By Michelle Nichols
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Fighting across the largest city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and “is still very much ongoing … it’s not over yet,” senior U.N. official in Congo, Bruno Lemarquis, said on Monday after Rwandan-backed M23 rebels claimed to have control of Goma.
“Active zones of combat have spread to all quarters of the city, all the neighborhoods of the city,” Lemarquis, the deputy U.N. envoy and top U.N. aid official in the DRC, told reporters in New York via video from Kinshasa.
The rebels marched into Goma earlier on Monday and Congolese troops exchanged fire with the Rwandan military across the border, in the worst escalation of a long-running conflict for more than a decade.
“There’s no question that there are Rwandan troops in Goma supporting the M23. Of course, it’s difficult to tell exactly what the numbers are,” U.N. peacekeeping chief Jean-Pierre Lacroix also told reporters in New York via video from Damascus, where he is currently visiting.
He described the situation on the ground in eastern Congo as “volatile and dangerous” and said that: “UN peacekeepers remain in their positions in the field.”
A rebel alliance led by the ethnic Tutsi-led M23 militia said it had seized the lakeside city of more than 2 million people, a major hub for displaced people and aid groups lying on the border with Rwanda and last occupied by M23 in 2012.
Lemarquis said that earlier on Monday artillery fire was directed at Goma’s city center and struck a maternity hospital, “killing and injuring civilians, including newborn and pregnant women.”
“The scenes reported by our colleagues on the ground are chaotic,” he said.
The U.N. mission in December had 10,960 peacekeepers and 1,750 civilians in Congo, deployed mostly in the east. Lemarquis said non-essential staff in the DRC were being moved to Uganda.
Lemarquis said the internet in Goma was cut on Monday, phone service was patchy and water and electricity had been disrupted.
(Reporting by Michelle Nichols, Ryan Patrick Jones; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
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