Our correspondent Peter Strandberg has been shown what it is like behind the rebel lines in the Congo. He has had the chance to talk to rebel leaders, military commanders, captured prisoners and the local people in the towns captured by the RCD forces. Here is his fascinating report.

The headquarters of the rebel Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) is in Goma, a beautiful lakeside town on the shores of Lake Kivu surrounded by high green mountains. The political and military leadership is based here in this town whose population has grown to half a million over the last few years of turmoil.

There is no shortage of food as trade with neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda is intensive. At nights, crowds of soldiers and civilians and a surprising number of Russians mingle in Goma's restaurants and bars where the civil war seems far away.

The only sound that interrupts the dance music in the clubs is that of the thundering transport planes landing and taking off from the local airfield.

It is the Russians who are flying in arms and supplies in their huge Antonov aircraft. From here they supply the remote towns in the central Congo captured by rebel forces in the last three months. The CentraAfrican Airlines could be more aptly named Air Russia. Silent Russian pilots and crews are just offering their services, like all the other freebooters interested in making big money out of the Congo's tragic civil war.

The rebel leaders are grouped around their chairman Professor Ernest Wamba dia Wamba in a sort of informal "university club". Wamba who was born in the Matadi district in western Congo, has since 1965 lived in exile in Tanzania and the US first opposing Mobutu and now Laurent Kabila.

The pan-African nature of the civil war is revealed just outside Goma where there are some 1,300 prisoners of war who the rebels captured when they took Kindu, Kongola and other towns in northern Katanga.

I talked to some of the prisoners. There was the Angolan, Saidi Chinhama, who had escaped war in Angola a few years ago to live in Zaire. He was promised that he would be sent home. "Instead Kabila sent me to the war front at Kindu where I was captured," he says.

Mahomed Farjala, a tall Ugandan, had an even more curious story to tell. He had lived in Sudan for 18 years. "I was a soldier in Idi Amin's army and fled to Sudan when Amin was overthrown in 1979. One day Idi Amin's son Tabar and Laurent Kabila's brother came to Juba and asked all Ugandan refugees to follow them back to the Congo. We were around 5,000. They took us to Kindu, and gave us arms, but within a few weeks the rebels came and we had no time to escape."

There were also many Rwandan prisoners from the old Hutu army who were responsible for the massacres in Rwanda in 1994. Other Hutu rebels came from Burundi and there were several youths from Amin's Chakwa tribe in north western Uganda. "Kabila gave us lots of arms but no military training. That's why we were captured," one of them told me.

The road from Goma to Uvira, near the border to Burundi on Lake Tanganyika, is supposed to be completely safe, but further south lies danger. Small groups of soldiers from the Rwandan Armed Forces and the notorious Hutu Interahamwe militia, who fled the Congo in 1994, are still operating.

The Governor of Bukavu, Benjamin Hkundabantu, says that continuing massacres of civilians, particularly of Banyamulenges have been carried out by these groups. "They tried to capture Kalemie from the west and south," said the governor, "though they failed, the situation remains tense."

The rebels have transported thousands of refugees from Kalemie to a safe haven in Uvira, but Kabila's strengthened airforce with jet fighters and helicopters from Angola and Zimbabwe have attacked the refugee ships.

Kabila draws many of his recruits from his fellow Balubas in his home region of northern Katanga. They have military training in Zimbabwe and return to form the backbone of Kabila's army.

"But we will capture Katanga and if Angola and Zimbabwe stand in our way they will have to pay the price," said one supremely confident rebel officer. "Zimbabwe is ruled by a crazy old man and the Angolan army only controls the coast in the west, in spite of their famous airforce."

The other rebel soldiers I met in eastern Congo are well armed, trained and highly motivated and they come from all parts of the country, from Equateur in the north to Kinshasa in the west and even parts of Katanga. It is certainly far more than a Banyamulenge rebellion.

Katanga is the heart of the rebel offensive in the southeast. If the mineral rich province falls into rebel hands, this would probably mark the end for Kabila. "He is only interested in collecting money. As soon as he gets the money he wants, he will run," said a smiling rebel soldier. He should know because the same soldier helped liberate Kinshasa on behalf of Kabila in 1997.

The rebel forces took the strategic town of Kindu, on the Congo river, in October after a battle lasting seven days. When I arrived it was a deserted ghost town. The population had fled, fearing air raids from Kabila's airforce.

