People are afraid: BBC visits DR Congo city under rebel control

When I first drove into DR Congo's eastern city of Goma, it was hard for me to tell I had entered a conflict zone.

Goma residents filled the streets a few miles from the border with Rwanda - commuters headed to work, hawkers sold goods by the roadside and taxi drivers scrambled to win customers.

But it only took a few minutes to notice there was a new "government" in town.

As I reached a checkpoint near a police post formerly run by the Congolese authorities, gun-toting fighters from the M23 rebel group stopped my car.

Last week M23 had captured Goma, an eastern city of nearly two million people, after a lightning advance in DR Congo's eastern region. At least 700 people in the city were killed and close to 3,000 injured as the rebels clashed with DR Congo's army and its allies, according the UN and the Congolese government.

M23, which is made up of ethnic Tutsis, say they are fighting for minority rights, while DR Congo's government says the Rwanda-backed rebels are seeking control of the eastern region's vast mineral wealth.

At the checkpoint M23 rebels peered into my car, asked my driver a few brief questions, then waved us into the devastated city.

The rebels faced no opposition - it was like they had always been there.

I made my way to one the few hospitals treating wounded victims and as I entered, cries of pain echoed through the corridors.

I met Nathaniel Cirho, a medical doctor who, in a strange role reversal, sat in a hospital bed with a sling around his left arm.

A bomb had landed on the house next to his and Mr Cirho and his neighbours were struck by the resulting shrapnel.

"I sustained an injury on my arm. A 65-year-old man was injured in his abdomen. After surgery, he didn't survive," he said with regret.

Several wards away, an elderly woman lay in another hospital bed, hooked up to an oxygen tank.

She had plucked a bullet from her arm after a fierce exchange of fire broke out in her neighbourhood.

"Suddenly my hand felt cold, and I realised I had been shot," she said, struggling to find her speech.

For days, she had nursed the gunshot wound without help. She told me she was eventually escorted to a public hospital by M23 fighters.The woman asked to be moved to a private hospital, where she is now receiving treatment, because she was not receiving adequate attention from the overstretched doctors.

But even at this second hospital, medics were overwhelmed as an increasing number of patients came through the doors.

"We have treated most of them because we had contingency plans," a doctor, who did not want to be named for security reasons, said.

He added: "On Sunday when the fighting began, we received 315 patients and we treated them."

But now, the hospital counts over 700 patients with various degrees of injury, the doctor told me.

He spoke of receiving patients with "gunshot wounds to the head, others on the chest, stomach, hands and legs".