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Rebels claim to have killed 12 Angola soldiers

Wednesday, 07 September 2016 12:56 PM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 07 September 2016 2:06 PM ]

The file photo shows soldiers and officers of the Angolan armed forces.

Angola’s rebels claim they have killed 12 soldiers in clashes that erupted in the oil-rich north of the country.

The Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC) said Wednesday that the troops were ambushed last weekend as they were travelling in Buco-Zau region, an area near the border with the Republic of Congo, where half of the southern African state's oil is produced.

The deaths, if confirmed by the government, would bring the total number of people killed by FLEC over the past month to 50. The group says most of those deaths came during three major clashes with government troops in August. The fighting escalated in June when FLEC’s 88-year-old founder Nzita Tiago died. He lived in exile in France.

Angola saw four decades of low-level insurgency although clashes have mostly subsided over the past years. The most significant of all attacks by FLEC was carried out in 2010 involving a bus transporting Togo’s national soccer team during the African Nations Cup held in Angola.

FLEC wants independence for Cabinda, a thin enclave sandwiched between Democratic Republic of the Congo and Republic of the Congo and a province with heavy police and army deployment. Angola reached a peace deal with the group in 2007 and has claimed since that the insurgency has fizzled out

Angola is the second largest crude producer in Africa but nearly half of its oil-drilling facilities are mostly based offshore and are out of reach of militants.

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