M23 fighters combed the streets of Uvira in eastern DR Congo on Thursday to flush out remaining enemy combatants a day after taking over strategic parts of the eastern city near Burundi, security and local sources said.
Businesses have been closed for several days, and only a few motorcycles were out in the streets, while sporadic shots still rang out, local civil society representatives said.
Around 10 bodies were collected from the streets between Wednesday and Thursday, according to local sources and witnesses.
“Yesterday we collected at least nine bodies and today two on the avenue leading to Saint Paul’s Cathedral,” a civil society representative told AFP, but gave no other details.
As it did in two provincial capitals, Goma and Bukavu, seized in January and February after a lightning offensive, the M23, backed by Rwanda and its army, is seeking to take control of neighbourhoods in Uvira where militia who have not already fled have taken refuge.
The city hall, provincial governor’s office, and the border post to Burundi already fell to the M23 on Wednesday after most Congolese forces fled in the previous days.
On Thursday, almost all parts of the city suffered power cuts, with many residents reliant on battery-powered phones for contact with the outside world.
The M23 offensive, launched at the beginning of December just before Kinshasa and Kigali signed a peace deal in Washington, was described by Burundi’s foreign minister on Wednesday as a “humiliation” for the United States.
The latest offensive by the anti-government armed group and its Rwandan allies aims initially to deprive the Democratic Republic of Congo of military support from Burundi, according to experts and security sources.
Some of the 18,000 Burundian forces present in South Kivu province in eastern DRC have already crossed the border back to the Burundian economic capital Bujumbura, sources within the Burundi army said.
However, around 2,500 are still in the hills overlooking Uvira and the Ruzizi border plain, they said.
The Burundian army has lost several hundred men in the fighting, according to several military sources. A Burundian general, contacted by AFP, acknowledged “humiliating defeats”.
The Rwandan army used drones, GPS-guided mortars, and jammers during the offensive on Uvira, security sources said.