Uganda, DR Congo troops fix road ahead of expected anti-rebel push

Ugandan and Congolese troops worked to repair a key road in eastern DR Congo on Friday, officers said, ahead of an expected push against the region's notorious ADF rebels.

The two neighbours have launched joint operations against the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), accused of massacres in eastern DR Congo and bomb blasts in Uganda.

Ugandan forces launched air and artillery strikes on November 30 and moved across the border to set up an advance base, but then had to pause because of poor roads.

Earth-moving machines were at work on Friday on a badly-damaged section of the 80-kilometre (50-mile) highway linking the frontier post at Nobili with Mbau.

Part of the road crosses the world-famous Virunga National Park, a haven to rare species, including the mountain gorilla.

"Work between the two armies' military engineers is progressing very well," Captain Antony Mualushayi, the military spokesman for the eastern DR Congo region of Beni, told reporters.

"Troops are already positioned in several (ADF) strongholds that were bombarded on November 30," he said.

"But as there is a road problem, it's better to fix it once and for all."

Work to make the damaged section passable will take "more or less 48 hours," he said.

An AFP journalist at the Nobili border post saw five tanks cross on Friday.

The ADF was historically a Ugandan rebel coalition whose biggest group comprised Muslims opposed to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

The group established itself in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in 1995, later becoming the deadliest of scores of outlawed forces in the troubled region.

DR Congo's Catholic Church says the ADF has killed around 6,000 civilians since 2013 while a respected monitor, the Kivu Security Tracker, blames it for more than 1,200 deaths in the area alone since 2017.

Uganda moved against the ADF with DR Congo's consent after accusing it of a string of recent attacks on its soil that have been claimed by the Islamic State.

The notion of Ugandan troops operating on DRC soil is controversial in a country where many recall the role of Uganda and Rwanda in stoking past instability in the east of the country.

Critics include Denis Mukwege, the gynaecologist who won the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for his work helping victims of sexual violence in South Kivu province.

Mualushayi told journalists, "You saw as I did that everywhere we go, there's always a Ugandan soldier and a Congolese soldier" together.

This, he said, showed "there really is friendship, collaboration, the will to confront and do away with the ADF."

Since April 2019, some ADF attacks in eastern DR Congo have been claimed by IS, which describes the group as its Islamic State Central Africa Province offshoot.

In March, the United States placed the ADF on its list of "terrorist" organisations linked to IS.