DRC unrest claims 60 soldiers
2007-09-04 12:40
Goma - At least 60 insurgent soldiers have been killed by the regular army in a fresh attack in the restive east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, says the government forces.
The army said it used a helicopter gunship to attack renegade soldiers in an area near Sake in the eastern Nord-Kivu region.
Army spokesperson Colonel Delphin Kahimbi said: "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."
The main force that took on the DRC army again in several places last week in the region was led by cashiered general Laurent Nkunda, a powerful local leader in restive Nord-Kivu.
According to regular army commanders, the fighting had claimed more than 100 lives.
Last year, the army sought to deal with the threat Nkunda posed in a volatile part of a 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 was 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 claimed one of his aims was to protect Congolese ethnic Tutsis.