[Source: Reuters]

Rwandan-backed M23 rebels asserted their control over east Congo’s largest city Goma.

By calling on residents to resume normal life, even as the group clashed with Congolese troops as they tried to take more territory.

The insurgents, backed by Rwandan troops, seized Goma this week and are moving south in the biggest escalation since 2012 of a decades-old conflict the U.N. says risks spiralling into another major regional war.

A sustained and successful push by M23 into the neighbouring province of South Kivu would see them control territory previous rebellions have not taken since the end of two major wars that ran from 1996 to 2003, in which millions of civilians died, mostly from malnutrition and disease.

Troops from neighbouring Burundi, which has had hostile relations with Rwanda, support Congolese troops in South Kivu – meaning the risk of a wider conflict would increase. Burundi’s military declined to comment on the situation in Congo.

Rwanda says it is defending itself, accusing Congo’s military of joining forces with ethnic Hutu-led militias bent on slaughtering Tutsis in Congo and threatening Rwanda, where Hutus targeted Tutsis in a 1994 genocide and some later fled to Congo.

Congo denies this and accuses Rwanda of using M23, which it describes as a “terrorist proxy of Rwanda”, to pillage valuable minerals from Congolese territory. U.N. experts have documented the export of large quantities of looted minerals via Rwanda.

An international backlash against Rwanda, which has included Germany cancelling aid talks and Britain threatening to withhold 32 million pounds ($40 million) of annual bilateral assistance, was having no apparent effect on the ground.

Advancing along Lake Kivu, M23 fighters were pushed back on Wednesday from the town of Nyabibwe, some 50 km (30 miles) from South Kivu’s capital Bukavu, and were clashing on Thursday with Congolese troops in the nearby location of Kahalala, according to two local sources.

“The Congolese army seems to be putting up fierce resistance there,” said one of the sources, from a civil society organisation in Bukavu.

FOOD STORES LOOTED

In Goma itself, M23 were presenting themselves as the city’s new administrators.

“We are asking all Goma residents to go back to normal activities. We’ll relaunch school and academic activities and water supply,” Corneille Nangaa, leader of the Congo River Alliance rebel coalition that includes M23, told reporters.

The situation in the city was far from normal, however.

The streets, strewn with debris and discarded military fatigues, were mostly deserted as heavily armed M23 fighters in pick-up trucks patrolled them.

The World Food Programme said there had been widespread looting, including at food stores.

Just before the M23 seizure of Goma, it was providing emergency aid to more than 800,000 people just around the city and 1.5 million in Congo’s four eastern provinces.

“The internally displaced camps around Goma … that were hosting around 800,000 people are emptying out as people flee for safety. The conflict keeps following them as they’ve been displaced multiple times,” WFP official Cynthia Jones said.

Nangaa said M23 would guarantee a humanitarian corridor to allow displaced people to go home.

“We are here in Goma to stay. We are going to continue the march until Kinshasa,” he said, referring to Congo’s capital more than 1,600 km away.

Nangaa had previously said the alliance’s ultimate aim was to topple President Felix Tshisekedi’s government.

FIGHTING TALK FROM PRESIDENTS

Despite a flurry of diplomatic activity, including a meeting of East African heads of state and a visit to Kinshasa by France’s foreign minister, both Tshisekedi and his Rwandan counterpart Paul Kagame made uncompromising statements.

Tshisekedi said in an address to the nation that Congo’s army would “reconquer every inch of our territory” and accused Rwanda and its “M23 puppets” of “a terrorist enterprise on our soil, sowing terror and desolation among our population”.

Kagame has long lambasted Tshisekedi for what he describes as Congo’s harbouring of Hutu “genocidaires”.

He also lashed out at South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa for saying in a post on X that the fighting in Congo, in which 13 South African soldiers have died since last week, was due to an escalation by the M23 and the Rwandan army.

Kagame accused South African forces of working alongside a militia in Congo with ties to perpetrators of the 1994 genocide and “threatening to take the war to Rwanda itself”.

“If South Africa prefers confrontation, Rwanda will deal with the matter in that context any day,” Kagame wrote.

Since the fall of Goma, Rwanda has also reacted angrily to calls for restraint from Western nations, accusing its critics of “victim-blaming” and turning a blind eye to what it says is Congo’s complicity in the slaughter of Tutsis.