DRC – Fighting broke out on Friday between members of a local armed group allied with the Congolese army and M23 rebels in eastern DRC, local sources told AFP, just seven days into a two-week humanitarian truce.
The United States announced last Thursday the truce between Kinshasa and the Rwanda-backed M23, which has seized swathes of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in an ongoing offensive launched in 2021 in the North Kivu province.
The truce began at midnight local time on July 5 and will continue through July 19, the White House National Security Council said.
But fighting erupted on Friday morning some 70 kilometres (43 miles) north-west of provincial capital Goma, the spokesman for one of the armed groups backing the Congolese forces said.
El momento en el que las milicias terroristas patrocinadas por Occidente, dispararon contra civiles congoleños del campo de refugiados de Goma, con el fin de controlar los recursos del este del Congo.
El genocidio continúa en el Congo a diario pero es invisible para la “prensa”. pic.twitter.com/kC9o9H87Wh
— Daniel Mayakovski (@DaniMayakovski) July 12, 2024
“The enemy attacked us at Nyange (village),” Safari Bindu told AFP Friday.
He added that “fighting continued” into nearby villages. Residents in the region also confirmed this information to AFP.
Lieutenant Colonel Guillaume Ndjike, a spokesperson for the Congolese forces in Kivu accused on Thursday the Rwandan army of having “launched simultaneous attacks… on the positions of the DRC armed forces and its partners in the villages of Nyange and Mpati”.
The M23 have almost completely encircled Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, killing scores of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more.
There are already 2.8 million displaced people in North Kivu, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
“The humanitarian situation in North Kivu is dire with close to three million displaced people in the province,” the White House security council said in its statement last week announcing the truce.
“The recent expansion of fighting in North Kivu has prevented humanitarian workers from reaching hundreds of thousands of IDPs in the area around Kanyabayonga and displaced more than 100,000 people from their homes,” it added.
DRC’s mineral-rich east has been racked for 30 years by fighting between both local and foreign-based armed groups, going back to regional wars of the 1990s.
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Source: AFP
Picture: Pixabay
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