KINSHASA, July 14 (Reuters) – Democratic Republic of Congo’s
army clashed with fighters from the M23 rebel group close to the
eastern city of Goma on Sunday, in what appeared to be the most
serious combat for several weeks.
In a statement, M23 said the fighting started at 2 p.m.
local time (1200 GMT) when the army attacked its positions in
the town of Mutaho, some 7 km (4 miles) from Goma, a city of a
million inhabitants.
The rebel group, which sparked international outcry when it
seized Goma in November, said its troops were responding firmly.
“Kinshasa’s army has just launched a large-scale attack on
M23’s positions at Mutaho,” Vianney Kazarama, an M23 spokesman,
told Reuters.
Colonel Olivier Hamuli, an army spokesman, said the rebels
had attacked government forces.
“The initiative for the fighting came from M23. It was them
who attacked us at Mutaho,” he said by telephone from Goma.
The M23 has accused the army and pro-government militia of
trying to goad its troops into combat for several weeks.
The fighting comes as the deployment is under way of a new
3,000-strong U.N. Intervention Brigade with a tough mandate to
take the fight to armed groups in eastern Congo.
The force – which will be made up of troops from South
Africa, Tanzania and Malawi – has begun patrolling and is
approaching full strength.
U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous told Reuters on Sunday
the 17,000-strong U.N. force in Congo would begin using unarmed
drones on a trial basis to monitor the war-torn region.
U.N. peacekeeping troops have been in eastern Congo for more
than a decade but the complex conflict has dragged on, killing
millions through violence, famine and disease since the 1990s.
Peace talks between the Congolese government and M23 in
Kampala, the capital of neighbouring Uganda, have stalled.
Some 66,000 Congolese refugees have fled into Uganda since
the Ugandan rebel Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an Islamic
group, and elements of the Somalian al Qaeda-linked Shabaab
movement struck the town of Kamangu on Thursday.
On Sunday, local officials said that ADF and Shabaab
fighters had captured the town of Kikingi, close to the Ugandan
border, when police fled after a short firefight.
“They are looting and robbing, as they did at Kamango,” said
Amisi Kalonda, the regional administrator. “The army is
stationed not far from there and is going to dislodge them.”
The ADF waged an insurgency against the Ugandan state in the
late 1990s from its bases in Uganda’s Ruwenzori Mountains and
across the frontier in the eastern Congo jungle.
A Ugandan government offensive that ended in 2001 quelled
the uprising and pushed its remnants deeper into eastern Congo.
The group had since kept a low profile.
Uganda is worried that a buildup in the capacity of the ADF
could pose a threat to its Lake Albert region, where crude
reserves estimated at 3.5 billion barrels have been discovered.
Al Shabaab claimed responsibility for a 2010 bombing in
which 79 people were killed while watching the soccer World Cup
final in revenge for Uganda’s deployment of troops in Somalia.
(Reporting by Bienvenu-Marie Bakumanya; Writing by Daniel
Flynn; Editing by Andrew Roche)
