Bold pincer movement by gunship-strafed M23 apparently broken near Virunga National Park HQ

M23 attacked FARDC positions in the early hours of Tuesday, July 24,

forcing Congolese troops to fall back to about 1 kilometer from

Kibumba, according to newswires.





Kibumba is at 28 kilometers north of the provincial capital of Goma.





A Western diplomat told AFP the town of Kibumba is the "last bolt before Goma."





MONUSCO gunships made sorties, strafing M23 so as to stymie the

insurgents' push.





MONUSCO spokesman Mamodj Mounoubaï said the sorties of gunships were

motived by M23 "attacks against civilians."





According to AFP, about 2,000 IDPs fled the combat zone to add to the

hundreds of thousands of civilians already displaced for the last 4

months.





The humanitarian situation in Goma itself is catastrophic, with an

influx of more than 10,000 IDPs.





Some of the fleeing IDPs are heading southward toward the hamlets of

Minigi or Kanyaruchainya; while others north-bound, towards Rumangabo,

the headquarters of the Virunga National Park.





On his part, Dr Emmanuel de Mérode, the chief warden of the Park,

filed a terse post today at 6:00 HRS (GMT + 2) titled "Heavy bombing

around Rumangabo" that says:





"All morning, yesterday, the area around our headquarters at Rumangabo

came under heavy

shelling.





"This made it impossible to launch the operation in the Gorilla

Sector, as we had planned to do yesterday.



"It's early morning, just before

dawn, and the bombing has started again, but further north around

Kiwanja, Rutshuru."





As Dr de Mérode's post doesn't provide further details, I can only

piece together troop movements based on his earlier logs.





In early July, Dr de Mérode talked about FARDC "build-up of troops at

Rugare," at "about 4 miles south" of his HQ in Rumangabo.





He also said that around 2,000 FARDC troops were billeted at his

nearby station of Rwindi.





I can therefore surmise that, while FARDC troops came under heavy

attack in the north, some M23 units, in a bold coordinated tactical

maneuver, had moved in a counterclockwise sweep southwest then

eastward against those FARDC troops billeted at Rugare and Rwindi, in

the hope of achieving the following 2 objectives:





1) To trigger yet another mass desertion in the ranks of FARDC; and





2) To envelop troops entrenched in and around Goma in a perfect pincer

movement.





Well, in planning their move, M23 might not have factored in the

warlike mindset of FARDC troops in Rugare and Rwindi who, as Dr de

Mérode has noted in his earlier posts, are inured to combat.





As the fighting is ebbing northward toward Kiwanja, the logical

conclusion is that the M23 pincer movement was successfully broken by

the FARDC, with the critical backing of MONUSCO gunships.





While tactital positions are in a flux, the intensity of these latest

insurgent attacks and the tactical thinking invested in their planning

clearly attest to the presence of Rwandan tacticians and battle

management specialists within the ranks of M23.





In an ideal world, at this stage of the hostilities, the DRC should've

already declared war on Rwanda!





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PHOTO CREDITS: AFP



VIA: leparisien.fr