By Yassin Kombi and Sonia Rolley
GOMA, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) -Rebels seized the airport of east Congo’s largest city Goma on Tuesday, potentially cutting off the main route for aid to reach hundreds of thousands of displaced people, after capturing the city in an offensive that left dead bodies lying in the streets.
M23 fighters marched into Goma on Monday in the worst escalation since 2012 of a three-decade conflict rooted in the long fallout from the Rwandan genocide and the struggle for control of Congo’s mineral resources.
The United Nations has heard that the rebels control the airport and are inside Goma, U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said at a briefing, describing the situation as “tense and fluid.”
“There are real risks of breakdown of law and order in the city, given the proliferation of weapons,” he warned, adding that U.N. peacekeepers and personnel had been forced to shelter at their bases.
In the Congolese capital Kinshasa, 1,600 km (1,000 miles) west of Goma, protesters attacked a U.N. compound and embassies including those of Rwanda, France and the United States, expressing anger at what they said was foreign interference. Looters ransacked the embassy of Kenya.
The U.S. State Department has ordered embassy staff to leave Congo, two sources said. One of the sources, with knowledge of the events, said they would leave on Wednesday. A third source said only non-essential staff had received the notice.
GUNFIRE IN GOMA
Congo and the head of U.N. peacekeeping have said Rwandan troops are present in Goma, backing up their M23 allies. Rwanda has said it is defending itself against the threat from Congolese militias, without directly commenting on whether its troops have crossed the border.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres spoke separately on Tuesday with the Congolese and Rwandan presidents and urged Rwanda to protect civilians, Dujarric said.
Goma is a major hub for people displaced by fighting elsewhere in eastern Congo and aid groups seeking to assist them. The fighting has sent thousands of people streaming out of the city including some who had recently sought refuge there from M23’s offensive since the start of the year.
Just across the border in Rwanda, trucks were unloading large numbers of people fleeing Goma with their children and bundles of possessions wrapped in pieces of fabric.
Goma residents and U.N. sources said dozens of troops had surrendered, but some soldiers and pro-government militiamen were holding out. People in several neighbourhoods reported small arms fire and some loud explosions on Tuesday morning.
By Tuesday afternoon, several diplomatic and security sources said the M23 rebels had taken full control of the airport, putting them in charge of a vital link to the outside world.
“It was through the airport that the U.N., the humanitarian groups, the peacekeepers and even the Congolese army were getting supplies in,” said Congo researcher Christoph Vogel, adding there was no viable access by road or by boat on Lake Kivu.
REPORTS OF RAPE AND LOOTING
Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the U.N. humanitarian office OCHA, told a briefing colleagues had reported “many dead bodies in the streets.”
“We have reports of rapes committed by fighters, looting of property … and humanitarian health facilities being hit,” he added. Other international aid officials described hospitals overwhelmed with wounded being treated in hallways.
The city’s four main hospitals have treated at least 760 people wounded by the fighting since Sunday, medical and humanitarian sources said, cautioning that they could not estimate an accurate death toll as many people were dying outside the hospitals.
Francois Moreillon, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Congo, told Reuters a medicine warehouse had been looted, and he was concerned about a laboratory where dangerous germs including ebola were kept.
“Should it be hit in any way by shells which could affect the integrity of the structure, this could potentially allow germs to escape,” he said.
FEAR OF WIDER CONFLICT
M23 is the latest in a string of ethnic Tutsi-led, Rwandan-backed insurgencies that have brought tumult to Congo since the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda 30 years ago, when Hutu extremists killed Tutsis and moderate Hutus, and then were toppled by the Tutsi-led forces that still govern Rwanda.
Rwanda says some of the ousted perpetrators have been sheltering in Congo since the genocide, forming militias with alliances with the Congolese government, and pose a threat to Congolese Tutsis and Rwanda itself.
Congo rejects Rwanda’s complaints, and says Rwanda has used its proxy militias to control and loot lucrative minerals such as coltan, which is used in smartphones.
The U.N. and global powers fear the conflict could spiral into a regional war, akin to those of 1996-1997 and 1998-2003 that killed millions, mostly from hunger and disease.
U.N. peacekeepers have been caught up in the fighting. South Africa said three of its soldiers were killed in crossfire between government troops and rebels and a fourth had succumbed to wounds from earlier fighting, bringing the number of its fatalities in the past week to 13.
(Reporting by Yassin Kombi in Goma, Sonia Rolley and John Irish in Paris, Ange Adihe Kasongo and Stanis Bujakera in Kinshasa, Bhargav Acharya in Johannesburg and Giulia Paravicini and David Lewis in Nairobi, Maggie Fick in London, Emma Farge in Geneva, Milan Pavicic in Gdansk, Michelle Nichols in New York; Writing by David Lewis, Aaron Ross, Estelle Shirbon, Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Michael Perry, Andrew Cawthorne, Peter Graff and Rod Nickel)
