HEAVILY armed ex-rebel forces in Sierra Leone forced a contingent of United Nations peacekeeping troops to back off from deployment into an eastern region, the UN mission UNAMSIL said on Friday. The troops involved in Thursday’s standoff were heading from Kenema and Daru, 240 and 270 kilometres east of Freetown, for Koidu in the diamond rich north-eastern Kono district where RUF forces are said to be mining heavily despite orders that all such illicit activity should stop. UNAMSIL has faced several serious challenges to its mission following a peace pact signed in July last year by President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and RUF leader Foday Sankoh, whose forces took up arms in 1991.