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At least 66 civilians, including three health workers, have been killed in an attack by suspected Islamic State-linked militants in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, worsening security challenges facing efforts to contain the country’s Ebola outbreak.
Since being declared in May, the DRC’s latest Ebola outbreak has become the worst in the vast central African country.
More than 11,000 cases have been confirmed, and more than 5,000 people have died.
The virus has spread across swathes of the DRC’s east and northeast, which have been plagued by violence from a litany of armed groups for more than 30 years.
That unrest has led to attacks on health workers working to fight the virus.
The chronic insecurity is allowing the deadly virus to “gain a head start, which is hampering our response,” Wessam Mankoula, a senior official with the Africa CDC public health body, told reporters in an online press conference on Thursday.
Among the groups active in the region is the IS-affiliated Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), which is suspected of carrying out last week’s attack.
Formed from former Ugandan rebels, the ADF is notorious for extreme brutality towards civilians and has regularly carried out massacres in the eastern province of North Kivu and neighbouring Ituri in the northeast.
“This appalling attack represents both a major humanitarian emergency and a significant setback to the response. And it’s not the only one,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote Wednesday on X.
During the deadly attack on the town of Cantine-Aloya, three health facilities were also looted and burned, the WHO chief said.
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After the attack, three confirmed Ebola cases were unaccounted for and more than 1,000 contacts to follow up had been lost, he said.
“Insecurity is now one of the greatest obstacles to the Ebola response in the DRC,” he said.
Two weeks ago, a nurse was killed and another health worker badly injured when they were attacked while responding to an Ebola alert in Tshopo province.
