At least 60 renegade soldiers have been killed by the regular army in a fresh attack in the restive east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), government forces said on Tuesday.
The army said it used a helicopter gunship to attack rebel soldiers loyal to cashiered general Laurent Nkunda in an area near Sake in the eastern Nord-Kivu region.
”There was heavy fighting near Karuba. We deployed an attack helicopter to back our ground troops. At least 60 men from the enemy side died on the battlefield,” Colonel Delphin Kahimbi, the local second in command, said.
According to preliminary information received by the United Nations mission in DRC, Monuc, more than 30 renegade soldiers have died.
”Nkunda has lost several commanders of battalions. His men are sure to reply,” Kahimbi said.
The self-proclaimed general Bwambale Kakolele, who is close to Nkunda, said that the government troops had bombed the area but claimed that most of the dead were civilians.
The government forces have deployed more than 2 000 men in the region to quell insurgents.
The main force that took on the DRC army in several places last week in the region is led by Nkunda.
The fighting has claimed more than 100 lives, according to regular army commanders.
The army last year sought to deal with the threat Nkunda poses in a volatile part of this vast, war-ravaged nation by forming mixed brigades incorporating his men and their officers, which were deployed in January.
But mass defections ensued once the army high command entrusted the brigades with the task of tracking down armed Rwandan Hutus from a politico-military movement established in the Kivu provinces since the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Nkunda is a Tutsi, like Rwanda’s minority population targeted in the 2004 genocide carried out by then Hutu troops and youth militias in the smaller nation across the border, and he claims one of his aims is to protect Congolese ethnic Tutsis. — Sapa-AFP