laurent-Desire Kabila - a leftist rebel leader who'd been fighting since the Congo Crisis in the Eastern Congo - in charge of.

Things came to a head in 1996 when a rebel uprising in the Kivu region was followed by an invasion by allied forces and the securing of a buffer zone. The remoteness of the region combined with the decay of the Zairian state meant that the only resistance was performed by local militias and Hutu genocidaires. Unfortunately, the allied forces were hardly a beacon of progress, with the Rwandans committing atrocities across the region against Hutus and strategic mines being secured for use by the invading nations. Things stagnated for a short period once this buffer zone was secured, although atrocities remained rampant in the occupied zone and a flood of primarily Hutu refugees fled from the region.

In 1997, the allied forces shifted their focus to ousting Mobutu and establishing the AFDL with Kabila at its head as a puppet government in Kinshasa. They were joined by Angola, which for decades had been dealing with Mobutu's harboring and support of UNITA rebels irredentist aims on the oil-rich Cabinda enclave. An offensive was launched from the occupied eastern region with two pincers heading west to the capital (a northern and southern pincer) and one going south to secure Lumumbashi and its lucrative mining industries. With Mobutu's army collapsing after decades of decay and corruption, he turned to Serbian mercenaries fresh from fighting in Bosnia to prop up his state. Unfortunately for him, the mercenaries only spoke Serb and were poorly disciplined and motivated. Instead of holding off the AFDL forces and training his army, the Serbs instead got into fights with the Zairian army and fled from fights. Ultimately, they would leave the country soon after they arrived, as Mobutu failed to find the money to pay them.

Meanwhile, Sudan had become a belligerent on Mobutu's side. Animosity existed between Uganda and Sudan over their support for rebel groups in their respective countries, and the Ugandans overrunning Zaire secured for them what was once an untouchable base of operations for both regions. Sudanese-backed Ugandan rebels tried to flee into South Sudan, but were followed by an offensive by the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA), which quickly overran the border regions.

Back to Zaire, there's little to talk about in the First Congo War after the exit of the Serbian rebels beyond atrocities. Mobutu's state collapsed and he fled first to his palatial estate at his hometown on the northern border of Gbadolite before fleeing once more to Rabat in Morocco, where he died in September of 1997 of cancer. The AFDL and allied forces rapidly secured the country and entered Kinshasa without a fight, committing atrocities against Hutu (and many other unfortunate ethnic groups) refugees along the way. A new government was set up under the control of the AFDL with Kabila at its head, and the process of undoing the damage of three decades of Mobutu began.