Congo slaughter

15 UN peacekeepers dead in ‘war crime’

In the deadliest single attack on a United Nations peacekeeping mission in nearly 25 years, rebels in the African nation of Congo killed 15 peacekeepers and wounded more than 50 others during an assault on their base that was launched at nightfall and went on for hours.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres expressed “outrage and utter heartbreak” and called the attack a war crime, urging Congolese authorities to swiftly investigate.

The US State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs said it was “horrified” by the attack.

UN peacekeeping spokesman Nick Birnback said it was the deadliest attack on a UN peacekeeping mission since June 1993, when 22 Pakistani soldiers were killed in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu.

The peacekeepers killed Thursday were from Tanzania.

Tanzanian President John Magufuli expressed his shock and offered his prayers to the wounded, three of whom are in critical condition.

At least five Congolese soldiers also were killed in the attack Thursday evening, which has been blamed on one of the region’s deadliest rebel groups, the Allied Demo- cratic Forces, or ADF.

Three peacekeepers were missing, the UN said. More than 20 were evacuated for medical treatment in the regional capital, Goma.

Birnback called the assault “a determined and well-coordinated attack by a well-armed group.” It was not clear when military reinforcements arrived after the attack, the UN said. Conditions in the region are “very, very challenging,” said UN peacekeeping chief Jean-Pierre Lacroix, who said the attack followed a recent increase in activities by various armed groups.

Lacroix called the assault a response to the UN mission’s “in- creasingly robust posture.”

“We are disturbing them,” he said. “They do not like it.”

The peacekeeping base is about 27 miles from the town of Beni, which has been repeatedly attacked by the ADF rebel group.

The ADF “has an agenda both ideological and extremist in nature, but also focused . . . on exploitation of illegal resources,” Lacroix said

The UN mission in Congo is the largest and most expensive in the world. It has a budget of $1.14 billion and over 16,500 soldiers. Nearly 300 peacekeepers have been killed since the mission arrived in 1999, according to UN data.