UN peacekeepers killed in fight with Islamist militias in DRC

At least seven UN peacekeepers and 12 Congolese soldiers have been killed in clashes with militias in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The fighting took place near Beni, in the east, and close to the centre of the country’s worst Ebola outbreak.

The peacekeepers were supporting an offensive by local forces against an Islamist group, the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), officials said.

A UN spokesman said the secretary general, António Guterres, “calls on all armed groups to stop their destabilising activities, which continue to add to the suffering of the population and complicate the response to the ongoing Ebola outbreak”.

The ADF is responsible for a series of attacks on civilians in recent months. The threat posed by the group is hampering international efforts to contain the virus by preventing medical workers getting to Ebola victims.

The epidemic in Beni and the surrounding villages has infected more than 300 people, killing two-thirds of them. This makes it the third-worst outbreak ever, after one in 2013-16 in west Africa, when 28,000 people were infected, and in Uganda in 2000, when there were 425 cases.

Eastern DRC has been plagued by banditry and armed insurrections for more than two decades, since the fall of the military ruler Mobutu Sese Seko, but there has been a surge in violence in the past year.

Much of the unrest has been blamed on the ADF, which analysts say is trying to develop links with other jihadists in Africa and beyond.

A report by the Congo Research Group at New York University this week said the ADF had received money from a key financial facilitator who has been linked to Islamic State.

The man, who is on a US government sanctions list, was arrested in Kenya, his home country, in July. The payments were made in recent years but it was not clear when, how much was paid or how the money was used.

The ADF has various streams of funding. UN investigators have discovered evidence of Western Union transfers during 2013 and 2014 from people in the UK to ADF agents in eastern Congo of at least $14,970.84 (£11,675.76).

The UN soldiers who died were from Malawi and Tanzania. Both countries contribute to the longstanding 17,000-member peacekeeping force in violence-prone parts of the DRC.

The ADF was set up by Ugandan Muslims in the 1990s and turned to banditry after crossing Uganda’s western border with the DRC. The Congolese and Ugandan governments accuse the ADF of links to jihadists such as al-Qaida but has offered little evidence to back up these claims.

In recent years, the ADF has tried to align itself with better-known extremist groups, adopting a flag resembling that of Isis and using language popularised by al-Qaida.

“The ADF appear to be … becoming more interested in broadcasting their messages to a wider … audience and are attempting to present themselves within a broader setting of radical jihadist groups,” the report by the Congo Research Group says.

In December, 15 Tanzanian peacekeepers were killed when the group overran a fortified UN camp in eastern DRC.