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Congolese forces killed 26 rebels of a group suspected of being linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), while repelling an attack in the Ebola zone of the country, announced the army.
The firefight took place on Thursday in a village near the city of Beni, a region where more than a dozen militia groups and associated gangs operate, and the epicenter of the worst Ebola outbreak in the world. Democratic Republic of Congo.
General Leon-Richard Kasonga, an army spokesman for eastern Congo, said that Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) fighters had attacked a position in the Ngite village and that soldiers had retaliated and pursued.
"Twenty-six rebels were neutralized by the army and their bodies were found," he told reporters in Goma.
The ADF never claimed allegiance to ISIL, but witnesses said that the Congolese group had launched an attack last month in Bovata, which would have been claimed by the US government. EIIL.
ISIL described this attack as the first in what it called the "Central African Province" of the "Caliphate" – the name it gave the region of the Syria and Iraq that he had been controlling for several years from 2014.
ADFs were born in the west Uganda in 1995 under the leadership of Jamil Mukulu, a Christian who became a Muslim.
Forced to UgandaIt operates in the border area of North Kivu province in the DRC, an area in which other armed groups are also active.
He has been accused of recruiting and using child soldiers, killing hundreds of civilians since 2014, as well as 15 Tanzanian peacekeepers who died in an attack in December 2017.
Rival armed groups remain active in pockets of eastern Congo long after the official end of a 1998-2003 war in which millions of people died, mostly as a result of the hunger and disease.
Insecurity around Beni is also undermining efforts to contain the Ebola epidemic, the second-largest epidemic in history, which has killed nearly 1,300 people since the month of February. # 39; August.
Last month, fighters attacked a hospital in the nearby town of Butembo and killed a Cameroonian doctor working for the World Health Organization.
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