The air raids by bombers and helicopters from Angola and Zimbabwe continued during the three days of my visit and then stopped.

The few inhabitants who remained in Kindu did not show much enthusiasm for the new rebel army which claimed to have liberated the town.

The population which was ignored by Mobutu for 30 years was first "liberated" by the rebel army, then fighting for Kabila, in 1997. It came and went without changing anything. "Everybody talks about democracy but we have not yet seen any improvement", said one of the surviving women still living in the centre of town.

Kabila's army was almost entirely supplied by air. The rebels control the river as far as Kisangani, Bumba and Gemena to the north and down to Kasongo in the south.

It took the rebels seven days to capture Kindu. The biggest problem was to cross the Congo river under heavy fire. "We used rubber boats, an old ferry boat and anything else we could find," said Commander Rigobert, in charge of the local rebel forces.

The loss of Kindu was a heavy defeat for Kabila. He had sent thousands of troops to defend the town, among them some 5,000 Sudanese and Ugandans, and piles of arms and equipment.

The heaviest fighting took place around the airfield where the rebels shot down a Boeing 727 carrying several hundred government soldiers. The front line has moved over the last few weeks to the diamond fields around Mbuji Mayi and to the main road between Kabalo and Kamina. The rebels have captured Katako-Kombe, Lodja and several small towns on the muddy dirt road leading through the jungle west and south of Kindu.

Commander Rigobert says that the rebels now control nearly half of the Congo from Gemena in the northern Equateur province, where troops from Chad were crushed in a government counter offensive, to Mbuji Mayi in Kasai province and Manono in northern Katanga.

"We also have 3,000 troops remaining in western Congo, in the jungle between Matadi and Kinshasa, ready to act," said Commander Rigobert. There, the rebels say their top commander, James Kabarere with a force of his own, has crossed into northern Angola and has joined forces with UNITA guerillas east of Quimbele town near the Congo border. Battles between the RCD/UNITA and Angolan army have taken place around Maquela do Zombe.

James Kabarere was the strategist in the campaign against Mobutu and was acting chief of staff until Kabila sacked him. He led the attack against Kinshasa in August. That offensive was frustrated by the Angolans, but Kabarere remains in the west consolidating his forces.

He is up against Kabila's army formed mostly by Balubas from northern Katanga. They are backed by 6,000 troops from Zimbabwe, several thousand Angolans, around 2,000 Chadians and 1,000 Namibians as well as the Hutu militias. But Kabila's armies have to control a defence line from Mbandaka in the north to Kanaga, Mbuji-Mayi, Kamina and Lubumbashi in the south.

It is from Lubumbashi that a counter offensive is being prepared against the rebel bases in eastern Congo. But the Zimbabwe troops are not happy. They have been taking heavy losses and in October, 16 troops were taken prisoner at Kabalo when their plane landed by mistake at the rebel-held airport. Hundreds of military police were sent out to prevent trouble in their ranks. One Zimbabwean prisoner told me: "We do not know why we are here fighting in the Congo, Mugabe should withdraw us and let the Congolese sort out their own problems."

While Kabila's airforce with its MIG fighters and M1-24 and M1-25 helicopters from Angola gives him total superiority in the air, the rebel force has so far used troops much better on the ground.

Kabila has lost much international sympathy by mismanaging his business deals. Jacques Depelchin, one of the RCD's leading figures and a former academic says: "International companies do not want to have anything to do with him after he sold the same mining concessions to several different companies without telling them. We must start all over again and show that we are serious people."

Depelchin said that some major mining companies were prepared to offer Kabila $200m to leave the country but this was scotched by the RCD. "He must go but we do not think that the companies should pay him to do it," said Depelchin. "While Mobutu made 10% on all deals with foreign companies, Kabila makes 30%."

Anyway the rebels already control large parts of the Congo's immense mineral wealth such as the rich Okimo goldmines in the northeast near Bunia. If they capture Mbuji Mayi, they will control the diamond trade too. "Several diamond companies have told us to push ahead in Mubji-Mayi so that they have a reason to come over to our side," says Depelchin.

When we boarded an Antonov plane that was to take us back to Goma, I was amazed to find the whole back of the plane was stacked high with unused notes valued at millions and millions of Congolese francs. The only trouble is that nobody in rebel held areas will accept the notes. They are completely worthless in half of the country and symbolic of the economic mess in the Congo.