South African soldiers surrender to M23 in the DRC and are taken as prisoners

Show Voice Options Senior East-African government sources have told NSN that several South African soldiers, deployed by the ANC Government into the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as part of an ill equipped and ill prepared force, surrendered to M23 rebels this past week. The soldiers are now being held as hostages by M23, according to these sources. The soldiers are part of a South African National Defence Force (SANDF) deployed to attack the M23 rebels specifically in the east of the DRC. This follows the withdrawal of an East African Regional Security Force that was led by Kenya that avoided a confrontation with M23. President Ramaphosa undertook to replace the East African Community’s peacekeeping deployment in the eastern DRC with the deployment of 2,900 soldiers from the SANDF. Although eastern DRC is ravaged by more than 90 different rebel groups, including the extremist Islamic State (ISIS), Ramaphosa tasked the SANDF deployment with a mission to destroy M23, the battle hardened Tutsi insurgent group that has long been a security buffer between Rwanda and the Forces Democratiques du Liberation du Congo (FDLR). The FDLR are the remnants of the genocidal Hutu army that fled into the eastern DRC in 2004 after the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda with some 2 million participants in the brutal genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis. The FDLR’s mission as stated in its name- the “liberation of Rwanda”- is the overthrow and destruction of the Kagame Government in Kigali that saved Rwanda from the genocide and since have rebuilt a modern country from its ashes. M23 was formed after the Rwandan genocide as a local defence force in the eastern DRC to protect the Tutsi communities in the DRC and Rwanda against ongoing attacks from the FDLR that has the continued genocide of the Tutsis as its sole political and military objective.