Conflict between the Rwanda-backed M23 rebels and government forces killed at least five people, including women and a child, in eastern DR Congo on Wednesday after a two-week lull in fighting, local sources told AFP.
Fighting between the M23 and Congolese armed forces on Wednesday morning drew closer to the strategic town of Kanyabayonga.
The town sits on the northern front of a conflict that has raged in the province of North Kivu since late 2021, when the M23 resumed its armed campaign in the region.
Shells fired by M23 rebels killed between five and seven people in the village of Bulotwa, five kilometres (three miles) from Kanyabayonga, sources said.
Women and a child were among seven people killed, said Jazz Muhindo, a Kanyabayonga civil society president.
Their deaths were caused by a shell fired by M23 forces falling on the house they were in, he added.
Kanyabayonga’s deputy mayor Baraka Lukulirwa said five people were killed in the violence and four were injured, adding that a school was also destroyed.
The fighting caused “panic” among the population of Kanyabayonga, the sources told AFP.
The town has seen an influx of tens of thousands of people in recent months, driven from their homes by the advance of the rebels.
Kanyabayonga, home to more than 60,000 people, is around 100 kilometres from North Kivu provincial capital Goma.
At the start of June, the International Committee of the Red Cross suspended food deliveries to thousands of displaced households in Kanyabayonga when fighting intensified in the area.
The area had seen a reprieve in the fighting over the last fortnight but the country’s armed forces announced a fresh offensive against the M23 at the start of the week.
The Congolese army “maintains the pressure on the Rwanda terrorists of the M23”, lieutenant-colonel Mak Hazukay, spokesman for the army’s operations in the east of the country, said Tuesday.
Hazukay said that “several Rwandan snipers and a mortar shooter were neutralised” on Monday, and that on Tuesday “two big enemy vehicles had been destroyed in Maisafi to the south of Kanyabayonga”.