Bitter fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo has sparked fears that highly dangerous Ebola viruses could be released from a laboratory in a city stormed by Rwandan-backed rebels.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has warned of ‘unimaginable consequences’ if samples of Ebola and other pathogens held at a lab in Goma were allowed to escape and spread amid the crisis.
The humanitarian organisation’s regional director Patrick Youssef said the ICRC is ‘very concerned about the situation in the laboratory of the national biomedical research institute, which is facing a risk of power cuts, as well as a question of preserving the samples that may be affected by the clashes.’
Aid agencies have also warned that attacks on water and electricity infrastructure could fuel the spread of deadly infectious diseases like cholera, with the clashes triggering a spiralling humanitarian crisis.
Following days of bitter fighting with Congolese government forces, members of the M23 armed group, which is backed by Kigali, appeared to be on the brink of seizing the key eastern city this morning.
Bertrand Bisimwa, the political leader head of M23, declared today that its fighters are in the process of bringing ‘the last pockets of insecurity… under control.’
‘Our army is working hard to guarantee total security, complete tranquility and definitive peace as is the case for all their compatriots living in liberated zones,’ he said on X.
The M23 armed group took control of Goma’s airport on Tuesday, a security source said, adding that ‘more than 1,200 Congolese soldiers have surrendered and are confined’ to the airport base of the UN’s mission in the DRC.
Days of intense clashes have seen more than 100 people killed and nearly 1,000 wounded, with the city’s hospitals ‘overwhelmed’ and some patients ‘lying on the floor due to lack of space’, the ICRC said.
Hundreds of patients have suffered gunshot, mortar and shrapnel wounds, with bodies seen lying in the streets of the city, according to the United Nations.
The UN said the humanitarian situation in the besieged city was ‘extremely worrying’ amid mass displacement, food shortages, looted aid, overflowing hospitals and widespread sexual violence.
Jens Laerke, spokesman for the United Nations’ humanitarian agency OCHA, said UN colleagues were reporting ‘heavy small arms fire and mortar fire across the city, and the presence of many dead bodies in the streets’.
The ICRC also said its medical warehouse in Goma had been looted and had to be ‘urgently refurbished’.
The World Health Organization has also warned that ‘hospitals and health workers are in danger’.
‘We are hearing reports of health workers being shot at, and patients, including babies, being caught in the crossfire,’ WHO’s emergency response coordinator for DR Congo, Adelheid Marschang, told reporters.
She warned that significant damage to infrastructure like water stations and electricity grids meant ‘conditions are rife for the spread of infectious diseases like cholera and measles’.
The violence in the mineral-rich North Kivu province around Goma has forced half a million people from their homes since the start of the year, according to the UN refugee agency.
At a UN Security Council meeting on the crisis on Tuesday, the world body’s peacekeeping force in the DRC warned that the fighting risked reigniting ethnic conflicts dating to the Rwandan genocide and beyond.
‘In the past four days, the Human Rights Office has documented at least one case of ethnically motivated lynching in a (displaced persons) site in Goma,’ Vivian van de Perre of the UN’s DRC mission MONUSCO said.
After a previous meeting of the council on Sunday, the Congolese government expressed ‘dismay’ at its ‘vague’ statement, which stopped short of naming Rwanda.
At an emergency meeting on Tuesday, the African Union called on the M23 to ‘lay down arms’, also without naming Rwanda.
The DRC has accused Rwanda of wanting to profit from the region’s abundant minerals – which include gold, coltan, copper and cobalt – and has called for stronger UN action.
Rwanda has denied the claims, saying its aim is to tackle an armed group called the FDLR, created by former Hutu leaders of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda who massacred Tutsis.
A UN expert report in July said up to 4,000 Rwandan soldiers were fighting alongside M23 and that Rwanda had ‘de facto control’ of the group’s operations.
A ceasefire in August failed to keep the peace and Angola-mediated talks were abruptly cancelled last month.
Aid agencies and world leaders have called for an immediate halt to the fighting.
