Unidentified assailants ambushed United Nations peacekeepers from Guatemala in the restive eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Monday, sparking an hours-long gun battle that left eight UN troops dead, officials said.
Fourteen UN peacekeepers were wounded in the attack in Garamba National Park, near Congo’s borders with Sudan and Uganda in the region of Ituri, UN spokesperson Kemal Saiki said. He had no information the attackers’ identities, but said rebels from Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army are known to operate in the region.
The gunfight broke out around dawn and lasted for about four hours until a helicopter-borne Nepalese contingent arrived in support, said UN spokesperson Jennifer Bakody by telephone from Bunia, eastern DRC.
The UN troops involved in the attack were from Guatemala, she said. There was no information on casualties, if any, among the attackers.
About 15 000 UN peacekeepers are helping provide security in DRC and monitor peace deals.
But thousands of militiamen still roam Ituri, where clashes between ethnic Lendu and Hema militia have killed more than 50 000 people since 1999 in a conflict that became a bloody spin-off of the DRC’s larger 1998-2002 war.
In separate fighting on Sunday, renegade former army soldiers in the DRC ambushed UN peacekeepers with mortars in a hilltop banana plantation, sparking a fighting that left four of the attackers dead, UN officials said.
The peacekeepers were conducting an operation to flush the militants out of territory they captured during a slew of raids this week near Rwindi, said UN military spokesperson Mayank Awasthi.
Rwindi is about 150km north of the regional capital, Goma, near the Rwandan border.
In February, Lendu militiamen in northern Ituri killed nine Bangladeshi peacekeepers as they attempted to disarm their camp.
Following the incident, UN peacekeepers killed at least 75 militiamen in operations to dismantle camps and purge Ituri of years-long terror and violence.
The Ituri conflict was a bloody spin-off of the DRC’s larger five-year war that involved six African armies and killed nearly four million people, mostly through war-induced starvation and disease.
The DRC’s shaky transitional government is attempting to shepherd peace throughout the enormous country, but the long arm of the law has been slow to reach the volatile east.
The first presidential elections in decades are expected this year in the vast nation, when Congolese will choose a new government to replace a post-war transitional administration. — Sapa-AP