Doctors Without Borders (MSF) have said that one of its humanitarian workers was killed by a soldier in the Central African Republic.
According to the report, Mahamat Ahamat, a medicine dispenser, was shot three times at his home on Saturday by a member of the armed forces in Moyenne-Sido, a town about 500 kilometers (310 miles) north of the capital, Bangui.
MSF has condemned the attack on the humanitarian worker and urged authorities to conduct an investigation.
CAR has experienced decades of violence and instability since gaining independence in 1960. An insurgency led by the Seleka, a coalition of armed, primarily Muslim groups, has severely weakened the country’s security infrastructure and heightened ethnic tensions. Seleka fighters launched an offensive against the CAR government in December 2012, seizing Bangui and staging a coup in March 2013.
In response to Seleka forces’ brutality, “anti-balaka” coalitions of Christian fighters formed to carry out retaliatory violence against Seleka fighters, injecting religious animosity into the violence that had previously been lacking.
In September 2013, anti-balaka forces launched widespread retaliation attacks on mostly Muslim civilians, displacing tens of thousands of people to Seleka-controlled areas in the north. The government disbanded Seleka forces shortly after revenge attacks began, but many ex-Seleka members began committing counterattacks, plunging CAR into a state of chaos and a humanitarian crisis. Thousands of people have been killed and nearly 575,000 refugees have been displaced since the outbreak of renewed conflict in 2013, with the majority fleeing to neighboring Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Despite initial optimism following the election of President Faustin Archange Touadera in the spring of 2016, the crisis worsened. A de facto territorial partition halted Muslim-Christian fighting, but fighting between ex-Seleka factions has increased.
Though the government retains control of Bangui, most armed groups have refused President Touadera’s efforts to calm the region through disarmament, rendering the government powerless outside the capital. The rest of the country’s lawlessness has allowed armed groups to flourish, and fighting has increased in the central, western, and eastern provinces. The conflict has also wreaked havoc on the economy, crippling the private sector and impoverishing nearly 75 percent of the country’s population.
According to reports from human rights organizations and UN agencies, both ex-Seleka forces and anti-balaka groups committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. Because of the magnitude of the crisis, the UN Security Council established a peacekeeping force in April 2014, which included African Union and French forces that had previously been deployed to CAR. MINUSCA was established with the mission of protecting civilians and disarming militia groups, and it now has nearly 15,000 peacekeepers operating inside CAR.