#3 DR Congo army says Ugandan rebel bases crushed
AFP
27 dec. 05 - 16.36h
GOMA, DR Congo, Dec 27 (AFP) - The Democratic Republic of Congo army said Tuesday it had overrun Mwalika, the last stronghold of Ugandan rebels based in the east of the DRC.
"Mwalika fell at about 6:00 am (0400 GMT)," FARDC (Congolese army) General Eugene Mbuy told AFP.
"The fighting began yesterday. There was resistance but we can say we now control the situation in the whole zone of operations," he said.
Since Saturday, some 3,500 FARDC troops supported by an Indian contingent of 600 men from the UN mission in the DRC (MONUC) have attacked the rebel Allied Democratic Front/ National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (ADF/NALU).
Mbuy said he knew of 54 rebels killed, six DRC soldiers killed and 16 wounded, and one Indian UN soldier killed and four injured since Saturday.
He had no specific casualties from the overnight battle for Mwalika, which was the headquarters of the rebels.
Mbuy is based in Goma, the chief town of the DRC's Nord-Kivu province on the border with Rwanda and Uganda.
Uganda has been urging the DRC government in Kinshasa to wipe out the rebels, threatening to send its own troops back into the vast central African country otherwise.
MONUC, which is the world's largest peacekeeping operation with more than 18,600 personnel, is helping the DRC through a transition to national unity and democracy after a 1998-2003 war that drew in the armies of half a dozen other African countries, including Uganda, on rival sides.
UN troops serving as part of MONUC have in the past year taken offensive action alongside DRC soldiers to crush militia forces and private armies still active in the volatile east of Africa's second largest nation, under a tough UN Security Council mandate allowing them to do so under specified conditions.
When the Christmas offensive hit the headlines with the killing of an Indian soldier in an ambush by the Ugandan rebels, a MONUC military spokeman said the UN troops had gone in to support the FARDC because the Ugandan rebels had rejected amnesty, disarmament and repatriation offers.
The UN also said the ADF/NALU was terrorising local residents in the region as well as being engaged in various kinds of illicit traffic. It estimated the total number of Ugandan rebels at about 1,500, while the DRC army said there were between 2,500 and 3,000 of them. |
Ugandan rebels have killed an Indian United Nations peacekeeping soldier and wounded four others in an attack in Nord-Kivu province in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). "An Indian blue helmet was killed and four others wounded, one seriously when their camp at a village in Nord-Kivu was hit by an RPG 7 rocket and came under heavy fire, to which they responded forcefully," a statement from the UN mission in the DRC said.