RPT-UPDATE 1-Congo forces kill 26 Islamist rebels in Ebola zone shootout

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By Fiston Mahamba
GOMA, Congo, May 30 (Reuters) - Congolese forces killed 26
rebels on Thursday from a group thought to be linked to Islamic
State while repelling an attack in east Congo's Ebola zone, the
army said.
The shootout took place in a village near the city of Beni,
an area where more than a dozen different militia groups and
associated armed gangs operate, and the epicentre of Democratic
Republic of Congo's worst ever Ebola epidemic.
The army's spokesman for east Congo, General Leon-Richard
Kasonga, said the insurgents from the Allied Democratic Forces
(ADF) attacked a position in Ngite village and that soldiers
returned fire and pursued them.
"Twenty six rebels were neutralised by the army, and their
bodies recovered," he told journalists in Goma.
The ADF has never claimed allegiance to Islamic State, but
witnesses said the Congolese group carried out an attack last
month in nearby Bovata that IS claimed. The jihadist group described that attack as its first in
what it called the "Central Africa Province" of the "Caliphate"
- the name it gave to the area of Syria and Iraq that it
occupied for several years from 2014.
The ADF, originally a Ugandan Salafist-inspired extremist
group, has been operating along the Congo/Uganda border for more
than two decades. Rival armed groups remain active in pockets of
eastern Congo long after the official end of a 1998-2003 war in
which millions of people died, mostly from hunger and disease.
Insecurity around Beni is also undermining efforts to
contain the Ebola epidemic, which has killed close to 1,300
people since August. Militiamen attacked a hospital in the
nearby city of Butembo last month and killed a Cameroonian
doctor working for the World Health Organization (WHO).